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David Shulman
An ‘Unlawful Presence’

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers’ savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.

Laura Marsh
Not So Bad Guys

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, is a workplace drama that also manages to animate the forces that are fracturing our politics.

Charlie Savage
A Terrible Mistake

Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.

Jed Perl
Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Free from the Archives

One hundred and eighty-six years ago today, Frederick Douglass, twenty years old, wearing a sailor’s clothes, and carrying identification papers he’d gotten from a free Black sailor, traveled by train, ship, and foot from Maryland to New York City, escaping his enslavers.

In the Review’s April 7, 2016, issue, Andrew Delbanco wrote about Frederick Douglass’s life—as an enslaved man, a presidential adviser, a diplomat, an internationally renowned abolitionist, a writer, and a sometime photography critic who was also “the most photographed American of his time.”

Andrew Delbanco
Mysterious, Brilliant Frederick Douglass

“He never stopped speaking of ‘the whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, the blood-hound, the stocks, and all the other bloody paraphernalia of the slave system.’ But as his fame grew, and with it his independence, he became less a scripted witness and more his own man—a man, moreover, of growing political consequence, to whom antislavery activists and, eventually, mainstream politicians turned for advice and for the sheer prestige of his affiliation.”

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