Lauren Kane

Apr 3, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Lauren Kane |Arvin Alaigh |Xavier M. Montecel |Dorothy Fortenberry

A week or so before I was due to travel to Warsaw, my text messages were filled with photos of Poland’s Independence Day. They had all the elements of your typical national celebration: streets dense with people, flags aloft over the heads of the crowd, and what appeared to be detonated smoke bombs tinting the dusk with chalky red and white, the colors of Poland’s flag.

Mar 27, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Lauren Kane |Arvin Alaigh |Xavier M. Montecel |Dorothy Fortenberry

A week or so before I was due to travel to Warsaw, my text messages were filled with photos of Poland’s Independence Day. They had all the elements of your typical national celebration: streets dense with people, flags aloft over the heads of the crowd, and what appeared to be detonated smoke bombs tinting the dusk with chalky red and white, the colors of Poland’s flag.

Mar 16, 2024 | nybooks.com | Lauren Kane |Daphne Merkin

In our April 4 issue, Daphne Merkin immerses herself in My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand’s “970-page, indexless brick of a memoir.” From this feat of self-mythologizing emerges “an extended, complex portrait of a woman gifted early on with an extraordinary talent combined with an unyielding drive, fueled by a mixture of insecurity and audaciousness (although the latter never seems to have been hampered by the former).” Merkin’s criticism, which often melds a confessional style with...

Jan 7, 2024 | nybooks.com | Lauren Kane

Henry Hamlyn was a British wool merchant who lived during the first half of the sixteenth century. His house stood on a central street in Exeter, in Devonshire, in the southwest of England. Its façade was done in the half-timbered style common in French towns and cities like Morlaix, one of Exeter’s trading partners in the Brittany region. The house was leveled around 1840 to widen the road, and all that remains are sketches and three wooden posts that had been placed at street-level.

Oct 14, 2023 | nybooks.com | Lauren Kane |Martha C. Nussbaum

“Activist” might not be the first word that comes to mind to describe Martha Nussbaum, whose work as a philosopher has made her a public figure for more than three decades. But her first piece for this magazine, published in 1985, was titled “Plato and Affirmative Action.” Early in the next piece on the education of women, she writes, “Philosophers have frequently discussed education.