The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide
On New Year’s Eve, 2013, Rwanda’s former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya was strangled to death in an upscale Johannesburg hotel. According to a South African inquest,...
Sentenced by Algorithm
Is it fair for a judge to increase a defendant’s prison time on the basis of an algorithmic score that predicts the likelihood that he will...
Far from the Realm of the Real
In 1890 Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a reporting assignment for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Just shy of forty years old, he was a popular...
The Gourmand’s Way
If American cuisine has a patron saint, it is James Beard. As early as the 1940s and 1950s, when frozen food and other convenience products were...
What Price Is Right?
What is a human life worth? That is an impossibly abstract question, so let’s ask a more concrete one. Suppose that while walking home at night,...
A Necessary Detachment
Never have the literary habits of so many readers been determined by so few people. Publishing is more centralized than it has ever been—with the proposed...
In the Ditch in Which the Camera Finds My Body
I’m splashing in the driveway in a ditchIn which a corpse of rain has gathered, hereA corpse has gathered, wearing noth-ing, a full diaper. I am three. A...
Another New World
The gist, the true essence, of Claudio Lomnitz’s Nuestra América is expressed not in its rather anodyne title, which simply means “Our America” in Spanish, but...
Contagious Constitutions
“We need to broaden and diversify our gaze,” Linda Colley asserts in The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen. Her dazzling global history does just that,...
Alone Together in Taipei
In 1997 the Taiwanese film and theater director Tsai Ming-liang premiered a movie called The River. It starred Lee Kang-sheng, who has had major parts in...
