
How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.
How the virus won, America’s denial about racism, China’s AI surveillance state, what MasterClass really sells, and novelist Gayl Jones. Plus racial-progess myths, how protest works, Elena Ferrante’s latest, Erin Brockovich, looking for Frederick Douglass, Putin’s rise, and more.
A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.
Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
The ads are everywhere. You can learn to serve like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But what MasterClass really delivers is something altogether different.
When her first novels were published, in the mid-1970s, Gayl Jones’s talent was hailed by writers from James Baldwin to John Updike. Then she disappeared.
Whether it’s happening or not
Mere reform won’t fix policing.
How a visit to his birthplace helped me understand this moment of rage, reckoning, and possibility
Americans have learned the wrong lessons about the political consequences of protest.
Twenty years after her moment in the Hollywood spotlight, the famed water-safety activist has not slowed down.
Photos from the University of Texas at Austin
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Dickens’s novel is mad, loving, and brilliant.
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.
Her latest novel frames lying as a creative act.
The origins of Putin’s worldview—and the rise of Russia’s new ruling class
Readers respond to our June 2020 issue.
Gravity is overrated.