Books
Prohibition and the Penal State
By Kelefa Sanneh
Is our modern prison system a hangover from the war on alcohol?
Is our modern prison system a hangover from the war on alcohol?
He succeeded in Iran. Can he break through in Syria?
Every day, our cartoonists have one goal: to make people laugh about the news. Here’s what they came up with this year.
In 1978, a Japanese couple went on a date. They were kidnapped, taken to Pyongyang, and did not return home for decades.
Discovering that my mother had suffered devastating depression made me see that she was more than who I thought she was.
For many Malaysian women, the head scarf is the focus of a high-fashion and social-media phenomenon.
The German-born director may have been the most intellectual filmmaker ever to work in Hollywood.
Here’s to dreaming of a sixty-five-degree Christmas.
Every day, our daily cartoonists have one goal: to make people laugh about the news. Here’s what they came up with this year.
One dilemma faced by the Bar Tab contributor is how to consume largish quantities of booze while also remembering its specific attributes.
Those all sound like the perfect presents for co-workers to open in front of one another, make a joke about, and then shove in the…
Perfect presents for co-workers to open in front of one another, joke about, and then shove in their desk drawers forever.
One dilemma is how to consume largish quantities of booze while also remembering its specific attributes.
As sea levels rise and streets begin to flood, South Florida confronts a bleak future.
A new study of health-care costs has managed to crack open the black box of private insurance.

By displaying some sixty of the artist’s works, MOMA shows how he revolutionized painting.
The superhero genre is reflexively juvenile about sexuality, but Marvel’s new show is distinctly adult and unafraid of ugliness.
The movie director and the creator of “Hamilton” exchange stories with Michael Chabon about the city that inspires their work.
The civil yet lively affair reaffirmed the Party’s two paths forward: experience and moderate reformism, or passion and an assault on privilege.
At the fifth G.O.P. Presidential debate, principles were less important than security. To suggest otherwise was political correctness.
The pharmaceuticals chief cried foul and accused his attorney of “outrageous and inhumane price gouging.”
With comedic authority and moral intelligence, he provided a good laugh-sob to help maintain sanity after a tragedy.
In the latest episode of The Cartoon Lounge, Bob meets the students of a course taught by the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake.
Setting his characters and tales in lurid tableaux, Douglas Sirk plays ironic variations on American themes.
Ellen Bass joins Paul Muldoon to read and discuss Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” and her own poem “Reincarnation.”
Sammy Slabbinck’s manipulations of perspective and proportion, and juxtapositions of color and black and white, turn banal source material into scenes of whimsical confusion.
Marc Philippe Eskenazi croons some holiday tunes (updated to account for the effects of global warming) to jolly passersby at Rockefeller Center.