Today in The New York Review of Books: Mary Turfah on the Lebanese hospitals treating Palestinian child amputees; Gabriel Winslow-Yost on fear and longing in “the Backrooms”; Dan Chiasson on what writers lose with the ‘convenience’ of AI; Adam Kirsch on Thomas Mann at the sanatorium; and, from the archives, FT on George Michael.

Mary Turfah
Safety Is When There’s No One Dying

Israel’s assault on Palestine and Lebanon has reconfigured how children understand the world.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
‘An Eternal Indoors’

The power of Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” series—over twenty YouTube videos and now a feature film—comes from the mix of longing and fear with which it views the pre-digital past.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

In this episode of Private Life, Langdon Hammer reads Helen Vendler’s essay, “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” from the May 11, 1995, issue of The New York Review of Books. Listen and subscribe at the link below.

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Dan Chiasson
Think for Yourself

One of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the short cuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing.

Adam Kirsch
The Siren Song of Illness

In writing The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann struggled to free himself from his artistic preoccupation with sickness and death.

Free from the Archives

Happy birthday to George Michael, né Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, who would have been sixty-three today. In February 2024, on the occasion of a documentary about Michael’s band Wham!, the pseudonymous critic FT wrote about his life and music, the teenybopper hits he made with Wham!, and the explosive success of his solo albums, and the tension between his creative impulses and his genius for commercial pop.

FT
Just Enough Blues

Michael is best known as a singer and widely recognized as a songwriter, but his greatest skill may have been production. The acoustic guitar that opens his 1987 solo single “Faith” hovers with perfect clarity just the right distance from the listener’s ear, as if the guitar player was strumming just a few feet away; in a decade practically synonymous with stiff, booming percussion, his drum programming has a deft, humorous touch that verges on virtuosity.

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