Out of the Rubble

Deborah Eisenberg

Small wonder that Wolfgang Koeppen’s native Germany greeted his suite of postwar novels with hostility when they were first published in the early 1950s: When things go wrong, who needs to be shamed? Who needs to be mocked? Who needs—even worse—to be warned? The past is over, that’s its whole point.

Now that the past of those years—the years immediately following World War II—has been superseded by so many other pasts, these novels are apparently received in Germany with (however temporarily) the great admiration and pleasure that was always their due. My own experience with them, though less illustrative, is vaguely parallel to Germany’s: some decades ago an acquaintance gave me a copy of Death in Rome, the third volume of the so-called postwar trilogy, and urged me to read it. I opened it up, it was opaque and inert, I closed it, and thought no more about it until recently, when it was reissued along with a new translation of Pigeons on the Grass and the first English translation of The Hothouse. Out of mild curiosity, I opened it up again, and, who knows why—possibly the atmospheric conditions of 2026—comets and stars came exploding out. I proceeded to read the three books in sequence, dazzled and enthralled, and every time I put one down (which, owing to their richness, intensity, velocity, and sheer unexpectedness, was often) I wondered what on earth had just happened to me; it seemed I’d been tuned, sharpened, elasticized—reformulated with better neurons.

Pigeons on the Grass is the earliest of the three, published in 1951, followed by The Hothouse in 1953 and Death in Rome in 1954. Koeppen wrote them “live,” as it’s put by Michael Hofmann, whom readers can thank for the remarkable translations—“live” meaning in real time and also in real place, Germany, where Koeppen was born in 1906. His long life is interesting—no doubt easier to read about than to have lived, as you can see from the excellent essays by Hofmann, Pankaj Mishra, and Joshua Cohen included in the volumes.

During the days of the Weimar Republic, Koeppen made a living at this and that, for a while as a journalist, and wrote two well-received and poorly selling novels. In 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor and Nazism established as Germany’s sole state power, Koeppen went to Holland. As he was not Jewish, or Roma, Sinti, Black, Slavic, homosexual, a communist, a labor leader, or, formally, a dissident, he was not likely to be in official danger, but his publisher was a Jew, he had Jewish friends, he was by nature an intellectual and an aesthete—a type that autocrats tend to view, understandably, with great distaste. And personal safety aside, who, I ask you, wants to live in a country given over to insane, sadistic, thieving, power- and money-mad psychopaths?

In late 1938, just as droves of distinguished writers, artists, scholars, and scientists were fleeing Germany and its occupied or soon-to-be-occupied territories, Koeppen returned. Hofmann tells us that he “lacked the fame, the contacts,...the aptitude for languages, and perhaps ultimately, the brute necessity required to make a go of things in exile.” He also, clearly, lacked the money that might have compensated for those other deficiencies. In 1939 he flew into Berlin, the seat of Nazi operations, where he warily made a living in the film industry, although, owing to either guile or good luck, few of the projects he worked on were realized. In 1944 the apartment building where he lived was destroyed in an Allied air raid, and he slipped off untraced to Munich. A few years later he married eighteen-year-old Marion Ulrich. The relationship seems to have been turbulent and ardent, and they are buried together. He wrote various things in the forty years between these extraordinary books and his death in 1996, but he published no other fiction. He never had money.

Eccentric in just about every way, this trilogy shares no characters (unless you count an image of Frederick the Great on a broken teacup that makes brief appearances in both Pigeons on the Grass and The Hothouse). Nor do the books share settings—the first takes place entirely in Munich, the second in Bonn, and the third in Rome—nor are their stories related. And they are very different in some ways that seem musical, like key, scoring, tempo.

Koeppen was an insatiable reader, and these books demonstrate his assimilation of early-twentieth-century modernist techniques—stream of consciousness, startling disjunctions, abrupt switching of narrative perspective, typographical oddities, and the like. It’s entirely possible that he methodically aimed for specific effects, but his style, which includes plenty of conventional narration too, feels more like an exuberant ad hoc improvisation than virtuoso display or literary experimentation—a flexibility in pressing circumstances, as someone marooned on a desert island might hurl a shoe, then a tortoise, to get an apple down from a tree instead of waiting for a ship to happen by with an apple-harvesting machine. The prose, at least as it comes to us in Hofmann’s worked magic, is simultaneously wild, fluid, often flat-out gorgeous, and uncannily precise. Reading, one feels at the center of a living thing rather than looking on from a safe distance—receiving thoughts and sensations just as they’re hatching into the articulable.

The fundamental unifying element of the trilogy, though, I’d say, is the simple implicit question: Does something in our nature compel us to repeatedly bring hell upon ourselves? The question is posed within the “live” historical moment in which the books were written, those few years after Germany conceded defeat in 1945, when the terrible war—which killed upward of 70 million, including the millions, mostly Jews, murdered by the Nazis—finally ground to a halt. It was a strange, unfixed interim, quickly eclipsed by the distortions and residues of time, by desperate needs and sudden opportunities, by the simple cinematic appeal of the grotesque objectives and machinery of Nazism, by the dramatic notion of “the end,” which camouflages beginnings, by the human gift for fashioning heroic images out of old junk, and so on. Actually, it was a critical interval—unsettled and unpredictable—an abrupt break in continuity, and like other broken things, it disclosed materials that are usually concealed or contained. These books are, among so much else, a reclamation of that moment of rapidly crystallizing forms in a country that concentrated so many hazardous volatile essences—an alarm, still sounding, as loud as ever, under a turf of ambient noise.

