A Vermeer for the IRA
In an essay first published by The New Yorker in 1995, Lawrence Weschler described an exchange with Antonio Cassese, the presiding judge at the Yugoslav War...
The Reader of Rocks
In 1815 William Smith published the first detailed geological map of an entire country. Its scope was ambitious, as his long, practical-poetic title suggests: A Delineation...
The Bloodhound
Nicholson Baker’s latest book, Baseless, is stuffed with examples of just how inventive we humans can get when devising ways to harm one another. Most of...
What Dignity Demands
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance...
Spirited Away
“People evangelize because they fear that the belief to which they have committed themselves may not be true.” T.M. Luhrmann has spent many years doing fieldwork...
Tune Out & Lean In
A subplot in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full involves a young husband and father named Conrad Hensley, a low-level employee in a wholesale...
The Real Problems with 1970s Psychology
To the Editors: In Gavin Francis’s thoughtful account of two books on the history of psychiatry [“Changing Psychiatry’s Mind,” NYR, January 14], I was surprised to...
Democracy’s Genuine Crisis
To the Editors: Jackson Lears’s review of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum [“Orthodoxy of the Elites,” NYR, January 14] fails the first rule of book...
Lydia Davis Is the Anti-Domesticity Influencer Pandemic Moms Need
I picked up Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory again recently for the first time in years, and as I flipped through, one line shone out to...
Alex McElroy Is Not Going to Make You Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This...
