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Ursula Lindsey
Lebanon’s Chernobyl
Lamia Ziadé’s illustrated book about the 2020 port explosion in Beirut is a personal, impassioned account of a crime committed against the Lebanese people.
Madeleine Schwartz
Whack-a-Rat
The rats of Paris have presented their human neighbors with centuries of complex problems, and now face a controversial future.
Andrew O’Hagan
Scorpion Party
From the first season of Succession, Jesse Armstrong was onto something: the idea of a family that will bend any rule to justify its predominance is a toxic time bomb.
Ghost Nets
Pale syllables drift
through the ear, reticulate
and mercurial
as moonlight’s ladder
glitching across the water:
skeletal rigging
of a doomed schooner…
Andrew Martin
An Off-Kilter Epic
In a revival of Tennessee Williams’s rarely staged Orpheus Descending, small-town outcasts buck the codes of southern propriety.
Free from the Archives
“When is it better to hide than to share, when better to expose than to conceal?” In the Review’s March 31, 1983 issue, the late philosopher of science Ian Hacking reviewed a book by Sissela Bok about the ethics of secrecy. Bok’s previous book had been about lying, Hacking noted. But whereas that study “went over welltrodden ground,” he wrote, “there seem to be no previous systematic studies” of secret-keeping. Bok aimed to provide one: “She writes about the confidentiality of doctors, lawyers, and priests; about secrets of state and of the military; about trade secrets; and about the secrecy of competing groups of research scientists. She also discusses undercover police, investigative journalists, nosy sociologists, and the uses and abuses of leaking secrets from high places.”
Ian Hacking
Kiss and Don’t Tell
“Our problem is that since secrecy itself is morally neutral, we don’t clearly see which secrets to respect and which to explode.”