Almost from one day to the next, millions of Germans had awakened from the fever dream of imminent triumph and race-pure world domination to find themselves essentially soaked with incriminating blood, clutching the gnawed bones of their former neighbors. Millions of others, of course, had simply kept their heads down and held their breath through the nightmare their own country had induced. Still others were emerging from the camps of which they were the few starving survivors, or from the European forests, caves, and cemeteries where they had hidden throughout the years of the war. Children, parents, lovers, and friends were dead, murdered, or simply gone; where there had been homes, villages, ancient splendor, there was rubble. The matter of identity was at the forefront: What did yesterday’s passport, nation, history, ethnicity, affiliations mean, and how were they to be dealt with? The printers were busy minting new names and birthdays.

Each of these three novels is complete in itself; they can be read singly or in any order, but there’s something to be said for reading Pigeons on the Grass first, as I did, since it provides a kind of aerial view of that particular moment and of a range of individuals and relationships caught within its circumstances. Even before the cast of characters appears, we are given a quick look at their milieu:

Planes were over the city, birds of ill omen. The noise of their engines was thunder, was hail, was storm. Storm, hail, and thunder, every day, every night, landing and takeoff, death exercises, a hollow roar, a flinch, a tremor of memory in the ruins. For the moment, the bomb bays of the planes were still empty. The soothsayers smiled. No one looked up at the sky.

The next paragraph brings us streaking into terrifyingly familiar headlines:

Oil out of the arteries of earth, stone-oil...deposits of dinosaur lard, lizard carapaces...the buried inheritance guarded by dwarfs, by evil, greedy mages, the mythical devil’s hoard...lugged up to the light of day, it was put to use.... War over Oil, Conflict Escalates...Attack on the Pipeline...Here as there people were stockpiling gunpowder to blow the planet to smithereens, Atom Tests in New Mexico, Atom Plants in the Urals.... They spoke of rebuilding and made plans for demolition.

We are then abruptly redirected from the menace overhead and underground and brewing throughout the abstract world to the surface of the earth, where in the city of Munich humans are enacting for us one day of their human business. They include a shopkeeper; a porter; a celebrity and his pansexual wife; the punitive, sin-obsessed nanny of their terrified little daughter, and the child herself; two serious writers, one a very famous, exquisitely cultivated American poet who lives in England and is visiting Munich to give a much-anticipated talk, the other a German—not at all famous, blocked, frequently entangled in proliferating slapstick coils of rumination and uncertainties; the beautiful young wife of the blocked writer, whose emotional compass is governed by the loss of her enormous pre-war family inheritance; a German secretary formerly employed in the offices of the Wehrmacht and now in the offices of the Black military contingent of the American occupiers; two eleven-year-old boys, one German, one American, both imbued with two generations of their families’ experiences and today engaged in heart-stoppingly tense negotiations over a stray dog; several antique dealers; a German-born Jewish actress who cannot convince her American husband that it would actually not be fun for her to join him on his posting to Munich despite his joyful enthusiasm for the city and its people; a psychiatrist who sells his blood to keep himself afloat; a small tour group of American schoolteachers; a pharmacologically inventive narcolept; and—figuring prominently—two Black American soldiers. Extras and cameos, as in a filmed operetta, include beer drinkers, cooks, prostitutes, priests, fashion designers, children playing, Greek pool sharks, a librarian, rough trade, a jazz band, and party guests. They all have plenty to do; no one is looking up at the sky.

They appear solo or in twos or threes; groups form, disperse, reconfigure; paths cross or fail to cross in an intricate choreography. Koeppen connects one little scene to the next in gleefully artificial ways, creating the sensation of an underlying loom-like thing at work, weaving a tight fabric, a fabric full, however, of irregularities—miscommunications, misunderstandings, and misattributions of feelings. Hofmann has described Pigeons on the Grass as “a modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces and showing 30 figures.” As this elegant formulation suggests, the puzzle is not only a portrait of the people who have, together, in their interactions, thoughts, and activities, made the present day what it is—it is also a portrait of the day itself, a day that shapes the day to follow. And among the questions that worry away from deep in the book are: Were these the inevitable figures, and if so, was this particular day inevitable? Or to put it another way: How much, and exactly what, does today tell us about tomorrow?

