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Today in The New York Review of Books: Ian Tattersall reclaims Lamarck; Taryn Simon photographs a spy; Joseph Horowitz peers into the future of the New York Philharmonic; Erika Balsom watches an undersung classic of the French New Wave; Jarrett Earnest talks with Lucy Sante; and, from the archives, Nathaniel Rich on lighthouses.

Ian Tattersall
Posterity Avenged Him

In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.

Taryn Simon
Mother Country

Almost ten years ago, I met a retired federal agent for lunch. What he witnessed on the job seemed to touch every part of recent American history.

Joseph Horowitz
Dudamel’s New York Dream

The New York Philharmonic’s new music director is admired by composers and audiences alike. Can he lead the company through the crisis facing orchestras everywhere?

Erika Balsom
Sand Castles

The revival of Paula Delsol’s La Dérive raises the question of how a film so accomplished and so proximate to the French New Wave could remain so little known for so long.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

In the second season premiere of Private Life, Lucy Sante joins host Jarrett Earnest to discuss Renata Adler’s blistering assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue; the legacy of staff film critics; and Sante’s relationship with popular music from Elvis to The Velvet Underground.

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Free from the Archives

With a potential nor’easter threatening New England this weekend, our thoughts turn to images of home and hearth, warmth and safety—like the lighthouse. “The history of the American lighthouse,” Nathaniel Rich warned in our May 26, 2016, issue, “is a history of calamity, insanity, and, in at least one case, cannibalism.” Far from the “brilliant beacons” that lighthouses represent in romantic literature and on picture postcards, they are also, Rich writes, “cenotaphs, marking deathtraps that for centuries devoured mariners along the continent’s coasts. Only after enough maritime disasters occurred in a treacherous location was a lighthouse built.”

Nathaniel Rich
To the Lighthouse

To build lighthouses, “municipalities and colonies had to overcome the resistance of the so-called ‘wreckers.’ Shipwrecks occurred with such regularity that the phenomenon created an entire underclass of scavengers who haunted the coast, waiting for the tide to deposit treasures. Nicknamed ‘mooncussers’—before lighthouses, a bright moon was a ship’s best navigational aide—wreckers were suspected of tying lights to cows and walking them along the beach, in imitation of ships’ lights, to draw sailors to their doom.”

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