We are now at the point where, if a second assistant to a dog-catcher in south-south-east Nowhere says something negative about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative from New York, it’s news. And if a Democrat criticizes her, it’s going to be all over Facebook. At any given moment, there are political figures saying critical things about other […]

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Palestinian-American author and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan has, at 32, already published four acclaimed books of poetry, as well as a novel, Salt Houses, which won the Arab American Book Award for fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In depicting the roller-coaster ride of exile and nonstop adaptation to new worlds, the speaker in […]

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This month we begin a year of featuring dynamic American poets whose work often focuses on politics, race, injustice, fascism, war, and human rights, reminding us, as poet Ellen Hinsey asserts, that, “No individual poem can stop a war—that’s what diplomacy is supposed to do. But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers […]

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Dubbed the Gentle Despot of The New Yorker, William Shawn was the shy, strong-willed, nurturing and eccentric steward of America’s leading magazine and mentor to generations of the country’s most gifted writers. In this short account of his own time in Shawn’s orbit, written in January, 1993, the critic Jacob Brackman depicts Shawn’s unconditional support […]

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When Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine, a country headliner who’s “faded as his jeans,” and Lady Gaga’s working-class Ally (a fed-up waitress and fledgling singer-songwriter who moonlights in a drag bar) suddenly ignite in concert for the first time, the newly created song they perform, “Shallow,” is so lucid and expressive (the alcoholic Jackson sings, poignantly, […]

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