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Lucy Jakub
Love’s Work

In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.

Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan
Exiles

I recognize in these young people—driven from their homes by war, famine, poverty—an unshakable energy called Hope.

Peter Minowitz, reply by and Robin D. G. Kelley
Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act: An Exchange

“The climate of fear created by these laws makes actual enforcement unnecessary.”

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

“Black Studies has been under attack since its formal inception on college campuses in the late 1960s, and repression of all knowledge advancing Black freedom goes back much further.”

Free from the Archives

On Tuesday Milan Kundera died in Paris. He was ninety-four. Over the years, many of his novels and essay collections were reviewed in our pages by, among others, Neal Ascherson, Adam Thirlwell, Gabriele Annan, and Janet Malcolm (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being has a kind of charmed life. It is like a performance that has gotten off on the right foot. Every door Kundera tries opens for him”). Starting in 1981 Kundera also wrote for The New York Review of Books, on subjects from Czech literature and history to Cervantes and the novel, and from Stravinsky, Kafka, and the artist’s prerogatives to, in the magazine’s April 24, 1984, issue, the formation of a Central European identity.

Milan Kundera
The Tragedy of Central Europe

“Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages.”