Richard E. Maltby Jr. on his fifty years of writing puzzles for Harper’s Magazine, his side hustle as a musical lyricist and Tony Award–winning director, and the crossword’s place in contemporary Amer ...

Brontez Purnell is nothing if not prolific. The author of seven books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse, he’s also a musician, filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer. Purnell ...

In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine, a selection from Jeff Kisseloff’s book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, which was published in April by ...

The notion of the “nostalgic American” served liberals as an ideal whipping boy at a time when the intellectual foundations of liberalism were beginning to erode. As the dogma of progress became ...

In her many celebrated novels and story collections, Joy Williams tends to confront—with mordant comedy and bluntness and often a kind of ambiguously mystical quality (befitting the child of a ...

Of all the niche communities birthed by the modern internet, “gooners” might be the most alien, and to many, the most repellent. Gooning, writes Daniel Kolitz in the November issue, is “a new kind of ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Franz Kafka was a skinny fellow; he claimed he was the thinnest person he knew. As a young man, he deliberately developed a facial tic. He sometimes felt he didn’t really exist, or if he did, only in ...

It was reported that pro-agribusiness messaging permeated certain Brazilian music genres and that Brazil surpassed the American production of beef in 2025, during which time the United States imposed ...

In May 2019, the German Bundestag passed a resolution declaring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement anti-Semitic. According to the text, the movement’s call to withhold economic support ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. In the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New England found itself beset by ...