In our May 9 issue, Darryl Pinckney reviews an extensive survey of “the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If anything,” he writes, “the exhibition liberates the individual African American artist. It says how eclectic the past is in its artistic practices and styles.” Pinckney’s review offers a tour...

On July 16, 1964, James Gilligan, an off-duty police officer in New York, shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Black high school student, James Powell, who was almost certainly unarmed. Dozens witnessed the shooting. The evening of Saturday, July 18, around 150 people followed a pastor from Fountain Spring Baptist Church to the police station in […]

On April 18 Israeli police arrested the scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. Now sixty-three, she has researched the state repression of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem for decades, but the police’s arrival at her door was still a shock. They confiscated her cell phone, her computer, posters made...

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 […]

Cats were not, historically, great talkers (unless you counted Siamese). For much of their existence they had not needed to be. Consigned to barns, kitchens and alleyways for centuries, their main communication remained mostly among themselves. Apart from the unearthly wailing of queens during heat, or the involuntary screech of a tom scratched during...

“We should remember that the people we study lived in a world crowded with invisible beings,” Peter Brown writes in our June 6, 2024 issue, as part of his review of Peter Heather’s book about the rise of Christianity. He’s referring to people living in “late antiquity,” a designation that Brown brought to the English-speaking […]