“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life
Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides…
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Ruth Asawa’s Art of Defiant Hospitality
“It was the first time in my life I didn’t have to do anything,” Asawa later said. She took drawing lessons from three interned Disney animators in an ad-hoc school for the camp’s…
Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real
On certain days, I’d cut school and head over to the Museum of Modern Art to dream awhile. This was in the mid-nineteen-seventies, and my high school—then called the High School for…
At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital
In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican church where…
Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us
That may not exactly sound like a call to arms, but the title of an expert and engaging new introduction to the philosopher encourages us to think otherwise. “Kant: A Revolution in…
Jamar Roberts’s Second Act
Jamar Roberts is the choreographer of the moment. His dances are in demand, with commissions from ballet and modern-dance companies across the country, including two world premières this…
A Daring Show Remixes the Monuments of the Confederacy
The first thing you see is a horse’s ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man’s arm descends from the beast’s stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a…
In the Dark Releases “Blood Relatives,” an Examination of a Notorious British Crime
On an August night in 1985, five members of one family were shot dead at Whitehouse Farm, a country manor in the rural county of Essex, in southeastern England. The police were alerted by…
How Corporate Feminism Went from “Love Me” to “Buy Me”
In retrospect, the book feels like an artifact of a fleetingly optimistic moment, and of a time when the mainstreaming of feminism—recall Beyoncé performing in front of a screen flashing…
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging…
Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself
But it wasn’t until he arrived in Paris, during his junior year abroad, that he could truly nurture his bohemian streak. The city was still reeling from the Second World War. The power…
Pan-African Dreams, Post-Colonial Realities
Two new books, on Kwame Nkrumah’s promise and Idi Amin’s tyranny, capture the soaring hopes and bitter aftermath of Africa’s age of independence. Source link
Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are…
Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery
At the start of “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s eighteenth novel, the year is 2119 and the humanities are still in crisis. Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030,…
“Splitsville” Plays Infidelity for Laughs; “A Little Prayer” Shows What’s Really at Stake
In the studiedly rambunctious comedy “Splitsville,” Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin play a pair of homewreckers. The home, a beachside vacation pad with natural-wood siding and…
The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is…
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had backed a coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, the…
Sterling K. Brown’s Upstanding Archetype
There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when the actor is conveying deep glee or charming irony…
The Trophy Abs and Soul Ties of “Love Island USA”
One good way to enjoy the latest season of “Love Island USA”—the seventh, in which new episodes aired on Peacock almost every day for six weeks and just wrapped up—is to imagine that you…
What Will Become of the C.I.A.?
In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with…
Can A.I. Find Cures for Untreatable Diseases—Using Drugs We Already Have?
When David Fajgenbaum was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, at the University of Pennsylvania, he started to feel so tired that he could barely stand. Fajgenbaum, a former college…
The Met’s Luminous New Rockefeller Wing Still Casts Some Shadows
It may be the most impressive of the recently modernized colonial collections, far surpassing Berlin’s much criticized Humboldt Forum. One laudable shift is the variety of media…
Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?
In early 2021, the journalist Matt Richtel spoke to a father who was a few weeks into a nightmare. Tatnai Burnett was a doctor, his wife was a therapist, and, until middle school, their…
William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Invention of American Conservatism
National Review embraced Goldwater. Bozell ghostwrote his campaign book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” a hit with college students. But Goldwater was crushed in the general election,…