Once something has happened it occupies a position of suspect privilege; it seems to have been inevitable—but maybe only because it happened! Does it truly deserve the respect we accord it, or did it somehow cheat its way into reality? Are the mysterious forces we call chance, fate, destiny, the will of one god or another, always busily at work determining the course of our days and our lives? Or are these merely phantoms we invent to embody our own disavowed impulses and fears? Or is it merely random aggregations and intersections that cause things to happen as they do? How much power do we have, if any—as individuals or societies—to determine the course of our lives, the course of the world? Koeppen certainly doesn’t put these eternal questions to rest—on the contrary, he sets them juggling mesmerizingly in front of us; he himself seems to be watching, mesmerized.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Unrequited Love

A New Seminar Series from Daniel Mendelsohn

Author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn follows the theme of unrequited love in works by Homer, Sappho, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, and more.

“Thou lov’st me not, / And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. / Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot, / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” So writes Lord Byron in “Love and Death”, describing a phenomenon that (alas!) most of us have experienced—and, more to the point, that has inspired some of the most brilliant and wrenching works of literature. In this five-part NYRSeminars season, we will be examining the phenomenon of unrequited love throughout its evolution as a subject in Western literature. We will begin with the classics, examining texts by Homer, Sappho, the tragedians and the Latin love elegists, and then move to the Middle Ages and early modern period, reading works by Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in which the poets address themselves to cruelly unresponsive women. From there we will segue to the novel, which takes over as the preeminent vehicle for examining hopeless love: from Goethe and Jane Austen to Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust.

Register Here

In “The Art of the Interview,” season three of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre speaks with writers, editors, psychoanalysts, and other professional interviewers to ask them about the art of conversation and the work of asking questions. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode.

Below, we’ve collected the first four episodes of the season—featuring discussions with an editor from This American Life, a novelist, a journalist, and a psychoanalyst. The rest of the season will be published over the next four weeks.

Orna Guralnik
Listening for the Unconscious

“One of the things that needs to happen for a real psychoanalytic interview to take shape is for the patient to feel themselves becoming rehumanized in the process of talking to the clinician, which is no simple task. What you try to do as a psychoanalyst when you’re interviewing is turn your ear to listen for things that are different than a regular conversation. You’re listening for the unconscious.”

Read the full interview here.

Sarah Stillman
People Want to Be Heard

“It’s complex reporting terrain when people have reasons to feel afraid of telling their stories, and a lot of the process is figuring out who’s in a safe position to talk, and who wants to talk. And these women really wanted their stories to be known.”

Read the full interview here.

Sheila Heti
Consulting the Oracle

“It’s interesting to think about the relationship between interviewing a person and talking to an oracle, because I was interested in doing interviews initially because I thought people were oracles, and I was using them that way. I had this feeling every time I did an interview, that I would learn the meaning of life from this person, and I would figure out how to make art and live. Once I no longer had that faith, I didn’t enjoy doing interviews anymore, and I stopped.”

Read the full interview here.

Chana Joffe-Walt
The Best Tape You Can Get

“The part of interviewing that feels natural to me is being interested in other people and being an observer. I have always liked watching people, wondering who they are, what they’re thinking about, what their lives are like. As an adult, I have become more enraged by things that hurt other people’s experience of the world. Vulnerable people, in particular.”

Read the full interview here.

Fridas for Everyone

Alma Guillermoprieto

Just when you thought that everything Frida had been Frida-ed—a hundred books, a million fashion moments, a jillion selfie homages, and a veritable continent of accumulated Frida tchotchkes, from mugs to oven mitts to compression socks to Christmas tree ornaments in the form of a gold-trimmed frame with an image of a dog dressed up as Frida, not to mention a movie or two—this spring High Art Frida returned. There was an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City of works from the Gelman Collection, among them a large number by Frida and Diego Rivera. There was an exhibition of the work of Frida and her followers that started at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and is currently at Tate Modern, and El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at the Metropolitan Opera, together with a small installation at the Museum of Modern Art of works related to it. To counter the socks and dog-faced Fridas, the culture seems to have felt the need to reestablish a connection with the flesh-and-blood artist, the profoundly original woman who used her own face as both a mask and a revelation of a soul stripped bare, who wore ethnic dress as a conjuration, and who spent her life painting not just her portrait but her Sinnbild, a term that the German Mexican art historian Paul Westheim used to signify “the image of the meaning.”

To begin at the beginning: Frida Kahlo Calderón’s father was German. He came to Mexico when he was nineteen to seek his fortune, married a Mexican woman, translated his name from Wilhelm to Guillermo, eventually took Mexican citizenship but spoke Spanish always with a German accent, and became an architectural photographer who also made many self-portraits in which he stared fixedly at the camera. As a girl, Frida (she spelled her name “Frieda” but dropped the e in her twenties) was a laughing, lighthearted spirit who was popular in school. Years later, though, she would mention how her schoolmates had mocked her skinny right leg and slight limp, the result of a double misfortune: spina bifida—a deformation of her spinal column—and then what was most likely polio at the age of seven. In the intensely nationalist Mexico of the 1920s, swept up in postrevolutionary fervor, it is reasonable to assume that her schoolmates also made fun of her good-natured foreign father and did not consider her quite Mexican.

