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07/21/2024

“She felt Proust and Joyce were its biggest influences—‘strange forefathers,’ she admitted, for a romance novel.” —Anna Leskiewicz revisits Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle.”

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her

07/21/2024

Tariq Mir reports from Kashmir, surveying the damage done by India's revocation of Article 370, which had given the region semiautonomous status.

On a warm spring day last March, I visited Ali Mohammad Sagar at his home in Humhama, a middle-class neighborhood in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. As

07/21/2024

“Rubies is a ballet rooted in a time more distant to us today than Petipa’s Imperial ballets were to Balanchine,” writes Dilara O'Neil. “And yet it never feels rote or old-fashioned.”

One of my favorite moments in George Balanchine’s Rubies is when the soloist, known as the “Tall Girl,” emerges from the corps de ballet and

07/20/2024

James Romm on the chilling history of Arctic explorations.

One day in 1652, a British man of science named Joseph Moxon stopped into an Amsterdam tavern, never dreaming that his harmless recreation would,

07/20/2024

“Soutine moved the brush quickly, so each stroke is still visible,” writes Celeste Marcus. “For a thicker stretch of color, he used bigger brushes or a palette knife, or the back end of a brush, or, sometimes, his fingers. He once dislocated his thumb painting with it.”

In 1931 Chaïm Soutine was moved to recreate Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654), which depicts a woman—thought to be his partner,

07/20/2024

“Whether we know it or not, Jews are haunted by the ghosts of those who, when they were being dragged off to the death camps, protested that they thought they were French or German or Italian.” —Rachel Eisdendrath

It took nearly a day to get there by train. But then there we were: Chicago!—the Europe of the Midwest, the “Rome of the railroads.” (Possibly parodying

07/19/2024

“Like Balanchine’s other work, Rubies has been restaged by different companies around the world,” writes Dilara O'Neil. “But the ballet still seems to represent what it did when it premiered: City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the present and the future of the art form.”

One of my favorite moments in George Balanchine’s Rubies is when the soloist, known as the “Tall Girl,” emerges from the corps de ballet and

07/19/2024

Lucinda Williams “has written few songs explicitly about her parents, but in her book they emerge as prototypes for the couples that fill her records,” writes Sam Huber. “One partner flamboyantly self-destructive, the other bearing imperfect witness.”

Again and again in the music of Lucinda Williams, the sins of the father are visited upon the son’s girlfriend. Over more than four decades, working

07/18/2024

“Many Chinese social media giants like Weibo and WeChat are popular outside China only within its diaspora,” writes Yi-Ling Liu. “TikTok, however, has become truly global.”

One way to understand the origins of TikTok is to consider two train rides that took place on opposite ends of the globe. The first was in Beijing in

07/18/2024

The Supreme Court has empowered “businesses to obstruct administrative agencies’ efforts to slow climate change, protect air and water, ensure the safety of food and medicine, provide access to health care, and counter fraud and instability in financial markets. But the decisions are not just deregulatory. They also dramatically increase the Supreme Court’s power at the expense of administrative agencies.” —David Cole

The Supreme Court in its just-concluded 2023–2024 term extended substantial new rights to hedge fund managers, big business, and former president Donald

07/17/2024

Dilara O’Neill on George Balanchine’s Rubies

One of my favorite moments in George Balanchine’s Rubies is when the soloist, known as the “Tall Girl,” emerges from the corps de ballet and

07/17/2024

“The cultural conflict that defined its reception—between…middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself.” —
on “I Capture the Castle.”

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her

07/17/2024

“If the encounter with the large structures of history often comes as a surprise to an American, perhaps it does so in a special way in the case of assimilated Jews, at least ones as ignorant as myself, because their culture is by definition not what they think of as their own.” —Rachel Eisdendrath

It took nearly a day to get there by train. But then there we were: Chicago!—the Europe of the Midwest, the “Rome of the railroads.” (Possibly parodying

07/16/2024

“The songs on Lucinda Williams sound native to the Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas landscapes in which she lived much of her first thirty years. The lyrics invoke farmhouses and open plains; her band’s four-piece rock arrangements are embellished with mandolin, fiddle, and steel guitar.” —Sam Huber

Again and again in the music of Lucinda Williams, the sins of the father are visited upon the son’s girlfriend. Over more than four decades, working

07/15/2024

“Glazer seems to know that kitsch is the abyss over which all Holocaust artworks teeter. His long, deliberate approach to making The Zone of Interest...and many of his aesthetic choices seem designed precisely to skirt this abyss.” —Kevin Power

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest puts all its faith in cinematic technique and forfeits much of the meaning in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel.

