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The Endurance of Notre-Dame | The New Yorker

It’s hard to blame the gargoyles. For a hundred and seventy-five years, they protected Notre-Dame de Paris from war, weather, and tourists—and, arguably, they managed to do the same under considerable duress one year ago, when, on April 15th, a blaze nearly destroyed one of the world’s most famous cathedrals. The fire started early...

“Minor Feelings” and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity

Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man...

The Case for Open Borders

In the past decade, the government of Australia spent more than fifteen million dollars on an advertising campaign designed to deter prospective migrants. The multimedia effort, which has been lauded by President Trump, featured bold, red text—“NO WAY: YOU WILL NOT MAKE AUSTRALIA HOME”—over images of dark, choppy seas. The Department of Homeland Security...

Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No

Yet, in her letters to James Tiptree—who was herself no stranger to mother issues—Russ returned often to the subject of her mother, and in a different tone. She described her mother in one letter as being “nutty as a fruitcake,” writing, “There is something particularly awful about having a crazy mother who also tries...

Can Surrogacy Remake the World?

Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America. It’s illegal, with rare exceptions, in three states: New York, Louisiana, and Michigan. But, most states have no surrogacy laws at all. Though the technology was invented in 1986, the...

How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as...