Whatever the case, she grew up defiantly original, seductive in dress and manner, and fiercely nationalistic. An essay by James Oles in the catalog for the Houston/Tate show takes us through the evolution of her wardrobe: she painted herself for the first time as a beautiful sophisticate in a velvet dress, posed for her father in a Chinese-style gown, and wore a three-piece man’s suit for a family photograph when she was eighteen. And long before she married the world-famous muralist Diego Rivera and began experimenting with native dress, she found another way to declare her Mexicanness: she swore like a sailor. Even her correspondence is littered with self-conscious cabrones, chingaderas, and pendejos. A strange effect, this tiny, well-brought-up girl puffing on a cigarette and reaching for a seaman’s vocabulary. Oh, and she decided she was partially Jewish, although the evidence indicates that her paternal ancestors were of stolid Lutheran stock. While she was at it, she determined that it would be better if she were born not in 1907—her real birth year—but in 1910, the year of the start of the great Mexican Revolution. Self-made Frieda! She would continue to invent herself, or her self, with each portrait to the end.

Largely self-taught, in her late teens she was already making small self-portraits that she considered inconsequential, impelled to do so after a streetcar collided with a bus in which she and a boyfriend were riding and drove a handrail through her pelvis and out her vagina. She spent three months lying face-up and in traction, and no doubt the training in staying still helped her get through a lifelong cycle of surgical torment, months of immobility, and painful recovery.

According to legend, Diego was standing on scaffolding at work on his great muralistic portrait of Mexico at the Ministry of Education when someone commanded him to descend. A young person at the foot of the ladder thrust a few of her canvases at him. “Listen,” she said. “I need you to tell me if these are any good or not.” Years before, at age fourteen, she had already decided that she would marry the famous old fat man she had spied painting a mural on the wall of her high school. He was married at the time to the stupendously beautiful Guadalupe Marín, but they had separated by the time Frida accosted him. Disarmed and seduced by the audacious Frida, he began his elaborate formal courtship soon after she introduced herself—complete with weekend visits to her aged parents. They married in 1929, when she was twenty-two and he was forty-two, and her painting of the couple on their wedding day is a study in charm, tiny Frida and enormous Diego side by side, solemn and holding hands. The style was consciously naive, but she was always a sophisticated artist, with a library of visual references in her head: the Houston catalog points out the painting’s kinship with Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, of which Frida kept a reproduction. For the first time in a painting she is wearing not elegant velvets and silks but a Mexican rebozo.

What to make of her ethnic clothing, so essential to her worldwide appeal today? It was only after Frida and Diego returned from a long sojourn in the United States, more convinced than ever of their Communist faith and militant anti-imperialism, that she began to wear native dress. And among the countless beautiful garments with which the indigenous women of Mexico once adorned themselves she gave pride of place to those of the women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the tehuanas, and especially their glorious ceremonial costume: a long skirt with a petticoat-like flounce at the bottom, a waist-length huipil densely embroidered with flowers, and, surrounding the face, the starched, pleated resplandor, white as the moon. In many if not most of her photographs, and also in the self-portraits, Frida is wearing the tehuanas’ simple everyday outfit: a long skirt with a bottom flounce and a short, square blouse with machine-sewn geometrical embroidery. She added a plain dark gray central Mexico rebozo with a simple fringe, which became so essential to her she even wore it in her hospital bed. Frida laid claim to roots in Oaxaca through her mother, who was born in the state, but in photographs recently found in the Casa Azul, Señora Matilde Calderón wears the staid, high-necked, long-sleeved dress of nineteenth-century urban women.

Naturally Diego, with his deep love of the Indian and pre-Hispanic worlds, encouraged the outfits, and of course they are a comfortable and graceful style of dress, and beautiful beyond compare. It was not particularly original of Frida to wear indigenous garb: society ladies and bohemian women alike loved to pose for studio photographs in tehuana costume, and even before the revolution the Frenchified upper classes sent their children off to the school play dressed like inditos, as Mexican parents do still. Also, the long skirts covered her gimpy leg. The question is, though, why did Frida choose to portray herself repeatedly in this costume? No doubt she was concerned with the desperate situation of the indigenous throughout Mexico, but they are not present in her work as they are constantly in Diego’s murals, not even in the forty or so of her paintings that are not self-portraits. Rather, Frida might be saying as she stares directly at the viewer, I am Frida Kahlo and I am wearing this costume because that is what I wear. But perhaps she enrobed herself in Mexicanness to counter an old fear of not being Mexican enough.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Now Available:

Unrequited Love

A New Seminar Series from Daniel Mendelsohn

Author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn follows the theme of unrequited love in works by Homer, Sappho, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, and more.

“Thou lov’st me not, / And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. / Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot, / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” So Lord Byron in Love and Death, describing a phenomenon that (alas!) most of us have experienced—and, more to the point, that has inspired some of the most brilliant and wrenching works of literature. In this five-part NYRSeminars season, we will be examining the phenomenon of unrequited love throughout its evolution as a subject in Western literature. We will begin with the classics, examining texts by Homer, Sappho, the tragedians and the Latin love elegists, and then move to the Middle Ages and early modern period, reading works by Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in which the poets address themselves to cruelly unresponsive women. From there we will segue to the novel, which takes over as the preeminent vehicle for examining hopeless love: from Goethe and Jane Austen to Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust.

