National Honors
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Taking Sanctuary
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 8 6 ]
“Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of sanctuary dates back at least to that record of a tribe of desert-dwelling nomads, the Book of Exodus.”
Read “Seeking Refuge in a Desert,” a report on the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s, by David Quammen
[ O C T O B E R • 2 0 1 7 ]
“Florida’s biggest problems are income inequality and water. But if you’re not paying attention, you would think that its most ominous menace is immigrants.”
Read Edwidge Danticat on Miami as a sanctuary city
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 1 8 ]
“Undocumented immigrants have long been targeted by swindlers who promise shortcuts through the labyrinthine corridors of immigration law.”
Read “The Deportation Racket” by Micah Hauser
Groves of Academe
[ M A Y • 2 0 0 8 ]
“A very generous hope was abroad in America which undertook to realize itself in the wide diffusion of a kind of education historically associated with privilege.”
Read “A Great Amnesia,” from a lecture delivered by Marilynne Robinson at Amherst College
[ O C T O B E R • 1 9 6 8 ]
A dispatch from the advent of the multi-university system in New York State.
Read “Life in the Yellow Submarine: Buffalo’s SUNY” by Barbara Probst Solomon
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 2 4 ]
“An economy in which the best way to get rich is to be born rich is one in which the value proposition of a college education is hazy no matter what you intend to study.”
Read Erik Baker’s report on the future of college in the asset economy
In Pursuit of Greatness: the Academy Awards
[ M A R C H • 2 0 2 1 ]
Martin Scorsese, Academy Award–winning director, writer, and producer, on Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema.
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 8 9 ]
Stanley Elkin attends the Academy Awards: “Gradually I feel the features of my great stone face subside, erode in the presence of all this fame, my ego not put down but beside the point.”
[ J U L Y • 2 0 1 1]
“You know not to trust the Academy’s imprimatur. The Best Picture award has gone to so many duds.”
Read “When Is a Movie Great?” by David Thomson
[ M A Y • 2 0 2 4 ]
On the latest WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Read “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner
In Memoriam: Lore Segal
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 1 8 ]
The novelist Lore Segal was born on March 8, 1928, and she passed away in October last year at the age of ninety-six.
Read her essay “The Fountain Pen”
[ J U N E • 2 0 1 9 ]
“Segal has spent her career facing the biggest, most serious questions of twentieth-century life—How do we deal with the aftermath of great cruelty and great trauma? Can a person ever truly find home in an adopted land?—and presenting them on a canvas that is charming and light.”
Read Madeleine Schwartz on how Segal reinvented the immigrant novel