State of the Nation

The State of Boston

A mayoral election special
Stephen Ansolabehere

Essays

The Big Bank Theory

How government helps financial giants get richer
Dean Baker

Counterinsurgency’s Comeback

Can a colonialist strategy be reinvented?
Nasser Hussain

Nothing to Fear

Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe
John R. Bowen

All Bark, No Bite

The decline of Germany’s Social Democrats
Clay Risen

The United States and the Media: Still “Civilizing” Haiti

“Every disaster and every coup inspires an old vision for the country: a site for multinational investment.”—Web only
Colin Dayan

Whitewashing Haiti’s History

“The inescapable truth is that ‘the world’ never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.”
—Web only
Sidney Mintz

New Fiction Forum

Wednesday Nights

Memoir
Vestal McIntyre

Everything is Breakable With a Big Enough Stone

Fiction
Taryn Bowe

Fine By Me

Geoff Dyer’s unlikely terms of engagement
James Wallenstein

Last Wishes

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura
Leland de la Durantaye

On Film

The Jewish Question

Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man
Alan A. Stone

On Poetry

Smothered to Smithereens

The poetics of motherhood
Stephen Burt

Lord, Hear My Voice

Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind
Craig Morgan Teicher

Microreviews

Roberto Bolaño
Filip Marinovich
Cal Bedient
Dobby Gibson
Charlie Smith

Poems

Martin Luther King Day—Web only

William Varner

Poet’s Sampler: Christopher Kondrich

Introduced by Mark Strand

Description of a Badly Drawn Horse

Daniel Johnson

Idyll

Alice Jones

Vault

Alice Jones

Prometheus

William Wadsworth

Squill

Ange Mlinko

A Brief History of Ghost Hunting

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

A Brief History of Spying

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

My Herculaneum

Jennifer Franklin

The Cake

Mark Irwin

The Engineer of Vertical Frontiers

Cathy Park Hong