New York Review of Books

Sponsored by Sony Pictures Classics

Our January 19 issue is online now, with Josephine Quinn on the alphabet, Zadie Smith on Tár, Fintan O’Toole on the dark lessons of January 6, Susan Tallman on trompe l’oeil à la cubisme, Tim Judah on Ukraine’s volunteer army, Ben Lerner on Victor Serge, Francine Prose on James Hannaham’s Brooklyn Bloomsday, Alastair Macaulay on the resourceful Bronislava Nijinska, Aaron Timms on psoriasis, Sophie Neiman on Ugandan oil, poems by Natalie Shapero and Karl Kirchwey, and much more.

Zadie Smith
The Instrumentalist

At the heart of Todd Field’s new film is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

Alexander Burns
Making the Senate Work for Democrats

The very structure of the US Senate tilts it toward Republican rule. The Democrats hold the chamber now — what can they do to move their agenda forward?

Susan Tallman
Feinting Spells

The thesis of an exhibition on the inspiration a subset of Cubism took from trompe l’oeil is convincingly built with objects made across four centuries.

Free from the Archives

In June 2015, Lucy Sante visited Michael Lorenzini, New York City’s Deputy Director and Curator of Photography at the Municipal Archives, while he was at work in a room “the size of a large walk-in closet” at One Police Plaza in Manhattan, sorting, preserving, and archiving hundreds of thousands of film negatives that had been discovered in the bowels of the New York Police Department. The cache of images provided a glimpse of crime in the five boroughs during the Prohibition era, and “a vital and even visceral link to the city’s past.’

Lucy Sante
The NYPD’s Lost Archive

“Much of the subject matter is likewise familiar: murders, suicides, a few burglaries. Nevertheless, times have clearly changed. There are multiple car crashes, subway accidents, raids on speakeasies and gambling clubs, and, overwhelmingly, illegal stills.”

A dead body in front of a church on 86th Street, Queens, May 13, 1926