Inside the December 2024 Issue
Dean Kissick on how politics ruined contemporary art, Rachel Kushner on hot-rodding in America, Gary Greenberg on climate disaster in a small New England town, and more.
December 2024
[ E S S A Y ]
The Painted Protest
How politics destroyed contemporary art
by Dean Kissick
“Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it.”
[ F O L I O ]
In the Rockets’ Red Glare
The past and future of hot-rodding in America
“Nostalgia racing demands mastery. There is a purity to the demand: there is no money to be made. There is fun, and glory, but underneath these is a more inchoate drive, an ontological imperative, maybe, to play with fire.”
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • C O N N E C T I C U T ]
After the Deluge
A small town faces down climate disaster
“Nothing could threaten our unity like the truth: that even though this was exactly the time to point out the danger we’re in and its immediacy, it was, for the same reason, exactly not the time. We need one another too much to risk that fight.”
[ M I S C E L L A N Y ]
Completely Hazardous Experiments
My father’s mercury
“I am my father’s daughter. Not a victim, not of anything. I want to keep it all, and I don’t really have a choice… I have to keep—a little of the anger. All I’ve learned these months, I can’t forget; the idea of mercury, if not the thing itself, is lodged in me now.”
[ S T O R Y ]
Mare’s Milk
By Daniel Mason
“Chekhov thought of Tolstoy as an ignorant crank who held too many opinions on topics that he knew nothing about, particularly scientific ones—and as a writer of such perfection and beauty as to validate the entire existence of literature itself.”
[ R E V I E W ]
A Sudden, Revealing Searchlight
On Jean Strouse and the art of biography
“Contemporary biographies are often touted for their discoveries: previously unseen letters, sources who haven’t before been interviewed, unpublished manuscripts. Less recognized—but equally important—is the gift of looking at what’s already there in a new way.”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ L E T T E R S ]
Steven Clark, Radhika Desai
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
By Matthew Karp
[ T H E • H A R P E R ‘ S • I N D E X ]
[ R E A D I N G S ]
and more...
[ F R O M • T H E • A R C H I V E ]
By Tom Wolfe
[ P U Z Z L E ]
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