Halfway through 2025, we have published twenty-three conversations with twenty-four writers, translators, and artists as part of the Review’s weekly “Brief Encounters” interview series, on subjects ranging from Alvin Ailey, snooker, and warhorses to the destruction wrought by the Trump administration on the Department of Education, the rule of law, the international order, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Below we have collected the interviews from the year so far alongside the articles that inspired them.

Magda Teter, interviewed by Lauren Kane and Dahlia Krutkovich
What Happened

“New scholarship should surprise us, not necessarily affirm our beliefs. I worry about the return to tendentious, agenda- and conclusion-driven scholarship…. We can push for a better future without distorting the past.”

—January 11, 2025

Magda Teter
Jewish Middlemen, Archival Myopia

The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.

—December 5, 2024

Trevor Jackson, interviewed by Irza Waraich
The Ungovernable Economy

“This is by far the richest administration ever assembled, with the most billionaires on the transition team, in the Cabinet, and so on. It’s striking how unhinged this project of class rule is.”

—January 25, 2025

Trevor Jackson
‘Never Too Much’

“What is the moderate, piecemeal path that leads to child slaves in the DRC being treated with dignity and respect? How do we get from here to a world where the US government pays into a global climate change fund?”

—January 15, 2025

Diane Ravitch, interviewed by Regina Martinez
The Campaign to Destroy Public Schools

“The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.”

—February 1, 2025

Diane Ravitch
‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

“One rationale for public schools has long been that students benefit from learning alongside classmates from different backgrounds. But this is precisely what the parents’ rights movement rejects.”

—January 11, 2025

Abduweli Ayup, interviewed by Willa Glickman
The Fight for Uyghur Rights

“The US still hasn’t given protected asylum status to Uyghurs who have already reached its soil. The issue had already been absent from the UN, and now Trump has taken the US out of the Human Rights Council. It’s complete hypocrisy.”

—February 8, 2025

Abduweli Ayup
A Thornbush in the Desert

“The poets who’d graced my cell wrote about freedom, love, and our homeland—and they’d brushed eternity with their words.”

—January 14, 2025

Blair McClendon, interviewed by Nawal Arjini
Dress It Up, Then Make It Real

“I believe in film—the material substrate—proper, in the sense that an increasingly high-definition fidelity to life bores me; the point is to look through a veil. Dress it up, then make it real for me.”

—February 15, 2025

Blair McClendon
It’s Technicolor

“Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso or Faulkner, whom one knows even without knowing the work—the name is shorthand for a whole field. He is, just a few years shy of what would be his centenary, an institution unto himself.”

—February 13, 2025

Joy Neumeyer, interviewed by Dahlia Krutkovich
Notes from Underground

“Political prisoners can become pariahs…. Other people often don’t want to be seen as guilty by association, which only underscores the courage of those who go out of their way to help.”

—March 1, 2025

Joy Neumeyer
Russia: Letters from the Opposition

“Many [of the political prisoners in Russia] are barely known. Their stories reveal a hidden archipelago of opposition that has endured and adapted.”

—March 13, 2025

Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, interviewed by Will Simpson
‘I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On’

“Israel’s continuing conquest and settlement of the West Bank, its genocide in Gaza, and its embrace of Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan have definitively answered the question of whether Israel is a colonial enterprise.”

—March 8, 2025

Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman
Never Again and Again

a graphic conversation

—February 27, 2025

Sally Rooney, interviewed by Daniel Drake
Brass in Pocket

“Broadly speaking, writing fiction makes me feel more attuned to the world, and writing nonfiction sometimes makes me forget its existence.”

—March 15, 2025

Sally Rooney
Angles of Approach

“Bad snooker would be painful to watch; mediocre snooker is notoriously boring; but great snooker is sublime. And it is generally agreed that even among those legends of the game…one player stands alone.”

—March 27, 2025

David Cole, interviewed by Daniel Drake
A Constitutional Redline

“I haven’t seen a president do anything like this in my lifetime, and I don’t think this country has seen an all-out assault on basic principles of civil liberties and bedrock principles of constitutional governance ever before.”

—March 22, 2025

David Cole and 17 other scholars
A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia

“The government’s action…risks deterring and suppressing constitutionally protected speech—not just illegal discriminatory conduct. And this danger extends beyond universities.”

—March 20, 2025

Nell Irvin Painter, interviewed by Sam Needleman
History in Open Air

“The times we’re in now impose fear. The Trump era’s attack on diversity is already cramping academic lives and scholarship; this MAGA meanness of spirit is doing lasting damage.”

—March 29, 2025

Nell Irvin Painter
‘This Land Is Yours’

“Only in 1799, more than a century and a half after the first enslaved person arrived in New York, did the state pass an act ‘for the gradual abolition of slavery,’ meaning it remained a slave state well into the nineteenth century.”

—March 27, 2025

Caitlin L. Chandler, interviewed by Dahlia Krutkovich
Continental Drift

“While many young Europeans are horrified by the Trump administration’s totalitarian swagger, they saw the US as a kind of global bully even before the 2016 election.”

—April 5, 2025

Caitlin L. Chandler
War and Peace in Munich

“As the conference proceeded, I heard more European defense leaders remark that they hoped they had finally gotten the push from the Americans they needed to militarize.”

