“A mental pentathlete.” That’s how Joyelle McSweeney describes the genre-defying Canadian writer Anne Carson—the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the subject of several other BR essays, ...

The clinic was open once a week. It saw patients in a borrowed space near enough that I could walk to it, even on a bad day. Walking slow in my cognitive fog, only once did I have to pause, leaning ...

There are few institutions as culturally sacrosanct and legally violated as the American family. Each year child welfare authorities separate half a million children from their parents. The system ...

On a Sunday in the summer of 1959, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Senator John F. Kennedy rose to address the banquet of the annual meeting of the American Society for ...

When, early in Donald Trump’s presidency, senior advisor Steve Bannon promised that the administration would fight every day for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” most Americans ...

Widespread vaccination is generally regarded as the primary exit route out of the COVID-19 crisis, and for good reason. Even as we continue our collective struggle against the delta variant, we ...

In February 1993, war was declared in Puerto Rico. In a special legislative address, Governor Pedro Rosselló pronounced that the time for half measures was over. The criminals and drug syndicates ...

In 1908 American journalist John Kenneth Turner traveled around Mexico with Mexican lawyer, writer, and union organizer Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara. Posing as an investor and his translator, the pair ...

Nine months into Donald Trump’s second term, MAGA appears more powerful than ever. Trump’s war on the pillars of civil society have scored real victories. Several elite universities have been cowed; ...

“Where has all the protest music gone?” After witnessing the remarkable Black Lives Matter protests staged in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a series of prominent music scholars posted various ...

This week, OpenAI claimed that a swarm of its agents—about ten times as many as involved in July’s Hugging Face security breach—solved one of the million-dollar Millennium Prize problems, some of the ...

According to a well-worn saw, prostitution is a profession like any other, apart from being the oldest. But in her new book Playing the Whore, journalist, activist, and former sex worker Melissa Gira ...