Sponsored by Bloomsbury

Today in The New York Review of Books: Yuri Slezkine wonders what “The West” was; Lucy Sante pages through Joe Brainard’s C Comics; A.S. Hamrah champions moviegoing; three poems by Lindsay Turner; and, from the archives, Tom Stoppard on the art and technique of playwriting.

Yuri Slezkine
Why ‘The West’?

The idea of the West survived a once-shared civilization as a code for its fractious heirs. A new book suggests its enduring constants have been a fear of Russia and of internal decay.

Advertisement

Lucy Sante
‘A Cartoon Revival’

The illustrated poems, satirical ads, and talking shoes that filled the pages of C Comics.

A.S. Hamrah
A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs

Major film studios embracing AI, newspapers announcing the death of moviegoing, critics devoid of values: all of this can instill a great sense of defeat. We have to write against it.

Advertisement

Three Madonna poems

by Lindsay Turner

The tiny baby flails at my chest.
The tiny nails, they tear
me up, they shred me to pieces.
Nothing will ever be the same…

Today in a beam of sun
the baby’s eyelashes had gold in them
and closed down on his cheek.
Then clouds then sleet…

The baby has a stuffed rattle shaped like a fox.
It curls around itself, closing its eyes,
while his soft voice
comes from very far away…

Free from the Archives

Tom Stoppard died last week, age eighty-eight. In our September 23, 1999, issue, the Review published remarks Stoppard had given that year at the New York Public Library, where he had been asked to talk about “Technique and Interpretation in the Performing Arts.” (“If there were ever a title dreamed up to strike me dumb, this one verges on inspiration.”)

Stoppard was then entering his third decade of critical and commercial triumph—his play The Invention of Love, per Harold Bloom “his masterpiece,” had premiered in London two years earlier, while his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love had just won the Academy Award. Yet in ruminating on the method and art of writing for the stage, he was clear and direct, assuming a “faux naif persona” (“I’m not even sure myself to what degree it’s a posture”): “The theater seems to me, on the whole, to be a way of telling stories which are acted out for an audience and which mean pretty much what the audience thinks they mean.”

Tom Stoppard
Pragmatic Theater

“The central paradox of theater is that something which starts off complete, as true to itself, as self-contained and as subjective as a sonnet, is then thrown into a kind of spin dryer which is the process of staging the play; and that process is hilariously empirical.
When all’s said and done…, it turns out that as the play negotiates that final bridge between the rehearsal room and the audience, the difference between success and failure is suddenly in the hands of real technicians, people who manipulate dials and switches.”

Advertisement

Recently in the Review

Sari Bashi
Gaza: The Threat of Partition

“Although the Israeli government has toned down its calls for the ‘voluntary emigration’ of Gaza’s residents, and although the Trump plan affirms the right of people in Gaza to stay, Palestinians will struggle to remain even in the 47 percent of Gaza still accessible to them. That may well, in fact, be precisely what the current reconstruction plans are meant to achieve.”

Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson
Runaway Short-Termism

“Members of Trump’s coalition aren’t really thinking about the long-term sources of American power. They don’t see the university as a place where human capital accumulates and innovations happen—they see it as a place that contests their current power in the culture. Similarly, they’re not thinking of immigration as helping to stave off American demographic decline—they’re thinking of the great replacement theory.”

A New York Review Online Event

The State of the Left
Fintan O’Toole in Conversation with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal

December 8, 2025, 5:00 PM EST

Join Fintan O’Toole and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of progressive politics. This online event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of ten dollars) and open to the public. Registration is required. The event will last for approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Register Today

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue and receive a FREE 2026 calendar

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305