From the Archive Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day.

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, by Andy Beta. Da Capo. 480 pages. $32.50 She had so many names, it’s sometimes difficult to know which one to use. They succeed one ...

Do I imagine it,” the disquieted American visitor asks his wife one night in bed, “or is it true that when they speak of the ...

When Ann Manov was an undergraduate humanities student at the University of Florida at the beginning of the 2010s, Florida ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

From an interview with the economist Branko Milanovic that was conducted by Alice Liu and published in April on Global Inequality and More 3.0, Milanovic’s Substack newsletter. alice liu: You’ve ...

Ten long years ago, an act of Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group in charge of overseeing the nation’s two-hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebrations.

From The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, out in February from Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was ...

In November 2023, as Israeli politicians and journalists blurted out their fantasies of mass extermination, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas co-authored a statement titled “Principles of ...

“It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily ...

Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, by Jonathan Haslam. Harvard University Press. 368 pages. $29.95. The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and ...

One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...