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Fintan O’Toole
Defying Tribalism

In her new polemic, the philosopher Susan Neiman charges her fellow leftists with intellectual betrayal and calls for a return to universal ideals of justice and humanity.

Michael Gorra
Who Are These People?

In The Pole, J. M. Coetzee returns to the novelist’s ethical and aesthetic imperative: to attempt to understand others for whom we may not, at first, feel much sympathy.

Simon Callow
Mozart the Modernist

In his new biography, Peter Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.

Dan Chiasson
Louise Glück (1943–2023)

“I was always letting the friendship slip, always begging for forgiveness once I realized how much I’d missed her.”

On Gaza

An Open Letter from Participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature

Signed by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Molly Crabapple, Natalie Diaz, Maaza Mengiste, Solmaz Sharif, et al.

Sari Bashi
Nowhere to go in Gaza

Friday’s evacuation order from the Israeli military directed over a million Gazan civilians to abandon their homes with no safe passage.

Linnaeus Town

a poem by
Anne Carson

Does it have
chlorophyll or not
if it has.
Chlorophyll does it
have anything
but twisted metal…

Free from the Archives

In the magazine’s April 8, 2004, issue, W. S. Merwin reviewed The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of how people relate to death. “His reading of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico,” Merwin wrote, “has led him to believe that the custom of burial marks the beginning and provides the definition of what we think of as humanity.” After all, “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, burying.”

W. S. Merwin
You Can Take It With You

“The ‘fringe of darkness’ that is the forest, the realm of the unknown surrounding human construction and cultivation and social life, becomes the unknown and unknowable country of the dead, a bourne of immeasurable, untouchable authority. The forest, of course, was not literally a place of burial, but for ages it represented to the living the encircling and ever-present unknown which the dead seem to inhabit.”