Ismail Muhammad

The filmmaker has made it clear that “Civil War” is a warning. Instead, the ugliness of war comes across as comforting thrills.

He ​had what must have been the wildly alienating experience of ​being upstaged by a cartoon character.

There’s something uniquely American in both its wanton borrowing from existing tradition and its naked admission of artificiality.

A video appeared to show Dodger Stadium in ruins. Was it a religious sign, climate disaster or something else entirely?

In the essay collection “Dark Days,” Roger Reeves tries to sidestep mainstream arguments to engage deeply with the way people actually live and think.

What used to seem like an admission of defeat became a source of strength.

After a celebrated career of making oblique work that refused autobiography, he is making his most personal work yet.

Martin Puchner’s new book is a forceful rebuke to those who argue that culture can be owned by groups, nations, religions or races.

A crop of recent novels strains against the expectations of a publishing industry attempting to embrace diversity.

Decade after decade, waves of migration have remade New York. What kind of city will the latest one create?

One of rap’s more confounding artists uses his popularity to assert his humanity.

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

In her new essay collection, the writer wants to enunciate all the meanings and manifestations of the word that our current conversation obscures.

Do Drake’s Melodramas Still Matter? (Published 2021)

He built his career portraying giants of American history. But it was a fictional character that transformed him into a kind of political figure.

Garrett Bradley has made a documentary, “Time,” that stubbornly resists all the easy ways of thinking about incarceration in America.

In “White Flights,” a new collection of essays, the novelist Jess Row plumbs the implicit whiteness of some of our most influential literature.