The only thing everyone can agree on about why Donald Trump does what he does is that his reasons are not obvious. There are innumerable proposals on offer for an intellectual framework that ...

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. In the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New England found itself beset by ...

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, edited by Ralph Rugoff. Hatje Cantz. 208 pages. $48. The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020, edited by Iwona Blazwick. Whitechapel Gallery.

From Vaim, which will be published in October by Transit Books. Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. That’ll be two hundred and fifty kroner, she said and I couldn’t believe it, two hundred ...

From reports of people living at airports. A German former pilot spent thirteen days in Viracopos–Campinas International Airport after he was dumped by a woman he met online. An Indian ...

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

From a list of 891 periodicals removed in July from the U.S. Army & Air Force Exchange Service’s on-base stores. Magazine sales at military exchanges declined by 18.3 percent between ...

From a February 4 complaint by the U.S. Department of Justice against the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s, charging that S&P fraudulently inflated ratings on residential-mortgage-backed ...

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

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 ...

From Time Tunnel, which will be published next month by New York Review Books. Composed in 1958, this essay was discovered in a University of Maryland archive in 2020. Snow-covered New England ...

From a speech given by the Tennessee state senator in April during a debate on a bill to make camping along highways a misdemeanor. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a ...