I grew up with the New Yorker in my house. To this day it remains the best source of intellectually stimulating and challenging writing (the New York Review of Books comes in second IMHO). Adam Gopnik is one of the relatively “new” generation of writers in the magazine. His review of several books about World War I is a great piece of anti-war writing.
“History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat. But life does offer the same points, over and over again. A lesson is many-edged; a point has only one, but that one sharp. And the point we might still take from the First World War is the old one that wars are always, in Lincolns perfectly chosen word, astounding. They produce results that we can hardly imagine when they start. It is not that wars are always wrong. It is that wars are always wars, good for destroying things that must be destroyed…but useless for doing anything more…”