Sponsored by CUNY / Leon Levy Center for Biography

Jarrett Earnest
Art Is a Drug

General Idea’s art was poised on a razor’s edge between complicity and critique; it is an inescapable precedent for thinking about artistic production in the twenty-first century.

Piper French
A Housing Crisis in Paradise

Two residential developments in Marin County have, for different reasons, met with resistance from their communities. What can they tell us about the way out of California’s housing emergency?

Jacqueline Rose
Fascism Plucking the Strings

C.P. Taylor’s deeply disturbing play Good asks if an ordinary individual can be relied on to resist the blandishments of an evil regime.

Jean Dykstra
‘Looking Out’

The podcast Ear Hustle and the photographs and writing collected in The San Quentin Project reveal the granular details of prison life without glossing over its violence or obscuring the humanity of incarcerated people.

Wendy Doniger
Of Crocodiles and Kings

Tony K. Stewart’s new translation of centuries-old Bengali stories reveals their rich and varied sources, including The Thousand and One Nights.

What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike

a poem by 
Mosab Abu Toha

Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is…

Joseph O’Neill
Embracing Defeat

Faced with a coordinated right-wing legal assault, the Democratic Party has responded with a passivity that borders on surrender.

The 2023 Robert B. Silvers Lecture
Sherrilyn Ifill: How America Ends and Begins Again

Registration is still open for the 2023 Robert B. Silvers Lecture, which will be given by Sherrilyn Ifill on Tuesday, May 9, at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. A civil rights lawyer and scholar, Ifill will speak about the opportunity we now have, after a period of national crisis, to build a healthy, multiracial democracy in the United States.

Tickets are free, but registration is required to either attend the event in person or watch the livestream.

Free from the Archives

In the January 30, 1969, issue of The New York Review, Mary McCarthy essayed George Orwell. Occasioned by the publication of his complete essays, journalism, and letters, she wrote about the “extreme egalitarianism,” “inspired ‘voice,’” “moral sanity,” “incipient philistin[ism],” heroism, commitment, and fatalism of the man often called “the conscience of his generation.”

Mary McCarthy
The Writing on the Wall

“He was prone to see the handwriting on the wall, for England, for socialism, for personal liberty; indeed, his work is one insistent reminder, and his personal life—what we glimpse of it—even when he was fairly affluent seems to have been an illustrated lesson in survival techniques under extreme conditions, as though he expected to be cast adrift in a capsule.”