Mayday
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Protest, Policed
[ A U G U S T • 1 9 6 8 ]
“The contradictions of our society weigh so heavily on the young…between the notion that violence is fine against simple folk 10,000 miles away and shocking against injustice in our own land; between the equality demanded by our constitutional structure and the equality denied by our social structure; even between the accepted habits of one generation and the emerging habits of the next.”
Read “America, 1968” by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
[ M A R C H • 1 9 6 8 ]
A documentary report about the famous Washington weekend during which thousands of Americans marched across the Potomac in the name of peace, and some—the author among them—ended in jail.
Read “The Steps of the Pentagon” by Norman Mailer
Blinken in China
[ J U L Y • 2 0 2 2 ]
Daniel Bessner asks what’s next after the American Century: “great power” rivalry with China?
[ F E B R U A R Y • 2 0 1 9 ]
Can the United States and China avoid war?
Read “What China Threat?” by Kishore Mahbubani
[ F E B R U A R Y • 2 0 2 2 ]
How Xi Jinping remade Chinese nationalism.
Read “The Great Wall of Steel” by Ian Buruma
May Day and Anarchy: The Haymarket Affair of 1886
[ M A Y • 1 9 0 7 ]
A history of the labor protest that ended in a bomb, and of the trial that ended in executions.
Read “Decisive Battles of the Law: The Chicago Anarchists’ Case” by Frederick Trevor Hill
Remembering Paul Auster
[ N O V E M B E R • 1 9 7 5 ]
Auster’s first review for Harper’s.
[ A P R I L • 2 0 2 2 ]
“...Baumgartner begins to wonder what worms taste like and how it would feel to put a writhing, living worm in your mouth and swallow it.”
[ J U L Y • 2 0 1 2 ]
An excerpt from Auster’s second-person memoir, Winter Journal.