I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

In the fall of 2014, I attended a public dialogue on “Revolution and Religion” between Bob Avakian, chairman and cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Cornel West, professor of ...

From the Forum “Undoing Bush” It has always been the case that failed wars damage armies and sometimes break them. So it is with Iraq, unless remedies intervene soon enough.… ...

As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw… ...

From “An Army of One’s Own,” which appeared in the February 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174 ...

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the… ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

Harper’s Magazine turns 175 this month, but New Books is only twenty-three—too young to rent a car without incurring an additional fee. It feels older, doesn’t it? Those two imperious monosyllables, ...

“There are very few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.” With these words, on September 18, 1851, Henry Jarvis ...

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...

Just I suspected everybody in here nursin drinks. Don’t go on gulpin shit down now. I already exposed y’all for the pussies y’all are. I already knew I was the only nigga in Maycomb who could take ...