The Swiveling Light of Truth

Remembering Grace Paley and her wise, fierce, funny, sad, innovative short stories

Secrets

Response to Our Summer Issue

From Oppressed to Oppressors

The Battle of Algiers took a pitiless look at the war for Algerian independence, but the filmmakers could not foresee the failures that would result

Making Good

Immortality Gained

John Milton was not only a great poet, but also a great defender of liberty

Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot By Anna Beer

Copyright Wrongs

When technology makes an illegal act easy, should the law make that act legal?

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy By Lawrence Lessig

How Special a Relationship?

Whether T.R. needed Edward VII to establish the United States as a world power

The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners By David Fromkin

The Censor in the Mirror

It’s not only what the Chinese Propaganda Department does to artists, but what it makes artists do to their own work

The Torture Colony

In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds

Apollo and Dionysus

Henri Cole combines the formal and the sensual

Potted History

Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet

Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave By Leonard Todd

Where Does American History Begin?

Mixing geography with invention, the first explorers and mapmakers made the New World a very hard place to pin down

Something Called Terrorism

In a speech given at Harvard 22 years ago
and never before published, Leonard Bernstein
offered a warning that remains timely

Shaking Habit’s House

Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert

How Fiction Works By James Wood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Four Poems

Burma: Captives of the Junta

America’s Dark Page

The Most Important Election in History

Is it possible to elect a president without invoking that phrase?

Rattling with Implications

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