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Rachel Bedard
A Culture of Repression and Neglect

The inaction of Jordan Neely’s fellow passengers underscores the mistrust pervading our public spaces. We see a city operating with the fearful logic of a jail.

Fintan O’Toole
Golden Coats, Sacred Spoons

Most of the coronation ceremony is a series of relatively recent inventions, a charade of historical continuity.

Nicholas Guyatt
Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Brenda Wineapple
At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

The Extinct

a poem by
D. Nurkse

Long ago, I find the house
with one blazing window and sneak up
to peek in: there are my parents
in each other’s arms
naked in the rumpled bed,
mouths locked, eyes
radiant like the glass. I put my ear
to the sash…

Andrew Martin
The Documentarian

Zachary Lazar so convincingly blurs real and imaginary characters that his novels avoid objective truth altogether, even though their prose is written like a journalist’s.

Yasmine El Rashidi
Stories Adrift

The crux of Netflix’s melodrama The Swimmers, a biopic of two Syrian refugees who pursued Olympic stardom, is everything it leaves unsaid.

Free from the Archives

Richard Feynman would have been 105 years old today. In the Review’s December 17, 1992, issue, the physicist Alan Lightman wrote about the life, scientific and mathematical work, and, inevitably, mystique of a man whose genius and penchant for eccentric behavior resulted in “hundreds of ‘Feynman stories’…passed along by word of mouth from one physicist to another, like beheld visitations passed from one disciple to another.”

Alan Lightman
The One and Only

“Scientific genius alone would not have explained Feynman’s legend. It was also his style. He was stubborn, irreverent, unrefined, uncultured, proud, playful, intensely curious, and highly original in practically everything he did.”