Noah Feldman
The Court’s Conservative Constitutional Revolution

The bloc of conservative justices on the Supreme Court have dismantled many of the legal precedents on their hit list. What’s in store for the new term?

Christopher Benfey
Constable’s Quiet Tumult

John Constable’s lifelong struggle was to convey his deep feelings for his native countryside to a reluctant public, which preferred escapist historical tableaux and portraits of grandees.

A.E. Stallings
‘Obedient to Their Words’

As a writer who is so obviously a real person, Simonides perhaps more than any other ancient poet attracts anecdotes and stories that reflect on his character as much as his work.

Miriam Pensack
The Specialist

Even as he appeals a recent money-laundering conviction, Panama’s former president has been planning a political comeback.

Adam Shatz
Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins

A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs.

Free from the Archives

Construction of the Burj Khalifa began nineteen years ago today, in Dubai. When it officially opened five and a half years later, it became, at 2,722 feet, the tallest building in the world. The next month, in February 2010, Ingrid Rowland wrote for NYR Online a short assessment of the new skyscraper (“the profile of Burj Khalifa suggests nothing so much as a seventeenth-century engraving intended to ridicule the human habit of tower-building”) and asked, “Why do we keep building to such heights?”

Ingrid D. Rowland
Upright Hubris:
A Short Tale of Skyscrapers

“The phallic nature of towers has never been subject to much doubt. Medieval Italian cities bristled with them, each one symbolizing, with what the Greek poet Pindar called (in another phallic context) ‘upright hubris.’”

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