How Anton Corbijn’s photographs shaped the history of rock music.

Why do we misunderstand one of modernism’s great writers?

Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated—a take on the upstairs, downstairs drama—examines class conflict among the Chinese upper crust and the people who wait on them.

Manuel Mujica Lainez’s historical novel, a strange biography of a 16th-century duke, leaves the reader wondering if human nature can ever change.

In Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane challenges himself, and others, to find a new way to write about nature.

Why adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, across generations, have misunderstood the work and its world.

A retrospective of the California artist’s work emphasizes her sense that art should not be frozen in time in a gallery but belongs in the world, at home and in public.

On the life and work of the pathbreaking French composer.

A conversation with Sophia Rosenfeld about her recent book on the roots of the concept of choice.

A new book revisits the public housing programs of the 1930s.

It’s that time of year again. 

In the show’s fourth season, everyone has a story to sell and very few are true.

In his performances, he questioned whether or not an artwork needed to supply a specific meaning in order to generate a feeling.

Through Nkrumah’s story, Howard French charts the history of African decolonization and the American civil rights movement.

What happens when liberalism’s crisis is made into a fable? 

How to make sense of the 13-year conflict?

This year’s Oscar-nominated international feature films—especially The Secret Agent and Sirāt—tackle what it means to live and die under tyranny.

In Stefan Fatsis’s capacious, and at times score-settling, personal history of the reference book, he reveals what the dictionary can still tell us about language in modern life

Journalist Yi-Ling Liu’s The Wall Dancers traces how the Internet affected daily life in China, showing how similar this corner of the Web is to the one experienced in the West.

Keeping its distance from the novel, Emerald Fennell’s film ends up offering us a mirror of our own times.

Claire Baglin’s bracing On the Clock gives its readers a close look at work behind the fry station, and in the process asks what experiences are missing from mainstream letters.

The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art.

In James C. Scott’s last book, In Praise of Floods, he questions the limits of human hegemony and our misplaced sense that we have any control over the Earth’s depleted watershed.

Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction tells the story of how a critical mineral became the focus of a worldwide battle over the future of green energy and, by extension, capitalism.

The second season tackles everything from the role of AI in medicine to Medicaid cuts. But above all, it is about burnout.

His films show how a regime’s wrongdoing can upend one’s sense of self and transform the very rhythm of daily life.

Constructing new residential buildings, let alone those with rental units that New Yorkers can afford, is never an easy task.

In her new film, Jodie Foster transforms into a therapist-detective.

In her new book, Alyssa Battistoni explores how nature came to be treated as a supposedly cost-free supplement of capital accumulation.

From “The Crying Lot of 49” to his latest noirs, the American novelist has always proceeded along a track strangely parallel to our own.

How the popular mayor and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City

In the novelist’s work, she mocks English culture’s nostalgia, revealing what lies beneath the country’s obsession with its heritage.

In A.E. Stallings’s Frieze Frame, the poet retells the many conflicts, political and cultural, the ransacked portion of the Parthenon has inspired.

Toni Morrison’s debut novel might be her most misunderstood.

A conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah about the religious origins of social theory and his recent book Captive Gods.

Madrid has changed greatly since 1975, at once opening itself to immigrants from Latin America while also doubling down on conservative politics.

The director Ira Sachs’s transforms an intimate interview with the photographer into a film about friendship, routine, and why we make art at all.

Long out of print, his novel Nebraska is an enigmatic record of queer survival in midcentury America.

A new history explores the political limits as well as possibilities of freedom of speech.

A new book tells the story of the island-nation’s transformation into a central hub for technological development and manufacturing.

The new show from the creators of The Office reminds us that their comedic style does now work in every “workplace in the world.”

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up explores the life and times of one of America’s greatest investigative reporters.

A new history examines the long history of a radical and sometimes conservative concept.

A brilliant prose stylist, confident, amiable, and wonderfully lucid when talking about other people’s problems, Updike rarely confessed or confronted his own.

Josh Safdie’s first solo effort, an antic sports movie, revels in a darker side of the American dream.