Sponsored by University of California Press

Willa Glickman
The Fight for Fair Wages

America’s lowest-paid workers are at a breaking point, and grassroots labor organizing may offer the only way out.

Michael Hofmann
Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

Jed S. Rakoff
The Frontier Justice

William O. Douglas was a strong advocate of conservation and environmentalism, but as a Supreme Court justice his involvement in such issues was often ethically questionable.

Kevin Lozano
The Oracle of Public Radio

In Michael Silverblatt’s long-running KCRW show, Bookworm, conversations with writers go past the imperatives of publicity.

Farewell Poem

a poem by 
Eugene Ostashevsky

for Dmitry Golynko

You are leaving with all these poems. You are leaving. An over-the-shoulder bag is over your shoulder.

And the river is leaving. It is making its unwavering way to no longer being a river…

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

Our country is experiencing a period of accelerated democratic unraveling. But within the danger of this moment, Sherrilyn Ifill argues that there is also a unique opportunity. Can we at long last build a healthy, multiracial democracy anchored in the values of equality and justice?

This year’s Robert B. Silvers Lecture 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, last year Ifill stepped down after a decade as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She was the second woman ever to hold this position. She is now a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation.

Registration to attend the event or to watch the livestream is now open. Tickets are free, but registration is required.

Free from the Archives

For the Review’s December 17, 1981, issue, Clive James read the first English translation of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Building from his admiration for Barthes’s “effervescent” criticism, James examined the development of photography as an art, from the work of Eugène Atget to William Klein, and from the autochromes of J. H. Lartigue to Mary Ellen Marks’s photographs of sex workers in Bombay.

Clive James
That Old Black and White Magic

“A photograph, says Barthes, does not nostalgically call up the past. Instead it shows the past was real, like now. Photography proves the past to be a reality we can no longer touch. Instead of the solace of nostalgia, the bitterness of separation. Photography is powerless as art but potent as magic.”