Today in The New York Review of Books: Susan Tallman audits the collections of colonial museums; Pria Anand diagnoses tuberculosis; Geoffrey O’Brien loses it at the theatre; Philip Clark burrows into the studio with Steely Dan; a poem by Ishion Hutchinson; and, from the archives, Robert M. Adams on Jonathan Swift.

Susan Tallman
The Plunderers’ Dilemma

Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.

Pria Anand
The Plague That Won’t Die

Tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide, and, as my recent diagnosis shows, America is hardly immune.

Geoffrey O’Brien
Magic from Elsewhere

The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future.

Inter Alia, North Carolina Trees

a poem by
Ishion Hutchinson

Willow oaks melting into sidewalks,
propagating grass with daylong jokes,
or, listen, the American holly alive
with robins flitting quicksilver through
perpetual shadow as gray foxes set off
the rainstick music of pine needles,
repeating Civil War betrayals on the wind,
all that undying Gothic covering fields…

On the NYR Online

Philip Clark
The Dude Ranch Above the Sea

Steely Dan conjured a sealed-in-amber studio perfection—a sound that could alienate listeners as easily as seduce them.

Free from the Archives

Today is Jonathan Swift’s 358th birthday. In the Review’s October 25, 1984, issue, Robert M. Adams reviewed Irvin Ehrenpreis’s “superdreadnought” life of Jonathan Swift (combined, the three volumes come to 2,142 pages). Adams’s assessment: “As exposition the volumes hold up remarkably well. Political, theological, ecclesiastical, and social intricacies are painstakingly explained; and if the explanations create occasional longueurs, no reader who hefts the volumes beforehand will be much surprised or daunted.”

But most importantly, “the biography of Swift himself…makes the most solid and sustained part of the story,” and Adams follows Ehrenpreis in his Brobdingnagian enterprise, from Swift’s “disguises, subterfuges, anonymities, ironic masqueradings, and mystifications” to his “outright political hatreds” and finally to his bitter, shrewd, defiant writing.

Robert M. Adams
Animated Paradox

“Jonathan Swift was idealized and despised; he was cruel and tender, noble and base, generous and stingy, a brutal political liar, a devoted friend, a patriotic defender of the oppressed Irish and a party to their systematic exploitation, by turns wrong-headed and inspired, a man of quivering sensitivity and of bristling pride verging on gross rudeness. A man with an infinite sense of fun and play, a man of more severe, narrow, and repressive principles than we today can readily conceive—in short, he was an animated paradox, whose entire life was a provocation to study him.”

Recently in the Review

Fintan O’Toole
The Lingering Delusion

Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.

Mark Lilla
Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

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