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Gary Younge
‘We Return Fighting’

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.

Michael Hofmann
Punning for Germany

The strange experience of youth in Thomas Brussig’s East Germany.

Megan O’Grady
Art as Action

Lucy Lippard is a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history.

Kaya Genç
Ruffians, Gamblers, Thieves, Outcasts

Over more than two decades, the amateur historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu led an ever-expanding project to document Istanbul’s vanishing past.

Sam Needleman
Broomstrokes

The American painter Ed Clark took his medium to its limits and back again.

New Angle

a poem by 
Jessica Laser

At your parents’ your daughter
cut angels out of paper plates.

Angels have paper wings so they can fly
up to God, but no one believes in that
god anymore. Now god is
whatever Blake said…

Free from the Archives

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Susan Sontag’s essay “Photography,” which, together with five more essays that she wrote for the Review between 1973 and 1977, formed the basis of her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning book On Photography. Traversing Plato and Barthes, Daguerre and Arbus, snapshots and war photography, Sontag questioned the “fragile” ethics of a medium—and a practice—that had come to dominate modern life.

Susan Sontag
Photography

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

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