Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.

© James Castle Collection and archive, courtesy Knoedler & Co IF THERE WERE A JOB APPLICATION for America’s archetypal “outsider artist,” James Castle could check almost all the appropriate boxes: Deaf, illiterate, untrained, and undiscovered until he reached his fifties, he lived his entire life (he died in 1977) on a farm in Idaho. There […]

BETWEEN 1958 AND 1966, Ernest Cole made photographs from inside the belly of the beast that imprisoned him and his fellow black South Africans. When his first and only photo book, House of Bondage, was published in 1967, Cole knew that if he stayed in his own country, he’d be arrested. He escaped, traveling through […]

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman. IN THE THIRTY YEARS since artist Francesca Woodman committed suicide, her reputation as a photographer has steadily grown alongside her mythic status as a kind of tragic heroine. Her self-portraits are widely imitated by young female art students eager to insert their own bodies into elusive narratives. The somewhat extravagant […]

The word crusade has coursed through American political debate from the beginning, with all manner of leaders—Thomas Jefferson to William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown to Wendell Willkie and FDR, Dwight Eisenhower to John McCain—adopting it as a de facto slogan. And it seems that each time a political figure characterizes a new reform as a crusade, the word’s meaning grows more tepid, more distorted, and more palatable, suggesting only an intense campaign rooted in moral righteousness. Perhaps this common usage is what sparked George W. Bush’s terrible gaffe on September 16, 2001, only five days after 9/11, when he proclaimed

A scant few weeks ago the New York Times published an essay that upset the Internet, entitled “How to Live Without Irony,” written by a Christy Wampole, assistant professor of French at Princeton. The gist was that we should cool it with all the mocking detachment

Come winter, when New York’s street life grows scarcer and the public parks become frozen stretches you either race through or avoid, my fantasies of suburban life are revived. They began when I was a boy, and I’ve held on to them, I think, out of a deviant nostalgia for a way of life that […]

STORMY WEATHER, there’s no sun up in the sky. But there’s plenty else. Nebraskan photographer Kevin Erskine captures epic doings in the skies over the Great Plains, where layers of cool and warm, dry and humid air clash to create tornadoes, lightning, and, if conditions are right, an especially combustible tempest called the supercell—a massive […]