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Is Capitalism Racist? | The New Yorker

At the World’s Fair of 1904, hosted by St. Louis, Johnson finds a literal exhibit of this enduring legacy: an elaborate celebration of the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase that was “designed to domesticate the restive immigrant workers of St. Louis by turning them into white people,” and to insure white workers’ “proper alignment...

The War on Coffee | The New Yorker

The first moral that this new literature brings out—a commodity that was a huge aid to the European Enlightenment was a huge drag on the people who made it—can be found as well in Antony Wild’s 2004 book, Coffee A Dark History.” Even Stewart Allen couldn’t conceal the truth that growing and harvesting coffee is...

Dorothy Day’s Radical Faith | The New Yorker

She moved back to Chicago, where she took jobs in a department store, at a library, in a restaurant, and as an artist’s model. Her employment was erratic, but her politics were consistent. When the Chicago police raided the Industrial Workers of the World boarding house, Day was there, and got arrested for prostitution—only...

The History of Loneliness | The New Yorker

The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is more...

The Curious Creation of Anna Kavan

Not long after being discharged from a Swiss sanitarium, in 1938, the English writer Helen Edmonds, who was born Helen Woods and had published six novels as Helen Ferguson, replaced her long brown locks with a neat blond bob and started calling herself Anna Kavan. The name was borrowed from the protagonist of her...

Why Americans Are Dying from Despair

It all started with a bad back. For more than a decade, the Princeton economist Anne Case had suffered from chronic lower-back pain, and nothing seemed to help. She’d made her name studying the connections between health and economic patterns in people’s lives; her research showed, for instance, a connection between your health in...

The Tragedy of Celebrity in Anne Enright’s “Actress”

Partway through “Actress” (W. W. Norton), Anne Enright’s captivating seventh novel, the narrator, Norah, advances a theory about her mother’s rise to fame. Katherine O’Dell, who died at the age of fifty-eight, the same age her daughter is now, was a grande dame of the Irish theatre. Her four-decade-long career, which began in the nineteen-forties,...

Thomas Piketty Goes Global | The New Yorker

Speaking in 1918, with Europe ravaged by the horrors of modern warfare and Russia in the hands of the Bolsheviks, Irving Fisher warned his colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association of “a great peril.” That peril, which risked “perverting the democracy for which we have just been fighting,” was extreme...

Fate and Fury in James McBride’s “Deacon King Kong”

Some novels about city life are poems of alienation, interior portraits of the existentially isolate, but James McBride’s vision of New York is one of overwhelming human profusion. His new novel, “Deacon King Kong” (Riverhead), set in what appears to be a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up, is...

When Historical Fiction Goes Magical

A list of history’s mythic tricksters, Lewis Hyde says in his book “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), would be endless. Since the trickster is culture’s ultimate shape-shifting, boundary-crossing figure, “there will be some sort of representative wherever humans invent boundaries, which is to say, everywhere.” Hyde refers in passing to one of Europe’s most...