Our February 8 issue is now online, with Philip Clark on Bernstein and Maestro, David Cole on cancel culture, Brenda Wineapple on the mad Transcendentalist, Laura Kolbe on that time of the month, Christine Smallwood on Chantal Akerman, Vivian Gornick on Lore Segal, Christopher R. Browning on democracy in Weimar Germany, Geoffrey O’Brien on hard-boiled gumshoes, Tamsin Shaw on unscrupulous spooks, Colin Thubron on Jonathan Raban, poems by Ann Lauterbach and Ben Okri, and more.

David Cole
Who’s Canceling Whom?

Conservatives often charge their opponents with “cancel culture,” but the right poses as significant a threat to free speech as the left.

Philip Clark
The Bernstein Enigma

In narrowly forcusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, Maestro fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

Tamsin Shaw
Ethical Espionage

What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?

Ian Frazier
The Plunder and the Pity

Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land.

Free from the Archives

Samuel Zemurray, the Mobile, Alabama, banana merchant who rose to head the United Fruit Company and finance a coup in Honduras, was born on this day 147 years ago. In the Review’s October 14, 1976, issue, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the decades-long decline of United Fruit, which, after Zemurray’s successful, barbarous tenure, was led by “certifiable meatheads.”

John Kenneth Galbraith
Bananas

“The multinational corporation must have influence on the foreign government, for that is the nature of the corporate-government relationship. But if it dominates or dictates, or only seems to do so, it risks the consequences reserved for modern colonial power, economic or political.”

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