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David W. Blight
The Two Constitutions

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

Yasmine El Rashidi
A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

Martin Filler
The Gilder Age

The architecture of the American Museum of Natural History’s new addition is as oppressively weighty as its exhibitions are spellbinding.

Susan Tallman
Invitation to a Dance

The early prints of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape enlivened the abstract geometries of Concrete Art with the social, improvisational ethos of a new movement.

Adam Hochschild
History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

Adam Thirlwell
House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary.

Free from the Archives

Yesterday was Bob Dylan’s eighty-second birthday. In the March 10, 2005, issue of The New York Review, Lucy Sante read the first entry in his memoirs, Chronicles, Volume 1, which she found to be “primarily about the interstices in Dylan’s life so far, periods when he was attempting to find or retrieve his own voice.” Taking into account his reputation for trying “to bore, mystify, or disgust his admirers,” Sante asked: “But is he serious?”

Lucy Sante
‘I Is Someone Else’

“Dylan can’t seem to help putting forth vivid images equipped with yawning ambiguities. That means that even when he has been at pains to make himself transparent, he has given grist to the interpretation mills, which have rarely been idle in forty years.”