While I was preparing for this interview, there was a problem with The New Yorker’s website; when I searched “Doreen St. Felix,” I got what seemed to be every single article ever written in the history of the magazine. This glitch struck me as an appropriate representation of Doreen as a prolific critic with a […]

In his five very different novels Charles Portis’s signature was deflation, his attention always fixed on how the world declines to make sense.

Last year, on holiday in Cornwall, I found a copy of A Private View of Stanley Spencer in a secondhand bookshop. I was only a few miles from St. Ives, the fishing village where the eccentric English painter—whose work inspired, among others, Lucian Freud—and his second wife, Patricia Preece, spent their six-week honeymoon in the […]

“Archival research can be magical, maddening, and sobering. Finding just one mention of an enslaved person’s name or an enslaved family’s home in a record can feel monumental.”

It will take time to know exactly how many people have been killed. Netanyahu has only made it harder.

Like so much about New York City politics, the fates of the various Gaza solidarity encampments that sprang up throughout the city in recent weeks were in part a question of real estate. At the New School, which has no outdoor campus, protesters needed to set up the encampment indoors at the university’s main building […]