Michelle Nijhuis
Saving Graces

What we conserve and why—art, heirlooms, animals, even the planet—are increasingly urgent questions.

Jarrett Earnest
‘I Am the Heir to Delacroix’

Jack Whitten’s brilliantly restless innovation is a rigorous interrogation and a surging expansion of what painting can do.

Aryeh Neier
Locked Up by Erdoğan

For his work as an activist and philanthropist, Osman Kavala has been unjustly imprisoned in Turkey for seven and a half years.

After a Car Crash

a poem by
Milan Děžinský

The car floated up and flew through
the snow-laden trees.
Later that night when I was coming
back by train from that place
whose name I first heard over the telephone
I pressed my wet feet to the heater,
in which dust was being burned…

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Translation’s Drift

“We reach for the perfect word or phrase across languages just as we reach for it within our own, sensing, maybe only fleetingly, the gap between what we mean and what we manage to say.”

Free from the Archives

Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago today, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. On the brink of a war with France that, in the end, never broke out, “the Federalists,” wrote Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan in the Review’s March 10, 2005, issue, “reaping enormous advantages from being the party in power,…passed laws in 1798 for the express purpose of suppressing individuals and institutions claiming rights of dissent under the Constitution.”

Of the four notorious acts—“shameful legislation,” as Brenda Wineapple later described them in our pages—three expired or were repealed within a few years, but the Alien Enemies Act remains in effect to this day. Rarely invoked, it is periodically disinterred to justify some particularly infamous deed, including the internment of thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II and the deportation of 137 Venezuelan immigrants to an El Salvador prison this spring. The laws, emphasized the Morgans, “furthered no legitimate government goals, serving only to institutionalize xenophobia and popular hysteria under the cover of national security.”

Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan
Bill of Wrongs

“What is staggering, moreover, is the degree to which the federal judiciary exhibited the spirit of vendetta…. These justices virtually directed Federalist juries to render guilty verdicts, passed excessive sentences, levied ruinous fines, and relied upon Federalist United States marshals to make the conditions of imprisonment as severe and demeaning as possible.”

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