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Namwali Serpell
‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

Stacy Schiff
‘Hallucinatory Spitballs’

Arthur Miller wrote that The Crucible should not pass as a true story. Why has the play become ubiquitous in American high schools? What have we done with the actual greatest witch hunt in American history?

Deborah Eisenberg
Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

Sean Wilentz
The Revolution Within the American Revolution

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

Paige K. Bradley
Boogie on the Higher Levels

Judee Sill made two exquisite, defiantly spiritual albums in the early 1970s. A flawed documentary attempts to reckon with her too-brief career.

Free from the Archives

“I propose to examine Wojtyla’s emergence as a powerful figure in the Church and the principal features of his pontificate,” wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Review’s October 10, 1985 issue. This was a dry introduction, in accord with an ironic headline—“The Liberal Pope”—to an essay that proceeded to demonstrate that the archbishop of Kraków who had presented himself at the Second Vatican Council as a reformer had become Pope John Paul II, a pontiff possessed of “an authoritarianism gentle and unasssuming in style, but implacable in substance.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien
The Liberal Pope

“Henceforth the language of Vatican II would mean whatever John Paul II said it meant, which would be the reverse of what liberally minded Catholics had understood it to mean.”