07/15/2024

"TikTok has in effect become a Chinese scapegoat for anxieties about the power that all private tech companies wield, regardless of where they come from…"—Yi-Ling Liu

One way to understand the origins of TikTok is to consider two train rides that took place on opposite ends of the globe. The first was in Beijing in

07/15/2024

"The brushwork is rough, suggesting speed and confidence," Celeste Marcus writes of Chäim Soutine's paintings. "People, animals, and objects are distorted, such that the paintings often look twisted."

In 1931 Chaïm Soutine was moved to recreate Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654), which depicts a woman—thought to be his partner,

07/15/2024

"This term, restraint was largely out, as the Republican justices repeatedly upended or refused to follow precedents in order to further conservative ends on voting rights, presidential power, the treatment of the homeless, immigration, and, most consequentially, the authority of the administrative state."—David Cole

The Supreme Court in its just-concluded 2023–2024 term extended substantial new rights to hedge fund managers, big business, and former president Donald

07/14/2024

“It was not the Bolsheviks who invented the surrender of souls, the sacrament of confession, or the office of the Grand Inquisitor.” —Yuri Slezkine on Gary Saul Morson, the Russian realists, and the Soviets

Gary Saul Morson is the world’s leading authority on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In his latest book, conceived as a stocktaking magnum opus, wonder confronts

07/14/2024

“The best way to learn to draw is to look at the world with an endless curiosity.”—Iris de Moüy, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

I’ve admired the work of Iris de Moüy, a Parisian illustrator, for years now, and have been looking for a chance to commission her. Her art is loose and

07/14/2024

"Like seeds, which need soil and sun and water to grow, books need something from outside themselves to take on life in us. I think it is the unpretentious human warmth of another person who loves them too."–Rachel Eisdendrath

It took nearly a day to get there by train. But then there we were: Chicago!—the Europe of the Midwest, the “Rome of the railroads.” (Possibly parodying

07/14/2024

Anna Leskiewicz on Dodie Smith's novel "I Capture the Castle"

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her

07/14/2024

Sam Huber on Lucinda Williams

Again and again in the music of Lucinda Williams, the sins of the father are visited upon the son’s girlfriend. Over more than four decades, working

07/13/2024

Anna Leskiewicz on Dodie Smith's novel "I Capture the Castle."

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her

07/13/2024

“Reading this collection we are inevitably drawn to compare James Fitzjames Stephen’s time with our own, another 150 years on.... We feel wonderment for a time when the novel dominated public discourse.” —Tim Parks

In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant form of entertainment.

07/12/2024

“It has often been said that it was Hélion’s experiences during World War II that turned him from abstraction to representation. But he was painting the figure before the war, and he [only briefly] saw abstraction in the same way as Mondrian.” —Jed Perl

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

07/12/2024

“‘Those little bastards...’ That’s how the boys are seen by the first-person narrator Percival Everett calls James, who in the opening sentences of this smart and funny and brutal novel...scoffs at the job Huck and Tom are making of it all.” —Michael Gorra

In James, Percival Everett’s smart, funny, brutal retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett takes readers deeper into the capricious yet certain violence of American slavery, giving the characters a life that seems to lift off the page.

07/12/2024

“I can’t speak for every author, but every writer I know and respect has spent hours dithering: Comma or no comma? Semicolon or period?” —an interview with Francine Prose

“The contemporary novel is not only alive and well but healthier than ever: as brave, as accomplished, certainly more diverse.”

07/11/2024

Sam Huber () on Lucinda Williams.

Again and again in the music of Lucinda Williams, the sins of the father are visited upon the son’s girlfriend. Over more than four decades, working

07/11/2024

“Story. Twelve-year-old girl runs away, starts up eBay empire in attic of loopy old woman. Family wants to put the old dear in a rest home, girl to the rescue. She got out her notebook and started scribbling away.” —from a new story by Helen DeWitt

“She ordered a coffee and a box of twelve doughnuts in the interest of research. The place was really rather good for scribbling. It was awfully nice, actually, not having to worry.”

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