The New York Review of Books
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‘The premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.’
Namwali Serpell on the selves, and unselfings, of Ming Smith’s self-portraits
Ming Smith’s Ming Smiths | Namwali Serpell
Perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for “unselfing” … is what is popularly called beauty. … I am looking out of my
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Eugen Sandow was “a Victorian-Edwardian Arnold Schwarzenegger.... Inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity, [he] visited museums to measure Greek statues’ muscles, with the aim of emulating them through exercise.” —Gavin Francis
Building a Real Man | Gavin Francis
The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew
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At the Museum of West African Art, Kovie Biakolo perceived an ambition “to serve as a home for contemporary global art—but also...to take part in remaking Nigerian nationhood amid imperial histories that assembled diverse groups into a single polity.”
A Delicate Repair | Kovie Biakolo
The late Nigerian sculptor Erhabor Emokpae is perhaps best known for his bronze replica of the sixteenth-century ivory mask of Queen Idia, the kingdom of
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“Rather than facilitating political change in China, the Internet and the associated world of the mobile phone have become formidable tools the government uses to maintain tight control over the society.” —@hofrench.bsky.social
Let a Hundred Websites Bloom | Howard W. French
The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
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“Liberalism, properly understood, is the political science of putting first things first.” —Mark Lilla on Judith N. Shklar
From Fear Set Free | Mark Lilla
Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the
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“What we are seeing is not just some isolated threat to the First Amendment. It is something much deeper: a transformation in the way political power flows through US governance unseen since the New Deal.” —Noah Feldman
Eradicating the ‘Fourth Branch’ | Noah Feldman
By ending the independence of federal agencies, the Supreme Court has taken another step toward the creation of an elected presidential dictatorship.
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“Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.” —Peter E. Gordon
Message in a Bottle | Peter E. Gordon
Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
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“This is not a warm and fuzzy picture but a hard look at how human behaviors reverberate through the planet’s systems in unexpected, even biocidal ways.” —Travis Diehl
The Art of Extraction | Travis Diehl
A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.
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Ali Smith’s “ghosts reach back to folklore, but they are also creatures of our dark and boggy present, of our anxieties and disconnection.” —Regina Marler
Catalytic Ghosts | Regina Marler
In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of
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Ithell Colquhoun “took a significant step when she extended Daliesque methods to her writing—and in this lies her true originality.” —Marina Warner
Possessed of Alchemystic Powers | Marina Warner
In 1949 Ithell Colquhoun—artist, writer, and occultist—produced a manifesto, titled “The Mantic Stain,” in which she called on her readers to follow
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“Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe,” Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes, “the Wexford Festival Opera, which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary later this month, is surely the unlikeliest.”
The Wexford Touch | Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe, Salzburg might be the grandest, or it certainly thinks it is; the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade is the
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“The secret disease,” “the French disease,” “the pox”...whatever it was called, syphilis “ruined lives” in early modern London, and “not everyone had a rollicking good time on the way to getting it.” —Catherine Nicholson
Pox Britannica | Catherine Nicholson
Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the
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“The contradictory nature of the hobo, a character without home or possessions who embodied good-natured liberty and gap-toothed joi de vivre, gave rise to a persistent sense of envy.” —@calfraser.bsky.social
Boxcar to Nowhere | Caroline Fraser
American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.
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“I can imagine [the regime’s prosecutor] arguing in front of a tribunal that I be given the death penalty, but doing it in a way that would leave me delighted with his speech.” —Václav Havel
Getting into Trouble | Václav Havel, Paul Wilson
Almost fifty years after the Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77 was first reported in the Review’s pages, Václav Havel’s own long-lost account of his imprisonment now appears in English f...
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None of the horrors of our political present would have surprised Judith Shklar, Mark Lilla writes, “except perhaps the speed with which the sinister, grinning cruelty of liberalism’s new enemies has been adopted by a large portion of the American public.”
From Fear Set Free | Mark Lilla
Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the
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“In China, an exam system...that has often been derided for promoting rote learning now works to motivate academic achievement and channel intellectual talent with surprising efficiency.” —@hofrench.bsky.social
Let a Hundred Websites Bloom | Howard W. French
The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
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“An unspecific God-that-failed haunts Wilfrid Sheed; each time he tries and fails to substitute Babe Ruth, jazz, or literature in that seat of authority he reenacts this primal disappointment.” —Jonathan Lethem
Second Chances | Jonathan Lethem
My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known
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“The innovation of intellectual monopoly capitalism is that capitalists don’t always need to incur the costs of ownership in order to enjoy its benefits. They can boss people around without taking responsibility for them.” —Ben Tarnoff
How Tech Rules | Ben Tarnoff
One of the hallmarks of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership from control. The firm is owned by shareholders but led by managers, who
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“Peter Hujar flourished artistically as the recorder of his own milieu of artists, writers, and especially performers: the reticent observer reveling in the performative exuberance of others.” —Alan Hollinghurst
The Elusive Glamour of Peter and Paul | Alan Hollinghurst
A dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is a tantalizing portrait of the artists and their epoch, just before the catastrophe of AIDS.
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Bodybuilding steroids have led to “an epidemic of abuse.... Steroid users have a mortality rate three times higher than the average and tend to die in greater numbers than their peers from suicide and heart disease.” —Gavin Francis
Building a Real Man | Gavin Francis
The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew
nybooks.com
“Jürgen Habermas was seldom fashionable, and his prose was often difficult, as if each word carried the burden of responsibility for the modern world.” —Peter E. Gordon
Message in a Bottle | Peter E. Gordon
Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
nybooks.com
Regina Marler on Ali Smith’s polysemous plots in her pair of novels Gliff and Glyph
Catalytic Ghosts | Regina Marler
In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of
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“Around 11 percent of early modern rape trials ended in a conviction, but the conviction rate for trials involving venereal disease was 34 percent.” —Catherine Nicholson
Pox Britannica | Catherine Nicholson
Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the
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“Respecting one’s elders is encoded into Indian life in a very different way—deference is a given. But that’s why these protests have been so remarkable. We’re seeing such a clear and vocal generational break for the first time.” —Poorna Swami
Protesting with Panache | Poorna Swami, Nawal Arjini
Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the
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“Jonathan Buckley’s best fiction…is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” —Lola Seaton
Small Is Beautiful | Lola Seaton
Jonathan Buckley's books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.
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“Plenty of composers could, in theory, have noticed that a pianist’s left-hand figures can be so pleasurable and comforting to listen to that it might be worth promoting them to center stage, but Glass is the one who actually did.” —Matthew Aucoin
The Virtuoso of Repetition | Matthew Aucoin
In both Philip Glass’s most avant-garde and his most commercially successful works, his music seems to accompany some unheard melody while inducing a state of blissful distraction.
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“A cynical part of me worries that the Indian political novel has hardened into a genre.... But a genre that attempts to capture the nexus of the personal and the political is preferable, in my mind, to the autobiographical evasions of so much American fiction.” —Karan Mahajan
The Private Life of Power | Karan Mahajan, Corey Robin
I met Karan Mahajan, the Indian-American novelist and essayist, in 2018, when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
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La Dérive “shows what happens when a young woman refuses to be bored, refuses to give in,” Erika Balsom writes. “Without shame, the film suggests how dead-ends, failures, and acts of self-sabotage are woven into the texture of a woman’s experience.”
Sand Castles | Erika Balsom
To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on
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