metazine

Amid the destruction of the US–Israeli war against Iran, much of the world’s attention has fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which

On Friday, March 13, nearly two weeks into the Lebanese front of “Operation Roaring Lion, ” Israeli forces bombed Burj Qalaouiyah, a village in the

What do Italian astronomers, cloistered nuns, levitating saints, and the “sexy dreams” of desert church fathers have in common? In the pages of the

Since the beginning of the year, my phone has been a window through which I watch the Rafah crossing from my bedroom in Paris three thousand kilometers

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.

The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?