Martin Filler
Oppie’s Problem

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer captures the drama of the physicist’s life to thrilling effect but glosses over an essential part of his conundrum.

Willa Glickman
‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

Karen Russell, illustrated by Natalie Frank
The Secret Author of Our Dreams

Modern horror, fantasy, and science fiction all emerge from the long shadow of the German polymath E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Andrew Katzenstein
Ensemble of One

The cellist Abdul Wadud had a virtuosic command of many musical languages, from bebop to free jazz, chamber music, and Delta blues.

Arash Azizi
Free Elizabeth Tsurkov!

In late March the Israeli-Russian researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, a doctoral student at Princeton University and a contributor to the Review, was kidnapped in Baghdad by an Iraqi Shiite militia close to the Iranian regime.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s September 22, 2005, issue, Thomas Powers read four recent books about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, including American Prometheus, the biography that Christopher Nolan adapted into his new film (itself reviewed in NYR Online this week by Martin Filler). “It is Oppenheimer the man, not general ideas about the nuclear age, that dominates these pages,” Powers wrote. “Oppenheimer emerges in all his complexity—a brainy theorist but also an ‘underdogger,’ quick in his sympathy for those at the bottom of the social ladder; a sometime revolutionary who irritated former students…with his talk after the war about ‘Dean’ and ‘George’—Dean Acheson and George Marshall.”

Thomas Powers
An American Tragedy

“What followed the building of the bomb is what makes Oppenheimer one of the handful of genuinely tragic figures in American history.”