Sponsored by W. W. Norton & Company

Larry Rohter
‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

Hermione Lee
The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

Found Poem

a poem by 
Michael Hofmann
to the memory of Charles Simic

I wrote an exuberant—
no, really!—e-mail yesterday
to my kind and illustrious

(or at least respectable) friends
who put in a good word for me…

Khaled Mattawa
and Jérôme Tubiana
The River

Four weeks on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

Hannah Appel
Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

Free from the Archives

Six hundred and eighteen (or, according to some sources, six hundred and seventeen) years ago today (or, according to some sources, yesterday), Constantine XI Palaiologos was born in Constantinople. He would die forty-nine (or forty-eight) years later: “The last Byzantine emperor,” R.C. Smail wrote in the Review’s October 28, 1965 issue, “refusing to surrender, desert, or survive his city, chose to meet his death in hand-to-hand mélée during the final Turkish assault.”​​​​​​

R. C. Smail
The Siege of Byzantium

“In 1453 Constantinople was already separated from its greatest days by its conquest in 1204 at the hands of western crusaders, by the unhappy episode of the Latin Empire, by the civil wars within the imperial dynasty of the Palaeologi and the irresistible advance of the Ottoman Turks; but it did not succumb without a struggle which measured up to the most heroic episodes of its past.”