Louis Menand

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?

Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.

In the online era, brick-and-mortar book retailers have been forced to redefine themselves.

Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

He was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved stars. Then his adopted country turned against him.

It was the first Southern school to be integrated by court order, and the town reluctantly prepared to comply. Then an acolyte of Ezra Pound’s showed up.

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.