Register Here

In the Review’s Summer Issue, Geoffrey O’Brien writes about Virginia Tighe, a housewife in 1950s Colorado; Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist; and Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century Irishwoman who, apparently, had been reincarnated as Tighe and could be coaxed out while her twentieth-century body was under Bernstein’s mesmeric ministrations. For a few months in 1956—a time, O’Brien writes, “grounded in practicalities, reassured by material things that functioned: fuse boxes, automobile engines, lawn mowers, power drills, reel-to-reel tape recorders”—the United States was captivated by the story of “a blast from the country of the dead” that had blown into “a world brightly lit and logically organized”:

The phenomenon of Bridey Murphy—a gust of wind from another world—for a moment nudged aside communism, juvenile delinquency, and the ascendancy of Elvis Presley. Hypnotists were suddenly much in demand, and a good many readers lined up to uncover their own past lives.

Below, alongside O’Brien’s essay, are five articles from our archive about spiritualists, theosophists, past lives, and Shirley MacLaine.

A Gust from Another World

Geoffrey O’Brien

It was at the lowest of decibels that the voice of Bridey Murphy—muffled, groggily articulated—leaked into America. Bridey first made herself heard on the night of November 29, 1952, in a living room in Pueblo, Colorado, elicited from Virginia “Ginni” Tighe through the ministrations of Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist. Ginni was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of a local Oldsmobile dealer; Morey, when not engaged with his hobby, ran a profitable family business specializing in heavy equipment for farms and ranches.

He had been enthralled with hypnosis for a decade. At first applying it to the treatment of headaches, insomnia, and stuttering, he was drawn gradually into uncharted realms: precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and finally reincarnation, something he had once regarded as “preposterous” but was now eager to investigate and, if possible, document. He had tried his hand at hypnotic age regression and was confident that he had taken subjects back to early childhood. Now he wondered whether the process could be pushed further, perhaps into a previous existence. Ginni, a casual acquaintance, seemed an ideal candidate for the experiment. In a few earlier sessions he had been struck by “how quickly and deeply she had become entranced.... Furthermore, she had remembered absolutely nothing afterward.... She was, in short, a somnambulistic subject.”^* Ginni had agreed to hypnosis as a treatment for allergies and had no interest in revisiting past lives.

With his tape recorder running, Morey led her “back through time and space, just like turning back in the pages of a book,” all the way to age one, before venturing “over the hump,” as he later described it (using the World War II term for the trans-Himalayan route from India to China), instructing her that “there are other scenes from faraway lands and distant places in your memory...and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it.” Within moments she identified herself as what sounded at first like “Friday Murphy,” a small child living in Cork in Ireland in “eighteen something...1806.” Her hair was red; her father was a barrister; her younger brother had died of “some kind of black something”; she had muffins and jam for breakfast; her husband’s favorite dish was boiled beef with onions. So it went on, for this and five further sessions, as Morey teased out details of Bridey’s fairly uneventful life one fragment at a time: her childhood amusements, her marriage, her relocation from Cork to Belfast, her death in 1864 after a fall down the stairs (“Seems I broke some bones in my hip too”), her funeral (“I watched them ditch my body”), her lingering in the house alongside her husband, who couldn’t see or hear her, her subsequent stay in a place where time “doesn’t mean anything...no night or no day.”

Shared at first among acquaintances for whom Morey was eager to play the tapes, news of the sessions spread to a wider audience through a series of articles in The Denver Post. When his own account, The Search for Bridey Murphy, was published with great fanfare in January 1956, it quickly became the best-selling book in America. The paperback edition, rushed into print soon after, splashed across its cover the question “DOES THIS BOOK PROVE LIFE AFTER DEATH?”

The details about Bridey that Morey had elicited were not very exciting—in fact they were unrelievedly drab, pieces of an obscure life without great drama and with only minor pleasures, in a country more monochrome and sullen than the Ireland of movies. This made the book all the more plausible. Its most devoted readers were women, whose interest in prenatal regression, Morey noted, “is definitely keener than that of men.” Some may have found comfort in the idea that a life so enclosed and frustrated was not the end but merely a prelude to something better: something perhaps like Ginni’s as a reasonably affluent housewife in the Sun Belt whose weekly round of bridge games and cocktail parties may have seemed as much a fantasy as her phantasmal former existence.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: Out on a Limb

• Max Nelson on mesmerism in America (2019)

• Nell Stevens on getting the dead’s permission to write about them (2018)

• Frederick C. Crews on the magic-minded Madame Blavatasky (1996)

• Jonathan Miller on Franz Anton Mesmer’s magnetic salons (1995)

• Martin Gardner on Shirley MacLaine and that “cosmic glue called love” (1987)

Now Available:

Unrequited Love

A New Seminar Series from Daniel Mendelsohn

Author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn follows the theme of unrequited love in works by Homer, Sappho, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, and more.

