Jed S. Rakoff
The Most Conservative Branch

In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

Ruth Franklin
Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

Jenny Uglow
Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

Forrest Gander
Desert Visions

The flamingos were listening to and watching me and I was listening to and watching them. We were reading one another.

Elaine Blair
Satire in a Skittish Time

In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, a canceled writer never quite makes the case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

Free from the Archives

Today is Caspar David Friedrich’s semiquincentennial. In the Review’s November 1, 1973, issue, Charles Rosen wrote about the legacy of the Romantic artists—painters, musicians, poets, and all—and “the artistic revolution of the early nineteenth century”: “the replacement of history painting (large formal depictions of historical or religious scenes) by landscape.”

Charles Rosen
What Did the Romantics Mean?

“‘Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape,’ said the French sculptor David D’Angers after visiting Friedrich in his studio, and indeed Friedrich was one of the first European artists to restore landscape to the status of a major genre.”

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