metazine

I’m writing this in the last days of the northern hemisphere’s autumn in 2025. Over recent weeks we’ve seen a hurricane hit Jamaica with wind speeds a few

Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.

What does a fair policy of museum repatriation look like? A new book considers the issue in terms of human rights, cultural sovereignty, and stewardship.

Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.

New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.

Little known today, Fitz-James O’Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes—among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots.

A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.

Maria Bamford’s wild and constantly inventive stand-up style relies on her never flinching from the most difficult realities.

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a longstanding colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation.

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.

Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship.

David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.

On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down, ” he told