Who’s to Judge?

Sponsored by Harvard University Press

James A. Goldston and Aryeh Neier
The ICC: Myths and Realities

The most prominent arguments against the court’s recent arrest warrants for Israeli leaders fall apart under scrutiny.

Ian Tattersall
Look Who’s Talking

When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

Hannah Gold
Mama Tried

In Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, newly revived with Adam Driver, a country star looks back on his wasted years.

Snow Elegy

a poem by
Ishion Hutchinson

Wild petunias slowly go
blind and a starched nurse
races to your bed to find
your quick hawk gaze
fixed on a blue mahoe branch

scraping the louvre glass,
its cellophane sound blurs
a gesture of recoil or beckon…

Free from the Archives

This past Thursday would have been Joan Didion’s ninetieth birthday. In our October 21, 2004, issue, she examined the state of American politics in the run-up to that year’s presidential election—the first in a country still reeling in the aftermath of 9/11.

Joan Didion
Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America

“During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or “crucial,” of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more “concerned,” more “uneasy,” more “discouraged,” even more “frightened” about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation’s very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy.”

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