“Thou lov'st me not, / And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. / Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot, / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still." So Lord Byron in Love and Death, describing a phenomenon that (alas!) most of us have experienced—and, more to the point, that has inspired some of the most brilliant and wrenching works of literature. In this five-part NYRSeminars season, we will be examining the phenomenon of unrequited love throughout its evolution as a subject in Western literature. We will begin with the classics, examining texts by Homer, Sappho, the tragedians and the Latin love elegists, and then move to the Middle Ages and early modern period, reading works by Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in which the poets address themselves to cruelly unresponsive women. From there we will segue to the novel, which takes over as the preeminent vehicle for examining hopeless love: from Goethe and Jane Austen to Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust.

Register Here

In the Review’s August 20 issue, David Cole surveys the Supreme Court’s 2025–2026 term. How’s the judicial branch dealing with the country’s slide into autocracy?

The term just concluded offered good news and bad news. The good news is that the Court will sometimes check Trump when he acts unlawfully. In this sense, it functioned as a court, not as a politically partisan institution. That is essential to the preservation of the rule of law, and should not be discounted.

But the bad news is that the Court is also more willing than ever to thrust aside prior decisions that get in the way of its desired outcomes. Limits on presidential power are essential to a constitutional democracy, but so, too, are limits on the Court’s power.

While in a few major cases—including rulings that upheld birthright citizenship and struck down the president’s attempts to unilaterally impose tariffs—some of the Court’s conservatives (although never Clarence Thomas) voted with their three liberal colleagues to, as Cole writes, “enforce limits against Trump,” the Roberts Court nonetheless “recognizes few limits on its own power. In particular, it too often runs roughshod over prior decisions to achieve conservative results simply because it disagrees with those prior decisions.”

Below, alongside Cole’s essay, are six articles from our archive about the Roberts Court.

Close Calls

David Cole

Can we rely on the courts, and most importantly the Supreme Court, to resist major assaults on the rule of law by the Trump administration? That question was front and center during the Court’s recently concluded 2025–2026 term. With its six Republican appointees—three nominated by Trump—some feared that, much like the Republican-controlled Congress, the Court would reflexively back the president. Initial indications from the Court’s “emergency docket,” where it considers requests to temporarily stay lower court orders, seemed to bear out those worries. The Court has granted seventeen such requests, often without giving any reasons and usually by a 6–3 margin.

By the end of the term, however, the story was more nuanced. The Court blocked four of Trump’s major initiatives: ending birthright citizenship, imposing worldwide tariffs, firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and dispatching National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland, and other cities. In other significant cases as well, the Court rejected positions advanced by Trump. In a decision that he called “a tremendous loss,” it held that federal law permits the counting of mail-in ballots posted by election day but received thereafter. And it refuted the Trump administration’s assertion of constitutionally unchecked power to demand that Google turn over the cell phone location histories of unlimited numbers of Americans. The justices may not be, as Trump called them after he lost the tariffs case, “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” but this is not Donald Trump’s Court.

Each of Trump’s appointees voted against him on important issues. In the tariffs case, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, both Trump appointees, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three Democratic appointees—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—to rule against the president. In the birthright citizenship case, Barrett, Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump appointee, joined the three liberal justices to reject Trump’s attempt to redefine who is an American. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch joined the liberals to find that the federal government’s demand for cell phone location data is a search limited by the Fourth Amendment. Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices to block Trump’s firing of Cook. And in the National Guard case, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts joined the liberals. These are not the decisions of a Court doing the president’s bidding or voting exclusively along party lines. By contrast, had these issues been put to a vote in Congress, would a single Republican have broken ranks?

The rulings cannot be dismissed as mere token losses for Trump. Each one established important guardrails on the executive branch. The tariffs decision rejected the president’s assertion of emergency powers, a step courts rarely take. Justice Samuel Alito called the birthright citizenship case “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court.” The decision blocking the firing of Cook protected the independence of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s most powerful financial institution. And the National Guard decision kept troops off our streets, halting Trump’s invocation of a classic authoritarian move.

Nor can the decisions be discounted on the ground that no reasonable judge could rule in Trump’s favor. They all raised serious and unresolved questions. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment, which extends citizenship to all persons born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” was intended to adopt the then-existing common law rule of birthright citizenship. That rule, borrowed from English common law, provided that virtually all persons born in the country were “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and therefore citizens, with only four narrow exceptions: children of ambassadors, people born in territory occupied by a foreign power, individuals born on foreign ships, and Native Americans born on tribal lands. (Congress subsequently extended citizenship to Native Americans by statute.)

In 1898 the Court affirmed this common law understanding in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. But that case involved the child of Chinese nationals who were permanently and legally domiciled in the United States, so it did not technically involve the classes of persons to whom Trump sought to deny citizenship: children of foreign nationals here illegally and children of transient visitors.

