A dispatch from the Art Editor

I’ve visited Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, several times over the past few years. It’s a likable place, with rich cultural offerings, fine food and wine, and hospitable people. This March, however, the city seemed gripped by a sense of unease. Everyone I spoke to on my visit—politicians, civil society activists, and […]

The first essay by Lauren Michele Jackson that I ever read was published in the summer of 2020, a week or so into the protests following the death of George Floyd. Many media outlets and English departments had published an “anti-racist reading list” or “anti-racist syllabus,” and a swarm of more or less identical essays on the […]

I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?

In February satellite photographs of a new militarized buffer zone along Egypt’s border with Gaza circulated online. The Egyptian government was silent about the matter for a few days, then said that the area was being prepared so that aid trucks could enter the besieged Palestinian territory through the Rafah border crossing. Unnamed Egyptian officials also...

Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker’s review of a recent translation of The Wall, a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: “Why write? Why describe your life for others? Why do anything at all?” […]