Debatable
Timeless stories from our 174-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
A Dog-Eat-Dog Nation
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 2 0 ]
“Tempers are frayed, charges are flying, and there is much talk about how none of the declared candidates will do. Part of this is life under Trump. The president is like a low-pressure system that never lifts.”
Read “On Courage” by Kevin Baker
[ A P R I L• 2 0 1 6 ]
Television, turnout, and the election-industrial complex.
Read “Down the Tube” by Andrew Cockburn
[ M A Y • 1 9 8 8 ]
Comparing cognitive capacities between presidential debaters.
Read “A Presidential Flubometer” by Louis A. Gottschalk, Regina L. Uliana, and Ronda Gilbert
23 Years Later
[ N O V E M B E R • 2 0 0 1 ]
Lewis H. Lapham’s reflections on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.
Read “Drums Along the Potomac”
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 0 2 ]
“It seems almost trite to say it: Whatever else last September’s events have done, they have forced on us–or will, eventually–a revolution in seeing. It will take time to understand what we have been shown; as of yet, the work of re-vision has hardly begun.”
Read “A Year Later” by Mark Slouka
[ J U N E • 2 0 0 7 ]
A transcript from Guantánamo Bay.
Read “The Language of War Is Killing”
Tropical Depression
[ O C T O B E R • 2 0 0 5 ]
“Disaster makes it clear that our interdependence is not only an inescapable fact but a fact worth celebrating.”
Read “The Uses of Disaster” by Rebecca Solnit
[ S E P T E M B E R • 1 9 6 8 ]
“Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”
Read “New Orleans Mon Amour” by Walker Percy
[ J U L Y • 2 0 0 6 ]
Excerpts from interviews with teenagers imprisoned at Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina.
Throwing Fits: NYFW
[ S E P T E M B E R • 1 9 7 8 ]
Fashion as a mirror of history: metamorphoses of the little black dress.
[ J U N E • 1 9 3 6 ]
“Then somebody invented pajamas–an invention more potent in its consequences than the invention of the steam engine or the telephone–and man once more regained his ancient essential dignity.”
Read “The Sartorial Revolution” by Newman Levy
[ S E P T E M B E R • 1 8 5 0 ]
What to wear, 174 years ago (hint: morning caps were in).
Read “Fashions for Early Autumn”