metazine

“Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire, ” writes Aaron

Alfred Tennyson's poetry addressed the central anxiety of his day: how to live in a world where scientific discoveries were slowly replacing religious faith.

Nicholas Lemann’s Returning traces his Louisiana family’s gradual distancing across generations from its Jewish faith and his own efforts to reembrace it.

Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.

Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that “communication is health. ”

In James Vanderbilt’s film Nuremberg, about the trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the questioning of Russell Crowe’s all too charming Hermann Göring becomes a moment of invented high drama.

For two novels that address the escalating violence, rampant corruption, and class resentment poisoning our society, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach are also surprisingly funny.

Two writers from different parts and traditions of the island argue with each other and themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of Irish unification.

In Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea, an elderly writer looks back across a life in which he has always sought distance and control rather than passion.

To the Editors: In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West , Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of