On the occasion of the publication of Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023 this fall and of a corresponding exhibition of the artist’s work at Gagosian, New York, we invited Glenn Lowry, a friend of the artist’s and former director of the Museum of Modern Art, to reflect on moments spent with Marden and on the enduring power of his art.
AMA Venezia
Celebrating the collector Laurent Asscher’s new art space in Venice, William Middleton underscores the richness of Asscher’s relationships with artists.
The Generative Surface
Eileen Costello explores the oft-overlooked importance of paper choice to the mediums of drawing and printmaking, from the Renaissance through the present day.
A quarter century after the attacks, the grief, wars, and political furies of their aftermath still shape American life. By Jill Lepore
Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?
The culture wars have come for lingerie as the right, once the advocates of promise rings and purity culture, embarks on a crusade to “Make America Hot Again.” By Jennifer Wilson
Saudi Arabia’s Pursuit of Michelin Stardom
The kingdom, seeking to rebrand as a culinary juggernaut, has bankrolled new restaurants and conscripted big-name chefs. Will it succeed? By Ruby Tandoh
Donald Trump’s Capital Makeover
A coterie of advisers, planners, and architects is enabling the President’s passion project—renovating D.C. in his own image. By Antonia Hitchens
As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing a work of literary criticism, as they happily did in the 1970s and 1980s. Even literary biography, literary criticism’s previously marketable stepsister, no longer brings a gleam to a publisher’s eye. The grassroots of the subject are also suffering badly. Since 2000 the number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third, to around 36,000, with an even higher drop among male students.
A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul by Caroline Moorehead
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythic Giant Panda by Nathalia Holt
The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Hester Grant
It’s getting on for twenty-four years ago that I first read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Books tend to come to us when we need them, and it’s easy to see why Tom Ripley’s project of self-reinvention and triumphant class resentment was so appealing to me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate.
The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age By Neil Price
Few groups in history have been so variously defined, quarrelled over, misrepresented and appropriated as the Vikings. Their identity elusive, they have been passed around like historiographical tokens to the detriment of a deeper understanding of their cultural and political milieu. Neil Price’s The Sea-King and the Sorceress sidesteps these often sterile debates by examining the lives – and deaths – of more than twenty figures from the Viking Age and using them to shed light on wider themes, a bottom-up approach which is both logical and engaging.
The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East By Simon Sebag Montefiore
A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently from the salons of Cairo to the palaces of Riyadh, from Atatürk’s Ankara to Khomeini’s Najaf, while keeping so many figures vividly in play.
All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Sh*tshow Politics Led to Trump – and How We Find a Way Out By Anthony Scaramucci
When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days as his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci thought his career was over. He had become such an object of ridicule that a crisis PR adviser suggested he lie low for a few years before attempting to start again. Instead, the self-styled ‘front stabber’ from New York – who had naively assumed that a successful Wall Street career could equip him for the toxic political swamp of Washington, DC – launched himself into a round of media interviews, choosing to roll with the punches.
Dolly Parton belonged to a beloved category: the outlaw Christian, who loved Jesus and refused to hate anyone else.
Cinema Lessons from a Trash-Movie Auteur
Why do we love trash and hate slop? Neil Breen’s so-bad-they’re-great movies elucidate the difference.
The Floods Nepal Didn’t Cause
Flash floods, triggered by a glacial collapse in the Himalayas, have killed at least five hundred people in a nation that has contributed little to climate change but is disproportionately affected by it. By Ishaan Tharoor
How the Meta Settlement Could Change the Internet
Even while refusing to admit legal fault, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children. By Nathaniel Lubin
New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State
The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.
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