Gavin Francis
What Do You Expect?

The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.

Michael Kazin
Bridging the Gap

Nick Witham’s Popularizing the Past portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

Francis Wade
The War to Remake Myanmar

For many of the armed groups fighting across Myanmar, the goal is not only to defeat the military but to end the centralized state itself.

Jay Neugeboren
Beyond the Asylum

“In 1955 half of all public hospital beds in the US were psychiatric; today we have eleven psychiatric beds for every 100,000 people.”

Free from the Archives

It is officially summer blockbuster season, and today marks the anniversary of three Hollywood premieres that rank among the grandest (and brashest) in film history: Cleopatra (1963), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Jurassic World (2015), a movie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that grossed more than the GDP of Grenada.

In the September 19, 1996, issue of the Review, Louis Menand wrote about a particularly prolific season of summer blockbusters—including the premiere of Mission: Impossible—and the futile search for meaning in the box office.

Louis Menand
Hollywood’s Trap

“A confusion usually arises when this question [of meaning] is asked about a movie, or about the state of movies in general. This is a confusion between the culture and the market. These are two completely different things, but they have gotten run together, in part thanks to people…who want to illustrate an ethical point with what is essentially a commodity. It is, at a certain level, like trying to moralize about Tupperware.”

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