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Today in The New York Review of Books: Rosa Lyster watches the world’s salt lakes dry up; Bijan Stephen listens to Beverly Glenn-Copeland; Clare Bucknell goes down the pedant’s rabbit hole; Max Norman visits a Eugène Atget exhibit; a poem by Fiona Sze-Lorrain; and, from the archives, Sarah Kerr on Jane Campion.

Rosa Lyster
This Bitter Earth

The world’s salt lakes are the canary in the coal mine for the climate crisis, and they are shrinking at a drastic rate.

Bijan Stephen
Ever New

In Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s music, the present moment is an astonishing, improbable gift.

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Clare Bucknell
Charlatans & Bores

The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.

Max Norman
Quoting the World

There may be no unifying style in Eugène Atget’s photographs—only an uncanny realism that still arrests viewers a century after his death.

Ladder to the Moon

a poem by
Fiona Sze-Lorrain

after Georgia O’Keeffe, 1958

                  Soaked in the information of stillness,

I found the moon too chaste—cut at the source
of its language.

                                            Night, green with blue:
ready for the ladder’s fame…

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Free from the Archives

Today is Jane Campion’s seventy-second birthday. In the Review’s February 3, 1994, issue, Sarah Kerr wrote about Campion’s fourth film, The Piano, the first movie directed by a woman to be win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Kerr, however, was preoccupied by The Piano’s failure to decide on its own meaning, arguing that an “avoidance of judgment gives it an open-armed warmth, a slightly New Age quality that shows up at the end of the final credits.”

Sarah Kerr
Shoot the Piano Player

Real people rarely have been served well by the movies, which tend to camouflage physical and psychic flaws, and pound lives into the shape of a lesson.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

In the latest episode of our Private Life podcast, May Lin reads “Ghosts in the House,” Martin Filler’s 1999 essay about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century. Listen and subscribe at the link below.

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