Louis Menand, The New Yorker Journalist Profile

Articles

Why the Court Hit the Brakes on School Desegregation

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

This is structural racism: the system is not self-correcting. Government has to intervene to break the cycle, and that is something that government has found it hard to do, even when the political winds were blowing in a direction favorable to civil rights. Systemic racism is the subject of Michelle Adams’s “The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews

Jan 13, 2025 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was promoted by the Bible and fed to children in Sunday school. Among other things, it produced the fiction of the Eternal Jew, a type unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs. In fact, Hurston thought, the Jews had evolved, just like everyone else.
Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?

Nov 11, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast. Genres tend to be pictured as the bones of literary texts, the formal properties onto which the imagery and details of character, plot, and setting are grafted. These skeletons are transmissible across time. So “Oedipus Rex” (circa 430 B.C.E.), “Hamlet” (circa 1600), and “Death of a Salesman” (1949) are all called tragedies.
Is It Time to Torch the Constitution? | The New Yorker

Sep 30, 2024 | archive.is | Louis Menand |Paige Williams |Daniel Immerwahr |Jeannie Suk Gersen

Still, Madison could see that the Constitution left the door open for the rise of what he called a “faction,” which he defined as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” In other words, either a movement led by a man on a white horse or a tyranny-of-the-majority regime.
Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?

Sep 23, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

All republican governments live in fear of the man on the white horse. A republican government, like ours, is a system of rules designed to prevent any one person or faction from hijacking the democratic decision-making process. The person on the white horse doesn’t respect the democratic decision-making process, is not a product of that process, and has no stake in its survival. The person on the white horse rides into town and says, Who needs rules? Let me take care of everything.
Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?

Aug 19, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

The pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for bookstores. Exactly how good is a little hard to measure. For all sorts of reasons, the data on book sales, bookstores, and most things bookish are notoriously inexact. Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book. If I self-publish a book and sell it on my Web site, is that a real book? And am I a bookstore?
When Yuppies Ruled

Jul 22, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was news because America’s metropolises, New York especially, had been given up for dead, gutted by white flight, a deteriorating economic base, and financial mismanagement. In the nineteen-seventies, New York had lost eight hundred thousand people, ten per cent of its population.
Academic Freedom Under Fire

Apr 30, 2024 | rsn.org | Louis Menand

Politicians despise it. Administrators aren’t defending it. But it made our universities great—and we’ll miss it when it’s gone. The congressional appearance last month by Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, was a breathtaking “What was she thinking?” episode in the history of academic freedom. It was shocking to hear her negotiating with a member of Congress over disciplining two members of her own faculty, by name, for things they had written or said.
Academic Freedom Under Fire

Apr 29, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

The congressional appearance last month by Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, was a breathtaking “What was she thinking?” episode in the history of academic freedom. It was shocking to hear her negotiating with a member of Congress over disciplining two members of her own faculty, by name, for things they had written or said.
When Preachers Were Rock Stars

Apr 14, 2024 | newyorker.com | Louis Menand

On an elegant residential block in Brooklyn Heights stands what once may have been the most famous church in America. Plymouth Church, on Orange Street, was founded in 1847 with just twenty-one members. The New York businessmen who established the church, practicing Congregationalists, wanted it to grow, so they offered the job of minister to Henry Ward Beecher, whose preaching prowess had made Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis one of the largest congregations in that city.