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Stefan Tarnowski
Syria: The Prison Gates Thrown Open

The Assad regime’s prisons were some of the worst in the world: sites of isolation, humiliation, torture, starvation, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale.

C. L. R. James, interviewed by Stuart Hall, introduction by Phoebe Braithwaite
A Microcosm of the World

The complete, unaired 1976 BBC interview

David Cole
What Could Stop Him?

Our Constitution includes multiple guardrails against Trump-like presidents. But those checks and balances only work when citizens resist.

Martha C. Nussbaum
Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

Free from the Archives

Giacomo Puccini was born 166 years ago today. In the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue, Philip Gossett made “The Case for Puccini,” arguing that “although some critics continue to resist the allure of Puccini’s operas”—deriding the composer for his perceived “shameless sentimentality”—in fact his “melodic language is sumptuous but hardly ever coarse; in each opera he carefully develops a discrete number of musical ideas.”

Philip Gossett
The Case for Puccini

“He would spend years bringing an opera from its earliest musical sketches to a producible version, but the première was only the initial step in a process of revision, contraction, and expansion, as the opera took shape during performance. Between [its première in] 1904 and 1906 Puccini revised Madama Butterfly four times.”

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