Europe, in Agnieszka Holland’s rough-and-tumble Green Border, is a beacon of hope and a cauldron of hate. The dual perspective is implicit in the movie’s title, which refers both to the European Union’s “open” internal borders and those forested international boundaries associated with smuggled contraband and illegal crossings. Holland’s film dramatizes...

This newsletter comes to you from a wild jungle: designer Rachel Comey’s annual sample sale. For a certain New York fashion set, this is a legendary event: past sales have featured a live DJ, Jell-O shots and childcare, and enormous markdowns on racks upon racks of beautiful dresses, blouses, snoods, and mules. (In 2022 Comey […]

At the beginning was the Garden. Call it what you like: Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, Childhood—“Other than childhood, what was there in those days that no longer is?” wrote the Poet.1 The Garden was inhabited only by a young couple, a forever young couple (but these days the word certainly calls for precision: […]

In 1991 an inmate named Dee Farmer sued prison officials at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, for violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Penitentiary staff had placed Farmer, a Black transgender woman incarcerated for credit card fraud, with male prisoners, one of whom had beaten and raped her....

Nîmes I was standing on a corner in Nîmes admiring the Maison Carrée, thinking that the roof of the Roman temple resembled the accent—the so-called petit chapeau—over the “i” in the town’s name, when a sudden blow knocked me off my feet, and there I lay, spreadeagle (or is it spreadeagled?) on the ground, like […]

“Palestine was a central part of the development of my political awareness, which was shaped by the cataclysmic American and American-backed aggressions in the Middle East.”