While six justices agreed that Trump’s executive order was illegal, only five (Roberts, Barrett, and the three liberals) deemed it unconstitutional. Kavanaugh concurred only because Congress had incorporated the common law understanding into statute in 1940 and 1952, and he concluded that Trump’s order violated that statute. But on the constitutional question, Barbara turned out to be a close case; four justices concluded that the Constitution permitted Trump’s interpretation. Alito and Kavanaugh reasoned that neither the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Court in Wong Kim Ark had considered the issue of illegally or temporarily present foreign nationals. When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, there were no restrictions on immigration, so there were no “illegal aliens,” and the logistics of travel meant that transient visitors were rare. Thomas and Gorsuch viewed the Fourteenth Amendment as addressed principally to the citizenship of the newly freed slaves, who were both born and “domiciled” here; they therefore found that it did not encompass temporary or illegal visitors. The majority had the stronger argument from precedent, principle, and what you might call legal culture: it has long been the settled understanding that virtually everyone born here is a citizen, and that rule is both simple to administer and puts everyone on an equal footing from birth. But the dissents raise serious objections that cannot be dismissed out of hand, as the nearly two hundred pages of opinions attest.

The tariffs case also presented a close question. The majority ruled that the president’s power to “regulate” imports under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not include the power to impose tariffs, as the Constitution generally assigns the power to tax to Congress, a tariff is a type of tax, and the IEEPA does not explicitly delegate the authority to tariff to the president. But Kavanaugh wrote a thoughtful dissent for three justices that echoed an earlier decision by Judge Richard Taranto, a widely respected moderate member of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court had previously interpreted the IEEPA broadly, and President Richard Nixon had imposed tariffs under a predecessor statute. Reasonable people could differ on the legal question, yet the Court sided against the president.

In Trump v. Cook, the majority ruled that the president does not have unilateral authority to remove governors from the Federal Reserve Board, even though in another case the same day, it recognized such an authority over virtually all other federal agencies. The Court identified no principled rationale for the distinction. It simply noted that the Federal Reserve is a successor of sorts to the First and Second Banks of the United States, which were independent of the executive. But those predecessors exercised substantially less authority than the Fed does today, so the agency’s historical provenance does not offer a rational justification for treating it differently from other agencies today. The Court also rejected Trump’s argument that his determination that Cook was properly dismissed “for cause” was not judicially reviewable and that Cook had been provided adequate notice and opportunity to respond. But there was very little precedent on these questions, and the vote was 5–4, as close as it gets, so again the case cannot be considered an inevitable defeat for the president.

In Chatrie v. United States, the Court declared that the federal government’s use of a “geofence warrant” to obtain personal cell phone location data from Google on anyone in the vicinity of a bank when it was robbed amounted to a search governed by the Fourth Amendment. The Trump administration argued that the Fourth Amendment did not apply at all, meaning that the government could demand location history without any warrant or probable cause. It urged the Court to extend analog-era precedents holding that bank records and pen registers, which record the phone numbers you call, are not protected by the Fourth Amendment because when you open a bank account or use a phone, you voluntarily give that information to the bank or phone company, forfeiting any privacy. Applying that rule to digital information, however, would have disastrous implications, as nowadays we share virtually everything we do with a third party—our emails, photos, texts, documents, Google searches, online reading habits, and physical location. The Court ruled that location data is sufficiently personal and revealing, and not truly voluntarily shared, to warrant Fourth Amendment protection. But this was a novel question, and three justices dissented.

In yet another significant loss for the administration, the Court upheld the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked by election day but received thereafter. The Trump administration argued that only votes received by election day could be counted, invoking (as is the president’s wont) the largely chimerical prospect of voter fraud. Many observers of the oral argument expected the Court to rule with the president, and the case raised difficult questions about what constitutes an “election.” The Court ultimately sided against the president. In short, these were all close cases, and if the Court were merely seeking to do Trump’s bidding, it could have ruled his way in all of them.

Many skeptics of the Court’s independence cite the administration’s lopsided winning percentage on the emergency docket. The Court has granted temporary stays of lower court orders in major disputes involving his efforts to halt USAID funding, fire agency heads, decimate agency staffs, and subject people in Los Angeles who look Latino or speak Spanish to forcible stops by ICE agents. But here, too, the story is complicated. The Court has denied the administration’s requests for stays, not only in the National Guard and Lisa Cook cases but also with respect to Trump’s effort to deport Venezuelans without hearings under the Alien Enemies Act and his foot-dragging in bringing back Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, an erroneously deported Salvadoran.

In addition, as the Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith has pointed out, Trump’s relatively high win ratio on the emergency docket is partly attributable to the fact that Solicitor General John Sauer has been strategic about which lower court rulings he asks the Supreme Court to stay.² Lower federal courts have issued at least 150 injunctions against the Trump administration, including ordering the Kennedy Center to remove his name from the building’s official title, blocking efforts to limit mail-in ballots and subpoena voter records, overturning the defunding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, barring the administration from denying funds to Harvard, and nullifying its efforts to punish law firms Trump doesn’t like. On one legal issue alone, whether the administration can detain immigrants without a bond hearing while their removal cases are pending, more than four hundred judges have said no and ordered bond hearings or release for more than 10,000 foreign nationals. The solicitor general has not sought emergency Supreme Court review in any of these cases. Had he done so, the administration’s win–loss ratio would look very different.

