THE YALE REVIEW (March 11, 2025): The latest issue features…
Do we want art to transform our lives?
Capturing Los Angeles in crisis by Sasha Rudensky
Is life online real? by Jesse Damiani
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 12, 2025): The latest issue features Clair Wills on Marion Milner; Deaths in Custody; Adam Shatz on Messiaen’s Ecstasies; Bee Wilson looks in the fridge and Christopher Clark defends Merkel…
Marion Milner believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal.
William had spent most of his life in the care of the state. His story was one of intergenerational trauma, common to many families in the West of Scotland, and of the lies Scotland tells itself about its treatment of its most vulnerable young people.
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.
While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 7, 2025): The latest issue features The Prophet Business…
A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson
There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment – an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025
One hundred and fifty years after Impressionist paintings were first exhibited, it takes a certain effort to recover their original radicalism.
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.
THE LONDON MAGAZINE (February 3, 2025): The latest issue features…
Zuhri James
‘I don’t think character exists anymore’, Rachel Cusk declared in a 2018 interview. This was not the first time Cusk appeared to be announcing the atrophy of the traditional novel. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Cusk stated she was ‘certain autobiography’ was ‘increasingly the only form in all the arts’. Inversely, fiction and its conventional preoccupation with ‘making up John and Jane’, Cusk argued, was only becoming more ‘ridiculous’, ‘fake and embarrassing’. It is precisely this disregard for literary orthodoxy that runs through Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of autofictional novels – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018).
.Idra Novey
My twin brother calls from the hospital. He’s finished his blood draw and wants to know the word in Portuguese for watermelon. I recite the word for him – melancia – though my brother’s mind isn’t likely to keep hold of it. Zach can no longer keep a hold of his house keys or his phone, which he left yesterday in the bathroom sink. Before we hang up, I ask him to please wait for me in the lounge area for outpatient services, not to wander outside the hospital.
.Julia Steiner
Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease: The Paris Document – out from Fitzcarraldo Editions on 30 January – delivers captivating literary reportage on Parisian squats of the early 2010s. Feldman introduces us to people who transformed abandoned buildings into homes, shelters and hubs for artistic creation. With echoes of Agnès Varda’s work, Feldman’s prose is compassionate and honest, acknowledging her own role as an observer. She answered these questions by email about her fifteen-years-long project, begun in 2009.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (January 23, 2025): The latest issue features…
An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.
Franz Kafka – an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, May 30–October 27, 2024, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, November 22, 2024–April 13, 2025
Bernardo Arévalo’s inauguration last year as president of Guatemala symbolized the revival of democracy in a notoriously corrupt country. A concerted effort by obstructionist elites now threatens to oust him on specious grounds—and bring repression back.
Bruce Ragsdale’s Washington at the Plow examines the connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.
Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery by Bruce A. Ragsdale
NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION (January 22, 2025): The National Book Foundation (NBF) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced selected titles for the fourth year of the Science + Literature program.
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
“…follows two teenage sisters who join their mother—a paleontology graduate student—on scientific expeditions near and far. Ausubel’s novel captures the wonder of scientific discovery as Jane and her daughters navigate grief, sexism, and a journey to find a wooly mammoth and themselves.“
Milkweed Editions
“…dissects the vulnerability of parenthood and our natural world, with embedded erasure poems of Lacy M. Johnson’s “How to Mourn a Glacier” throughout the collection. Meltwater simultaneously mourns the disastrous effects of the climate crisis while finding moments of joy in the everyday through the eyes of a new mother.“
Random House / Penguin Random House
“…invites readers into the remarkable sensory worlds of birds, bugs, crocodiles, dogs, and many other animals to show us how these creatures experience the world. Yong argues that all creatures, humans included, have their own unique way of perceiving their surroundings, making the case for why we must collectively protect our biologically diverse planet.”
As Donald J. Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, much of the world seems to be bowing down to him and demoralized opponents are rethinking the future.
After the fighting paused, Hamas began to free some of its hostages, releasing 3, and Israel said it had released 90 Palestinian prisoners.
After 470 days of death, a tentative cease-fire began on Sunday in Gaza. But Palestinians could not be sure that the war had ended, and Israelis fear that many hostages will still remain in Gaza.
After four years in office, President Biden has a long list of accomplishments he takes pride in. But he struggled with inflation, illegal immigration and his own advancing age.
A fierce dispute erupted in the president-elect’s camp between immigration hard-liners and tech industry leaders including Elon Musk.
Trapped in Sudan’s brutal civil war, a young woman chose to work in a clinic on the front line, treating civilians and combatants. She had to navigate suspicion from both sides.
Amid an outcry for justice and accountability and threats online, a once-dominant group is feeling deep anxiety after the ouster of Syria’s dictator.
Robert Brooks died after a savage attack at a New York prison this month that was captured by several officers’ body-worn cameras.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 21, 2024): The 12,22,24 issue features ‘Escape From Gaza’…
The war is nearly impossible to flee — except for a small number of sick and wounded who are offered a dramatic path to safety. By Nicholas Casey
Fifty years since he left the Soviet Union, he insists on using his huge fame to bring attention to difficult, esoteric art. By Jason Diamond
Users are now flocking to Bluesky. But every social media platform becomes a wasteland in the end. By J Wortham
The Senate passed the measure, sending it to President Biden’s desk, shortly after the midnight deadline for funding to lapse.
Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.
In Michigan, the state’s largest insurer has tightened restrictions around medications like Wegovy. Patients are panicking.
Syria’s new rulers say they will spare conscripts of Bashar al-Assad and pursue those who oversaw his regime’s abuses. Hundreds are lining up to learn which promise applies to them.
