Category: Arts & Entertainment

All of Auden

Sponsored by The Morgan Library & Museum Nick Laird Auden’s Dialectic In Auden’s complete poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, the poet veers from puckish youth to adult diagnostician and back again. Anna Della Subin A Body That’s Divine A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who […]

The Zimbabwean Writing Against Empire

Sponsored by Summer Classics at St. John’s College Darryl Pinckney Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels and essays are marked by her struggle against gender hierarchies and the legacies of colonialism. Ingrid D. Rowland An Exceptional Witness The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish […]

Madame Mao’s Nietzschean Revolution

Mao’s wife Jiang Qing helped lead the Cultural Revolution with a Nietzschean philosophy of art. Through revolutionary operas and ballets, she sought a heroic consciousness to could transform society. Whether it comes in the form of a musical composition, a ballet, or a violent revolution, a great work […]

Jolly Kafka

Sponsored by Harvard University Press Our April 6 issue—the Spring Books Issue—is online now, with James Fenton on the English garden, Frances Wilson on Kafka’s diaries, Christopher de Bellaigue on Erdoğan’s disastrous misrule, Martin Filler on Adolf Loos’s minimalism, Christine Smallwood on Bret Easton Ellis’s worst fear, Anahid Nersessian on […]

Ernst Jünger’s sinister fable of 1939

“The classical beauty of the writing, in Tess Lewis’s exquisite translation, gives a sense of the author’s sympathies. . . . [Jünger’s] short, prismatic book is beautiful.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS Ernst Jünger Translated from the German by Tess Lewis Introduction by […]

A Net Over the Void

A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s March 23 and April 6 issues. Our seventh art newsletter is brought to you from Santa Monica, where the clothing designer Rachel Comey and I have come with the writer Maile Meloy to take a […]

‘Straight Through the Eyeholes’

In the Review’s April 6 issue, Ed Park writes about the cartoonist Daniel Clowes, creator of the comic book Eightball (1989–2004), the first eighteen issues of which have just been collected in one volume by the publisher Fantagraphics. “Varying in tone and ambition,” writes Park, Eightball “fixates on verbal zing and graphic […]

Why metalheads are happier people

Music makes us happy. Millions of people can agree on that. But heavy metal? A genre that is often described as deafening and aggressive, how is can that make people happy? Are the headbanging, beer-drinking and blackclad metal fans even happier than other people? Surely, that can’t be.But […]

The Revolution and the Border

Sponsored by Reaktion Books   Francisco Cantú An American Story Kelly Lytle Hernández’s latest book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change. Liza Batkin Men Explain Abortion Drugs to the FDA In a Texas lawsuit, Christian medical […]

Hooray for Hollywood

Sponsored by MUBI “When we first stepped onto the Red Carpet, I felt a little like Captain Cook must have felt walking ashore in the Society Islands just before he was bludgeoned to death.” This was Larry McMurtry’s description of arriving at the 2006 Academy Awards—where he and his […]

Review: Are Memes Upending Democracy?

In Meme Wars, so-called “disinformation” experts call for the suppression of more ideas and speakers to protect democracy. Brian Doherty | From the April 2023 issue (Bloomsbury Publishing) In the Trump era, prankster reactionaries went online aiming to perplex and unnerve the olds and normies. In their book […]

‘Introducing the Stunt Awards,’

— Katherine Brooks, deputy editor, Vulture We’re less than a week out from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ annual celebration of movie magic, and there’s one important department that will go unrecognized at the 2023 Oscars: the stunt professionals. While superior production design, visual effects, […]

Vice Cop Vices

Sponsored by Platform Books Sarah Schulman Red Lights, Blue Lines Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.” Geoffrey Wheatcroft Bloody Panico The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened? Anjum Hasan Endless Trances […]

The Right to Be Artful

Sponsored by Platform Books In John J. Lennon’s latest essay for the Review, he reads Sarah Weinman’s book Scoundrel, an account of the saga of the writer and convicted murderer Edgar Smith, who had once been championed by William F. Buckley. “As a journalist who covers criminal justice […]

‘Cocaine Bear’ Is a Buzz Kill

The 41 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now Wired From ‘Physical: 100’ to ‘Wednesday’, these are our picks for the best Netflix streaming titles to binge this week. READ How AI Could Transform Email Reece Rogers Artificial intelligence may streamline a form of business communication that’s already super […]

From Peru to the West Bank

Rachel Nolan An Amazonian Exodus The discovery of a Bible led a Peruvian man on a decades-long process of conversion, leading him and his disciples to a settlement in the West Bank, where they became caught up in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel. […]

Tracking the Trolls

“The following is a description of a video that I did not watch,” writes Vanessa Barbara in her report on the nation’s recent presidential election in the February 23, 2023, issue of the Review. “‘A male synthetic organism was walking down the street when it came across an […]

Inventors of the Molotov Cocktail

New York Review of Books “Polls over the last decade indicated that no more than a quarter of Finns supported NATO membership,” writes Gordon F. Sander in the Review’s March 9 issue. One month after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, however, public opinion had shifted, and “a poll by Finland’s […]

Germany’s Nineteenth-Century Genocide

Sponsored by Brandeis University Press Thomas Rogers The Long Shadow of German Colonialism The people of what was once German-occupied Africa are demanding reparations for the colonial violence that shapes the region to this day. Kathryn Hughes A Complicated Reformer Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from […]

The Verbal and the Nonverbal

A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s February 23 and March 9 issues. In late January and early February, New York City temperatures hit strange highs, rain blindsided us, and snow was mostly absent. Over the course of four weeks, three friends visited, […]

In True Crime’s Shadow

New York Review of Books “What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness for entertainment?” asks John J. Lennon in our March 9 issue. “When we do this, do we hinder the progress of writers who focus on criminal justice reform?” He is writing about Sarah Weinman’s book Scoundrel, […]

The Feminists of the Egyptian Revolution

Sponsored by University of Nebraska Press Ursula Lindsey Rape and Resistance in Egypt A new book recounts the heroics of activists who organized to protect women from sexual violence during the Egyptian revolution and to assert their right to participate in the country’s political life. Andrew Butterfield A ‘Magic […]

Highly Eccentric Characters

In the Review’s February 9, 2023, issue, Francesca Wade reviews a new biography of the enigmatic modernist Mina Loy, a poet and artist whose work has been “periodically ‘rediscovered’ while remaining elusive.” Her life was peripatetic and haunted: she had affairs with Italian Futurists, married the boxer-poet Arthur […]