Sponsored by University of California Press

Robin D. G. Kelley
The Long War on Black Studies

It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on “critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political battle.

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo
Lonely at the Top

In his most recent film, Alejandro González Iñárritu invited us to picture ourselves in his place.

David Hering
The View from the Back Seat

In David Easteal’s The Plains, a three-hour-long film shot almost entirely inside a car, a friendship takes shape in slow motion.

Linda Greenhouse
Not How He Wanted to Be Remembered

Two decades passed before the ghosts of the Rosenbergs came back to haunt Irving Kaufman, the judge who sentenced them to death.

Free from the Archives

Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The New Yorker, Simon and Schuster, and Knopf; biographer of Greta Garbo, Sandra Bernhardt, and George Balanchine; and a long-time contributor to The New York Review of Books, died last week. He was ninety-two. Starting in 2001, with an essay about Lillian Gish, Gottlieb wrote forty-two pieces for the Review, about dance (Margot Fonteyn, the history of ballet), about silent-film stars (Gish, Anna May Wong, Douglas Fairbanks), and about, of course, writers (Dorothy Parker, James Jones, Charles Dickens). And for the Review’s October 23, 2014 issue, Gottlieb read seventeen best-selling books about near-death experiences to see why the genre had come to rule the book industry.

Robert Gottlieb
To Heaven and Back

“I’ve never had a near-death experience and don’t know anyone who has, but according to a poll that’s quoted throughout the NDE literature, at least 5 percent of Americans have returned from one and told the tale. That may be a small percentage, but it’s a lot of people—given today’s population, over 15,000,000. Other estimates are lower, but they’re still huge. And most of these people seem to be writing books.”