When the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in June 2015 confirming marriage equality, it was greeted as an historic civil rights achievement. Over the past several years, mounting marriage victories combined with a cresting wave of trans activism had already pushed legal advocates to think beyond gay marriage, the issue that has absorbed the bulk of the movement’s advocacy, resources, and powers of mass mobilization. From the legalization of homosexual assembly to the repeal of anti-sodomy laws and now national gay marriage, legal gains for LGBT people since World War II have brought important benefits and legitimized the citizenship rights

VIVIAN MAIER: A PHOTOGRAPHER FOUND (Harper Design, $80) shifts the focus from the faux-romantic idea of Maier as an eccentric recluse (à la Henry Darger) who hoarded never-displayed photographs until she died a pauper’s death and was granted sudden and improbable posthumous stardom. Instead, we see a surprisingly savvy street photographer, who, like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander, honed her vision in 1950s New York. From the late ’50s on, in the guise of a socially invisible Chicagoland nanny, she created thousands of remarkable photographs, devoting her skills to unsentimental images of children and “women of a certain

Parliament’s seminal album Mothership Connection hit the streets of the inner city in a big way in 1975. At the time, I was a shy, skinny, book-reading thirteen-year-old only child who was being raised by a single mom on Chicago’s South Side, but I thought the music was hip and grooved along like everyone else. The album’s extended, richly textured jams featured thumping bass lines, snappy percussion, and catchy keyboard melodies. Meanwhile, the lyrics, sung in a gutsy style, derived their energy from clever sexual puns, textual allusions, and weird otherworldly notions of people united through interplanetary travel, drugs, dancing,

A generation gap divides readers of the New York Times. On one side, it’s the publisher of the Pentagon Papers, the first draft of history, the indispensable source. On the other side, the Pentagon Papers do not define the Times at all; failure to publish the Edward Snowden papers does. If you were a teenager on 9/11, the Times introduced itself to you with news of WMDs. A couple years later, it confirmed your ill impression by dousing the fuse on its own domestic-wiretapping story—ready to publish in the fall of 2004—until after Election Day, removing a major obstacle to

This past fall, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released the results of a long-awaited inquiry into the final phase of the twenty-five-year war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It uncovered widespread mass killing, torture, disappearances, assassination, and rape. While the report blamed both sides, it reserved the harshest criticism for the Sri Lankan state, whose actions it said may amount to “crimes against humanity.” Yet the Sri Lankan government, which claimed it was fighting a war against terrorism, has faced little more than pro forma denunciations

By the end of his life, the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris—universally known by his nom de pinceau, Le Corbusier—had emerged from decades of frustrated plans, encircled by controversy and dismissal, to become the world’s most renowned architect. For a man who had devised three hundred projects but seen only seventy-eight of them built, the high-profile commissions that belatedly started pouring in proved a glorious bounty: the National Museum of Western Art for Tokyo; a church, apartment building, and elementary school for Firminy, France; the Olivetti tower outside Milan; a mixed-use project for thirty-five acres of undeveloped land along the Hudson