Reviews
Essay-reviews by writers and scholars
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 answer to shareholders only indirectly. Actually, it’s weirder than that. The corporation owns itself. Shareholders merely own stock, which is a…
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.
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.
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 him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A…
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 tradition has Samson, the Greek Heracles, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Irish Cú Chulainn. Every culture has its dreams of superhuman strength…
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.
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.
In 1949 Ithell Colquhoun—artist, writer, and occultist—produced a manifesto, titled “The Mantic Stain,” in which she called on her readers to follow French Surrealism’s practice of “pure psychic automatism.” It was, Breton wrote, “the real working of thought. Dictation of thought, without any…
Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet…
The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
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 contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy…
Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the…
Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive of slavery produced by those who built and benefited from it.
Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the…
Ashton Politanoff’s new novel tells the story of sad dads and washed-up jocks vying for a phantom ideal of masculinity.
Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.
Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but…
From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense…
Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single…
Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991)…
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic.
Joe Kloc’s portrait of a group of outsiders living on boats in Marin County provides a record of a community many wish would quietly disappear.
Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
A biography of Peter Matthiessen captures his antithetical actions and character while never losing sight of his ardent attentiveness to the natural world.
