Piper French
The Reunited

The Biden administration has spent years reunifying families separated during Trump’s first term—but as his second approaches, they find themselves vulnerable again. 

Martin Filler
The Architect Who Unified America

H. H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.

Joanna Biggs
A Very Quiet Symphony

Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.

Robert Kuttner
The Import of Exports

Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.

Robert Craft
Edvard Munch: Self-Portraitist (Notes from a Diary)

“The exceptional, unforgettable picture The Sun stands by itself at the end of the room, behind and above the orchestra. Broken rays of color, like spokes from an aureole, emanate from a white, borealis disk, for which Munch’s first sketch was “a pillar of naked men climbing toward the light”—like his 1902 lithograph of a pillar of naked women bearing a coffin high over their heads. Whether, as Messer claims, The Sun is “perhaps the greatest achievement of modern mural painting,” it is the most arresting picture of the artist’s post-breakdown, rehabilitation period.”

Solen; painting by Edvard Munch