Sean Wilentz
The Constitution Turned Upside Down

Any account of Trump v. Anderson should lead with the fact that the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that an insurrectionist will remain on the presidential ballot.

Meghan O’Gieblyn
The Trouble with Reality

William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view.

J. Hoberman
Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

Lily Meyer
Nefer’s Mission

Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January, about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose.

Time & Task

a poem by 
Richard Sieburth

I have aced time
now doth time ace me
I attend to tides
in deathspan
& clock
the rings of trees
once in a blue moon…

Ariel Dorfman
My Secret Police Files

Why did armed men come looking for me in Buenos Aires in 1974?

NYRSeminars:
Rachel Cusk, Outline and Second Place

Join Daniel Mendelsohn as he leads a seminar on two works by Rachel Cusk: Outline, which follows its nameless heroine, a writer, as she voyages to Greece to teach a writing class; and Second Place, which tells the story of a writer, isolating in the countryside with her family, who hosts a disturbing visitor.

Four weekly sessions beginning April 3. Purchase your membership here!

Free from the Archives

On March 7, 1530—494 years ago today—Pope Clement VII issued a papal bull notifying King Henry VIII of England that, despite his boasts “that he would proceed to a second marriage, the Pope issues this inhibition, to be fixed on the doors of the churches as before, under the penalty of the greater excommunication, and interdict to be laid upon the kingdom.” The Catholic Church notwithstanding, Henry proceeded to divorce Catherine of Aragon, setting in motion the English Reformation and years of grief for the king’s wives, advisers, and countrymen.

In the Review’s September 12, 1968, issue, J. P. Kenyon took the measure of the notorious monarch, who has often been depicted by historians as either one of England’s greatest rulers or a lustful tyrant. “In the clear light of reason,” Kenyon wrote, “his achievement was so stupendous, his character so petty, that his responsibility for that achievement must be called in question.”

J. P. Kenyon
All the Way with Henry the K

“His father had been ‘his Grace,’ Henry was ‘his Majesty.’ By 1534 he was ‘most rightful and dreadful Sovereign Lord,’ and in 1536 he was ‘daily finding and devising the increase, advancement and exaltation of true doctrine and virtue,’ and ‘the total extirpation and destruction of vice and sin.’ The true title of the famous Act of Six Articles was ‘An Act abolishing diversity in Opinions.’

“He was arguably the most atrocious tyrant who ever sat on the English throne.”

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