Proud of His Conundrums
The art critic Harold Rosenberg is remembered as a swashbuckling player in a sprawling American intellectual drama—a sort of epic family romance—that extended from the 1930s...
The Downward Slope
In early 2015 Alex Riley, then twenty-four years old, was working as a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, using CT-scanning technology to study...
Burke on Principle
The blackout curtains were drawn—it was night, I mean—though dawnshould have come. Beeches, maples, the dying horse-chestnuts, all had surrenderedto the general fall, like men to...
Romanian Masquerades
Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn, the Romanian director Radu Jude’s exuberantly rude and bawdy new film, is a movie about us. Or rather, it’s a...
When Did They Decide?
On January 20, 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, presided over a meeting at a villa on the shore of the Wannsee, a lake...
Knife Skills
The website of the Nobel Prize Committee describes Louise Glück’s poetry as “free of poetic formalities” and notable, by contrast, for its use of “daily spoken...
Trouble in Paradise
In the opening pages of Lena Andersson’s novel Willful Disregard, we are told that Ester Nilsson, a thirty-one-year-old poet and essayist in Stockholm with “eight slim...
Visions of Waste
A few days before his sixtieth birthday, in 1903, Henry James wrote to his brother William of his desire to return to his native land after...
Washington’s Crackpot Realism
The twenty years of war since the September 11, 2001, attacks have killed more than 900,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the United...
