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Christopher de Bellaigue
Iran: A Grand Bargain?

The conditions necessary to negotiate a new nuclear deal and revive commercial ties between Iran and the US are in sight.

Linda Greenhouse
How Brown Came North and Failed

The effort to desegregate Detroit’s public schools required not just the courts but a social movement that could speak effectively about the barriers that Black people faced before it could begin to seek redress.

Anna Della Subin
‘Her Own Cuneiform’

The poet Dunya Mikhail is preoccupied with Iraq’s urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past.

Dennis Zhou
The Quantum Generation

The filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke has spent a career trying to capture how China’s ordinary citizens experience the twenty-first century.

Larry Wolff
Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality.

Free from the Archives

Ninety-seven years ago today, on May 15, 1928—six months before the premiere of Steamboat Willie—Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse made his slightly inauspicious debut, in a test screening of the short Plane Crazy, which failed to garner interest from distributors.

In the Review’s May 16, 1974, issue, Robert Craft wrote about the vast business empire that sprang, Athena-like, from Mickey’s head: the silent shorts, talkies, color films, amusement parks, and merchandise dreamed up by a man who, as Craft quotes the writer Christopher Finch, “completely abandoned his career as an animator to concentrate all his energies on the production side of the business.”

Robert Craft
In the Mouse Trap

“As is well known, some adults seek to re-enter the child’s world because their sexual desires are not then apparent to them as such. But ten million visitors annually, and by no means preponderantly children, entering not only a sexless but also a degenitalized (viz., the Polynesian statuary) speaking-animal kindergarten?”

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