In July of last year, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing the Make America Beautiful Again Commission, which claimed that his administration would “prioritize responsible conservation, ...

Like many Americans, I had become an admirer of the worldview taken by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, which is ...

As the anti-immigrationist far right continues to surge in French polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, it seems ...

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

To live in society involves putting up with people who we did not choose to know and may in fact prefer not to exist. Even those we basically like and get along with are sure, from time to time, to ...

Whenever a friend wrote me reporting a successful shit, I wondered: Why are you telling me this? Good manners dictated I ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

During the worst romance of my life, I often fantasized about holding a funeral for the relationship. Over time, I worked the fantasy out in detail: I had picked a location and imagined congregating ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

This month’s Letters section is devoted to remembrances of Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024), the editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006. I first worked for Lewis just out of ...