—March 6, 2025

Wendy Doniger, interviewed by Nawal Arjini
Myths That Matter

“Although my book survived the attacks of the Hindutva brigades in India, it became increasingly apparent that many Indian journalists who wrote against Modi were being arrested or killed.”

—April 19, 2025

Wendy Doniger
The Rise and Fall of Warhorses

“What a sad judgment it is on the human race that the main thing we could think of to do with these glorious creatures was to use them to help us kill one another (and them).”

—April 10, 2025

Maria-Ines Gul, interviewed by Leanne Shapton
Happy Accidents

“My work is on a constant mission to capture the magic spark in mundane, everyday moments and objects.”

—April 26, 2025

Maria-Ines Gul: Clouds in My Coffee, 2025

Heather O’Donnell, interviewed by Lauren Kane
Joie de Livre

“For me, the revelation of working in the book trade has been how many people, from all walks of life, have transformative relationships with books.”

—May 3, 2025

Heather O’Donnell
Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

“The tension between Belle da Costa Greene’s documented achievements, as one of the most public of all American librarians, and her largely unrecorded, closely guarded inner life has made her an inexhaustible subject of speculation.”

—May 15, 2025

Daniel Mendelsohn, interviewed by Lauren Kane
Translating from Troy to Ithaca

“The Odyssey has always felt more modern to me than the Iliad. It has a meta quality, which is almost postmodern in the way it comments on its own narrative structures.”

—May 10, 2025

Homer, translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn
Odysseus Saved from the Sea

And then he drifted about—two nights, two days—driven
By the surging waves, and his heart looked destruction
straight in the face.
But when Dawn with her lovely braids brought
the third day into the world
The wind died down and a calm, clear and still, descended….

—April 20, 2023

David Salle, interviewed by Sam Needleman
Straight to It, Then

“Putting a visual sensation into words gives me an obscene amount of pleasure.”

—May 17, 2025

David Salle
‘Why Not All These Things at Once?’

The sculptor Arlene Shechet’s work is held together by a combination of stand-up shtick, fairy tales, strong nerves, and high modernist sobriety.

—May 15, 2025

Jonathan Mingle, interviewed by Willa Glickman
Dismantling the Environment

“To anyone who lives through one of this season’s coming hurricanes or wildfires, the text of the message to Americans from their government is clear: You’re on your own. But the subtext is: You’re also in the dark.”

—May 24, 2025

Jonathan Mingle
An EPA Without Science

“If the Trump 2.0 goal is to hamstring the regulatory powers of future administrations—to drive a ‘dagger’ into the heart of science-based rulemaking—then a certain amount of chaos is a feature, rather than a bug.”

—May 16, 2025

Chris Ware, interviewed by Will Simpson
Good Old Ink and Paper

“Comics are a complicated ballet of words and images and rhythm and gesture and color and imaginary sound that at their best synesthetically recreate on the page the sensation of life.”

—May 31, 2025

Chris Ware
Pure Thought on Paper

“Unlike the characters in most graphic novels,…Olivier Schrauwen’s feel real, and he affords them great sympathy and expansiveness of mind and heart.”

—May 29, 2025

Hari Kunzru, interviewed by Willa Glickman
Scratching the Surface

“When you think the world as we experience it is about to be swept away, the boring work of ameliorating suffering or managing resources can be shelved in favor of exciting fantasies about transcendence.”

—June 7, 2025

Hari Kunzru
Doing Their Own Research

“With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s elevation, conspiracy—which usually presents the government as a distant object of obsession or fantasy—has become governmental logic.”

—May 29, 2025

Zoe Guttenplan, interviewed by Daniel Drake
Colors and Shapes

“There is something about the hard corners and gray background of Berlin’s transit map that seems to echo the city’s architecture; I find that pleasing in the same way as when a dog resembles its owner.”

—June 14, 2025

Zoe Guttenplan
Spaghetti Underground

“Live in New York long enough and you develop a strange innate understanding of this convoluted system…. You realize that the map is important, but that it will always be a bit wrong.

—April 18, 2025

Nina Siegal, interviewed by Stephanie Pisarevskiy
The Museumgoer

“I get excited by all forms of cultural resistance, those quiet and thoughtful efforts, often overlooked, that may not be flashy heroics but that nonetheless can have a significant impact.”

—June 21, 2025

Nina Siegal
The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

“Rose Valland managed to avoid being dismissed from her job, and she was thus able to observe the Nazis’ art-looting operation, surreptitiously taking notes and holding on to her secrets until the time was right.”

—May 29, 2025

Max Rivlin-Nadler, interviewed by Daniel Drake
The New York World

“Anyone who doesn’t see [that Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor] is in denial, and some time into burning another pile of cash on negative ads, they’ll probably see the light.”

—July 5, 2025

Max Rivlin-Nadler
The Mamdani Coalition

“This is the coalition Mamdani hopes to build: people who love New York City but struggle to keep living here.”

—June 20, 2025

Miriam Pensack, interviewed by Willa Glickman
In the Zone

“Studying Guantánamo and the Canal Zone has been a way to examine how people and governments reconstitute themselves both metaphysically and politically through ongoing imperial encounter.”

—July 12, 2025

Miriam Pensack
‘The Canal Is Ours’

“The first generation of Zonians came from a range of backgrounds—some were engineers, others manual laborers—yet all found themselves on a preferential end of a system of Jim Crow–style segregation that the US exported to [Panama].”

—June 28, 2025

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