This year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a survey of more than 14,000 studies, confirms that we are now in the management phase of the climate crisis: it can’t be prevented, only mitigated. What role can art play now that the “awareness” and “warning” stages have passed? Artist Alexis Rockman suggests that we take the long view: “It’s interesting to contextualize what’s happening in our lives, within the historical lens of the many times this has happened before.” That does not mean forgoing immediate action. As David Rimanelli writes in the opening essay of ALEXIS

WHILE WANDERING AROUND the Jewish Museum’s haunting exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” curated by the artist’s former literary archivist Philip Larratt-Smith, I stopped at a melancholy sculpture called Ventouse, 1990, a double-decker hunk of hacked, chipped black marble that resembles a sarcophagus. The coffin is topped by protruding glass cups, their rounded ends lit from within by electric bulbs.

For some reason, while studying this sculpture that’s heavy in every way (after all, it is part of a show of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic art and texts), I couldn’t stop thinking about

THE PRIMARY PROBLEM with freedom is that it’s impossible for everyone to have at the same time. Even circumscribed freedoms intersect, impose, and oppose, as conflicts about speech, masks, and vaccines remind us daily. “If and when we ascertain that our well-being is linked to the behavior of others, the desire to impugn, control, or change them can be as fruitless as it is intense,” writes Maggie Nelson in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, her attempt to probe the question of “how to forge a fellowship . . . that does not reflexively pit freedom against obligation.” The book was

LAST DECEMBER, nestled amid the second and final COVID-19 stimulus package of Donald Trump’s presidency was a strange provision: within 180 days, the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were to release an unclassified report detailing the agencies’ knowledge about unidentified flying objects. Between the law’s passage and the release of the report, American interest in UFOs—or, as government officials have euphemistically dubbed them, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—soared. In May, 60 Minutes ran a segment featuring witnesses, including two Navy

IN 2011, WINFRED REMBERT HAD ACHIEVED a sufficient measure of fame to be invited back to his hometown of Cuthbert, Georgia, to celebrate his success as an artist. Rembert’s artworks were sought out by collectors and hung in various galleries, including the Yale University Art Gallery. Growing up in Cuthbert in the 1950s and ’60s, Rembert was subjected to police harassment and beatings and, on one occasion, nearly lynched. He had been paraded through town in chains before being sent to prison. But now Cuthbert was honoring its native son with Winfred Rembert Day. He was presented with a plaque

HAS THERE EVER BEEN A WRITER more reviled or more admired than D. H. Lawrence? (His full name was David Herbert Lawrence but he had begun using the initials “DHL” or “D. H. Lawrence” as his signature already as an eighteen-year-old.) Almost from the moment he put pen to paper, this mad genius of English literature with intense blue eyes and a flaming red beard raised a ruckus, which he not only thoroughly enjoyed but did his part in fomenting. He wrote with great fluency—3,500 words in a morning was a snap for him—and he would go on to write an astonishing amount, in many genres, before he died