Midway through Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk “hand in hand” down a dusty road in an anonymous, fictionalized African country. “They looked like best friends,” she notes—that “looked”...
Erika Meitner’s poetry and prose, combined with photography from Ryan Spencer Reed, take us inside the city of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.
What kind of energy do we get from the streets? What does it give us and how much do we need it? The publication of Arthur Lubow’s biography, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, and a national tour of Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, a...
Disgrace is a public phenomenon, defined by public measures—of perception, opinion, consensus. To suffer disgrace is to arouse a collective sense of betrayal, bounds demolished, moral or social compacts violated. Reprieve from disgrace is...
San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself.
There has been much talk lately of a renaissance in Nigerian literature. Hardly a year passes without yet another young writer winning yet another international prize. This renaissance is measured against the writers who came of age around...
During the summer of 2013, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin, word leaked out that a juror was already shopping around a prospective book about the case. One...
