The Power of the Source

Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory has reenergized leftists and spurred centrist Democrats to embrace the call for “affordability.”

January 7, 2026

The Scrolling Eye

The values of Zohran Mamdani’s digital campaign were those of the amateur content creator: playful, self-deprecating, celebrating ordinary delights. 

January 7, 2026

Mamdanism Without Guarantees

What would Zohran Mamdani’s vision of “comprehensive planning” entail?

January 6, 2026

A Council Divided

The City Council that Zohran Mamdani will inherit is a tricky one to navigate.

January 5, 2026

‘Imagination for the Other Fellow’

Fans and pundits have frequently wrapped Zohran Mamdani in Fiorello La Guardia’s mythic mantle—even when the comparison seems naïve or premature.

January 4, 2026

Sanctuary City

The question is less what Zohran Mamdani symbolizes for New York’s immigrant communities than what benefits he might deliver for them. 

January 2, 2026

Wielding the Ice Pick

Zohran Mamdani has revealed himself to be a hard-nosed practitioner of realpolitik, especially within his own coalition.

January 1, 2026

Until the Next Storm

With the deadlines imposed by New York’s signature climate law looming, Zohran Mamdani will have to enforce the city’s green transition.

January 1, 2026

Leaving Khartoum

When war came to Sudan’s capital, I was trapped in my apartment complex with neighbors I hardly knew. Suddenly we were all we had.

December 30, 2025

L’Affaire Carlson

Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it.

December 21, 2025

‘Minimum Victory’

Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future. 

December 20, 2025

‘They Killed Our People’

More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested. 

December 19, 2025

East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

December 18, 2025

‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’

If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?

December 13, 2025

The Liberator

At a moment when American architecture was caught between an exhausted Modernism and a callow Postmodernism, Frank Gehry showed the way forward. 

December 12, 2025

The Scramble for the Seafloor

With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all.

December 10, 2025

‘Want in the Midst of Abundance’

Food banks were meant to be America’s safety net of last resort. As further SNAP cuts loom, how much weight can they bear?

December 9, 2025

The Gray Tick

Since leaving Iran fifteen years ago I have felt a permanent anxiety for loved ones there. Never is it sharper than when the regime shuts the Internet down.

January 13, 2026

Khamenei’s Dilemma

As protests in Iran continue, the regime’s attempts to crack down on them may create an unstoppable spiral of state violence and popular fury.

November 24, 2022 issue

The Enigma of Iranianism

The terms ‘electoral collusion,’ ‘alternative facts,’ and ‘deep state’ may have not existed at the time of the American-back coup in Iran. But they were an essential part of the CIA toolkit.

June 7, 2018 issue

The Iranian Revolution

“The most glaring misperception of all has been the failure to grasp the part that Islam would play in mobilizing the revolutionary opposition to the Shah and in shaping post-revolution Iranian society.”

June 26, 1980 issue

Unveiling Iran

From the start, the Islamic Revolution used the compulsory hijab to cement its rule by subordinating women. A wave of civil disobedience is challenging all that.

March 8, 2021

Tehran Winter

“The city was free, but it remained the Shah’s creation. In the winter of 1980, a year after the revolution, it was still awaiting purpose.”

October 8, 1981 issue

An Appeal in Iran

“On the occasion of the commencement of the third year of the revolution, we the undersigned writers and intellectuals of the country feel that it is our duty to go over the record of the past two years under the present leaders of our society and to explore what has happened.”

June 11, 1981 issue

Terror in Iran

“All prisoners have a common destiny. With twenty-six books to my name I was kept in a dark solitary confinement cell of four feet by eight feet.”

October 28, 1976 issue

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

The Big Melt

Sometimes, it seems, threats to our future become so great that we opt to ignore them.

August 16, 2018 issue

A World Without Ice

The project before us is paradoxical: thinking on long time scales while acting with furious urgency.

May 14, 2020 issue

Elegy for a Country’s Seasons

It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning.

April 3, 2014 issue

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system. 

March 30, 2025

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

March 15, 2025

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

October 10, 2019 issue

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

Sundays at Slugs’

Following Ornette Coleman’s death, Charles Simic spoke to his brother Milan Simich, who has produced concerts and recordings for more than twenty-five years, about the avant-garde jazz scene in New York’s East Village that gave rise to that music.

July 29, 2015

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

Paradise on 13th Street

Hidden within the storied Greenwich Village hangout Spain were remnants of the neighborhood’s bohemian past. 

August 22, 2023

In the Despot Archives

“Government officials routinely distort the truth, incite ethnic hatred, treat the legislature and the media with contempt, and appoint partisan judges, while security forces carry out arbitrary arrests, torture and kill people, and run amok in other countries.”

January 17, 2026

Community Poetry

“I’m interested in writing my way through, around, above, and below my life, as a way to navigate life’s joys, beauties, and sadnesses all at once.”

January 10, 2026

Policies of Denial

“What I sense most powerfully from my friends in Gaza is a feeling of abandonment.”

January 3, 2026

A Christmas Story

“The Bible is a collection of texts beyond and outside us, and we may find its messages strange and even unwelcome. There’s nothing we can do about that, except to examine ourselves afresh.”

December 20, 2025

Gaza: The Threat of Partition

By putting the possibility of reconstruction out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the current UN-endorsed “peace plan” may make it impossible for them to remain. 

November 23, 2025

What ‘Day After’ for Gaza?

The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future.

October 25, 2025

‘A Life That Is Not a Life’

My friend Awdah Hathaleen devoted himself to ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. His killing demonstrates just how little distance remains between settlers and the state.

September 5, 2025

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue