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Sherrilyn Ifill
How America Ends and Begins Again

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew.

Robert Darnton
The Dream of a Universal Library

Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an “Alexandria in the cloud” really an open sesame?

Susan Tallman
‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

Christopher Benfey
A Leaf or Two from Whitman

The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.

Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller
Managing Monstrosity

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film suggests how matter-of-factly adults force queer children to hide their difference.

Jennifer Wilson
We Got Next

By treating the league as a sisterhood or a worthwhile cause, a new documentary about the WNBA risks dulling its competitive edge.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s May 25, 2017, issue, Robert O. Paxton reviewed two encyclopedic books about owls—The Enigma of the Owl and Owls—and traced the bird’s flight through ancient art and mythology to its classification in modern taxonomy (Owls “covers 225 species, but there is no agreement about the precise number of owl species in existence or, indeed, about which ones are authentic species”) and, inevitably, extinctions. Finding the books to be a helpful antidote to humans’ “simple ignorance,” as well as repositories of “picture after picture of birds,” Paxton surveyed the varieties of owl, the quirks of owl behavior, owl habitats and hunting habits, and, of course, owl wisdom.

Robert O. Paxton
A Parliament of Owls

“The ‘owl of Athena’ portrayed on Athenian coinage represents a real species, the little owl (Athene noctua), which can still be seen among Mediterranean ruins. Nowadays, Europeans and Americans generally regard owls as benign but sometimes as pretentious, as in The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, which famously mocks poetry of ‘sentimentality’ and ‘banality,’ or the pompous know-it-all in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh who misspells his own name ‘Wol.’”

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