metazine

A new history of the Mets tries to turn the pain of losing into the struggle of class politics.

What If Augustine’s idea of original sin was wrong? Testimony from the Inquisition reveals freethinkers using their sexual experience to dispute the reign of shame and otherwise critique Church doctrine.

In writing The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann struggled to free himself from his artistic preoccupation with sickness and death.

In the decades before the Civil War, innovations in printmaking and photography created a “rage for pictures” that transformed American visual culture.

The investigation into the origin of papyrus fragments that the owners of Hobby Lobby purchased from an Oxford scholar underscores papyrology’s long history of shady deals and ulterior motives.

Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.

The languid melodies of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas look simple and spare on the page, but they are exacting, even merciless for singers.

In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.

An oral history of the New York School Poets suggests how its successive cohorts have changed over the years.

To the Editors: In his review of my May 2025 book Our Dollar, Your Problem , Trevor Jackson takes little interest in engaging with the book’s core thesis

The problem with sports is that sports either: 1) functions as an allegorical enclosure inside which everything else can be glimpsed and

Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.

When a ship sends out a Mayday signal, nearby vessels have a duty to come to its aid. This is a core tenet of maritime law. But on Monday, May 18, when a

In 1970, after living abroad for over seven years, the New York painter Joan Semmel returned to the city, rented a loft in Soho, and, within months,