spring23cover
Essays

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Essays

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

ARTICLES

The Sound of Wood and Steel

A new exhibition explores the guitar’s power and influence in American art and life

Look Back in Wonder

A father searches for the secret to empathy in the face of unthinkable loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Pain Principle

What if the animal rights movement abandoned its focus on suffering and appealed to a different set of human emotions?

Phantoms

What it’s like to navigate the world when your senses conjure up phenomena that others can’t perceive

I’ll Be Seeing You

The search for traces of a beloved writer led to an uncertain pilgrimage—and a friendship that endured over distance and time

The Sound of Wood and Steel

A new exhibition explores the guitar’s power and influence in American art and life

Look Back in Wonder

A father searches for the secret to empathy in the face of unthinkable loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Pain Principle

What if the animal rights movement abandoned its focus on suffering and appealed to a different set of human emotions?

Phantoms

What it’s like to navigate the world when your senses conjure up phenomena that others can’t perceive

I’ll Be Seeing You

The search for traces of a beloved writer led to an uncertain pilgrimage—and a friendship that endured over distance and time

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DEPARTMENTS

editor's note

tuning up

Knowledge Before the Fall

Sometimes you simply can’t prepare for a seemingly inevitable outcome

George’s Angels

Remembering my time with Balanchine’s dancers

The Lotus Position

What does one of television’s biggest hits have to say about the nature of a certain kind of American tourism?

Milking the G.O.A.T.

Why are we so obsessed with anointing the very best?

Mortal Music

Franz Schubert, silence, and the final reckoning

Night Visitors

The power of music at a New York City soup kitchen

poetry

Drunk on Dub

The new Caribbean sounds of Ishion Hutchinson

anniversaries

fiction

Under Covers

“This is the story Lulu told me when I was little, since before my mom died. There’s a man. He’s very sick. ... When girls misbehave, when they don’t do as they’re told, that man comes and takes them.”

commonplace book

book reviews

Death in Drohobych

A new biography of a Polish literary master

Doors of Perception

The often unreliable ways we interpret reality

Culture Shock

The hidden history of reverse colonization

Life at the Bottom

It’s not just the rich who victimize the poor

The Center Cannot Hold

A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country

Tales of Memory and Forgetting

What happens when we cease to be who we were?

Errant Thought

Can we keep the Enlightenment from dimming?