Ari Aster’s farcical western is billed as a send-up of the puerile politics of the Covid years. In reality, it’s a film that seems to have no politics at all.

Seth Harp exposes how all the death and crime surrounding one military base is not an aberration but representative of the fratricidal impulse of the armed forces at large.

The latest addition to the Star Wars series offers an intricate tale of radicalization and its costs.

A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art tracks what has changed and what has remained the same in the artist’s work.

In her most personal work, The Möbius Book, Lacey uses a devastating moment of heartbreak to ruminate on the messy intersections between life and writing.

What are the parallels between the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s and today? 

A new biography depicts the different sides of the American author.

In a new career-spanning collection of shorter fiction and nonfiction, the past often looms larger for Ozick than the present.

The Weimar physician advocated for a more fluid understanding of sexuality and gender—a pioneering idea that was erased by the rise of Nazism.

Richard Parker’s love letter to El Paso, The Crossing, argues that the Texas city can illustrate the best and the worst of the nation’s history.

He was an artist and activist who found in his verse a tool for both community and agitprop.

Alex Higley’s True Failure, which dramatizes one man’s dream to pitch his business idea on reality TV, slyly compares this bathetic task to publishing literary fiction.

By looking at his early work, we can better understand who the German writer was beyond his persona as the melancholy intellectual and serious man of letters.

Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood looks at the efforts of a human rights group to find the children and grandchildren who were disappeared by a dictatorship.

Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars, a world-spanning inquiry into the politics of garbage, makes a case that everything that is wrong with capitalism is embodied in our trash.

Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories.

In Pan, his debut novel, he makes the unruly mind of a teenager the stuff of high art.

How influential was the New Wave band?

His bracing novels represent an honest reckoning with the post-AIDS era and its effect on life and imagination.

Our art critic visits the Smithsonian American Art Museum to get a closer look at the Trump administration’s attack on DC arts institutions.

Nathan Kernan’s biography of the New York School poet tracks the development of his serene and joyful work alongside the chaos of his life.

A conversation with the German theorist about the history of Western philosophy and more.

In 1985, police were acquitted in the killing of a graffiti artist and painter, a grisly act that galvanized the city’s art underground. Why has he been forgotten?

Notes to John, posthumously published journal entries chronicling Didion’s therapy sessions, is a peek into the myths and fears that animated her writing life.

The Studio is pitched as a send-up of the idiocy of the entertainment industry, but its potshots are harmless, even friendly.

In Everything Is Now, the veteran film critic looks back at the downtown art scene of the 1960s.

In Spent, the graphic novelist confronts aging, politics, sex, and what it means to succeed under capitalism.

A conversation with the German sociologist about the challenges that face Europe and his polarizing views on how to roll back the excesses of globalization.

His music, by turns joyous and melancholy, wide-eyed and masterful, transformed the meaning of pop.

The show is at once a succession story, a riches-to-rags tale, and a buddy comedy about two hapless brothers trying to save their father’s convenience-store empire.

The building's dramatic and dazzling feats of architecture make it appear as if it were hovering above the street. But is that a good thing?

His songs, for generations of listeners, provided community, solace, and a sense of understanding. 

Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place For Us is an enraging book about the intertwined calamities of homelessness and wage labor.

Over a long career, Skinner has sought to reclaim the idea of republican liberty for the modern age. But his work also raises the question: free for what?

A capacious new history examines the remaking of the the global economy through the story a single barge.

Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker, an intimate look at a processing plant in Arkansas, exposes the inhumanity of a workplace and how workers fought back.

The Australian writer’s 1984 novel, The Island, is a hypnotic work of fiction about the border between life and art.

American writers have long made European misadventures the stuff of fiction, but what does it mean to be an expatriate today? Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten is one answer.

The second season of his HBO series The Rehearsal—which tackles the crisis facing the aviation industry—is better understood as an extreme form of reality TV.

Shortly before his death, The Nation spoke with the Kenyan writer about his most recent essay collection Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas.

The composer is an undeniable part of the classical music canon. Does that change the meaning of his radical early work?

Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, a cutting portrait of bourgeois expats in Berlin, examines a generation's fixations and degradation in the German capital.

Alex Karp uses his company and his platform to advocate for a world in which big tech is the defense industry's most willing collaborator.

Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.

Warfare attempts to rewrite the rules of depicting violent conflict on screen, making for a close-up, visceral experience.