But while the Court has demonstrated its willingness to enforce limits against Trump, it recognizes few limits on its own power.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: The Roberts Court

• Duncan Hosie on the Court’s sanctioning of ICE raids (2025)

• David Cole on how the Court bends the rules to get their desired results (2025)

• Noah Feldman on why the fate of the country largely depends on the courts (2025)

• Laurence H. Tribe on the Court’s inconsistencies in its Dobbs decision (2022)

• Cass R. Sunstein on the Court vs. the administrative state (2022)

• Annette Gordon-Reed on the leaked draft of Alito’s Dobbs opinion (2022)

Life on the List

Caitlin L. Chandler

Late one night in May 2016, Naif al-Qaysi was riding shotgun in an old Landcruiser as it barreled down an empty highway through the desert connecting Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For the past six months Naif, then thirty-three, had been the governor of Al-Bayda, a large mountainous region in central Yemen, which he was trying to keep from falling under the control of the Houthis’ armed insurgency in the early years of the country’s brutal civil war. Now he was heading home from business in Riyadh. Naif’s colleague and cousin were chatting in the backseat when his phone buzzed with the name of an old friend. “Have you seen the news?” the friend asked. “No man I’m in the desert,” Naif replied. “The US has declared you a terrorist,” the friend told him. “You’re on the list.”

Naif instructed the driver to pull over to the side of the road, where the men pitched camp against a dune and brewed tea. Quickly they learned that the US Treasury, under President Barack Obama, had declared Naif a financier and senior official of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He was now, in the eyes of the US government, a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” subject to a US asset freeze and travel ban.

The charge was so outlandish that it almost reassured them: clearly the Americans had made a mistake. Naif was a prominent politician who condemned violent extremism, a prodemocracy reformer who had grown-up in Al-Bayda. A few months earlier, AQAP had tried to assassinate him, peppering a car that they thought contained him with bullets. “When I spill your blood I will be justified in front of God,” one of their operatives texted him. “You discourage the youth from jihad.” Now, concluding that the whole thing was a mix-up, the men sang some poetry: “You piece of news! Oh you struck my heart—a lightning strike.” Then they drove home.

The next morning, from his house in Marib, Naif dialed the then president of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, offering to resign if the listing, however unfounded, caused too many problems. Hadi expressed his irritation at the US, who, despite a decade of counterterrorism operations in Yemen, had not consulted him. “Forget about this for now,” Hadi said, assuring Naif that he had his full support. Hadi had bigger problems to deal with: a year and a half earlier the Houthis had captured Sanaa, the country’s capital. Hadi was running what remained of the government from Saudi Arabia, as the conflict reverberated across the Gulf.

Naif returned to mobilizing Al-Bayda against the Houthi advance—the militia controlled some 30 percent of the province, and battles occurred weekly. Shortly after the Treasury announcement community leaders from Al-Bayda, Marib, and Al-Jawf provinces held a press conference rejecting the accusations against Naif and calling on the US to “stand by freedom, democracy, and the values ​​of justice and progress.” Naif was blocked from receiving funds from a regional and national bank, but another Yemeni bank continued to process his salary.

At first not much about his daily life changed, though his stomach dropped whenever he heard the low hum of a plane. For the past seven years the Obama administration had been bombing Yemen, claiming to target al-Qaeda members, although some of those killed turned out to be civilians, even children. That year American drone strikes in the country killed some 123 people. Did the US target men they labeled “global terrorists”? No one knew how the list worked.

Then, in February 2017, the United Nations Security Council placed Naif’s name on the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Da’esh) Sanctions List, established by Resolution 1267 (colloquially known as the 1267 List). Naif, they declared, was a leader of AQAP, facilitating the group’s expansion in Al-Bayda. The UN posted his passport number and other identifying information online: he was now on a global no-fly list and all his bank accounts were frozen. No one from the organization had contacted Naif to ask for an interview, assess his political leanings, or inform him he was under an international investigation. This list applies in all of the UN’s 193 member countries.

President Hadi ordered the Ministry of Interior to investigate. Ahmed bin Ahmed al-Maisari, who then led the ministry, had suffered his own losses from al-Qaeda: a suicide bomber killed his father, and his brother died in an ambush. Al-Maisari told me they found no evidence to support the allegations against Naif. “It’s impossible that this guy is a terrorist,” he said matter-of-factly when we met in 2022 at a Tim Horton’s in a mall in Muscat, the capital of Oman. The Yemeni National Committee for Investigation of Alleged Human Rights Violations, led by the prominent women’s advocate Ishraq Fadhel al-Maqtari, conducted a separate review, which also cleared Naif.

None of those findings seemed to matter. Naif was named a terrorist by the European Union, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom, Qatar, and the Terrorist Financing Center in Saudi Arabia, among others. Neighbors began avoiding him and his children faced taunts at school. He could no longer receive his Yemeni salary. When we talked in October 2022, in his living room in Salalah, Oman—where he now resides in exile—Naif said that the long-term implications took some time to dawn on him: “I didn’t know how much this would affect my life.”

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Homer vs. Hollywood:

A Live Q&A on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” with Daniel Mendelsohn

You’ve seen the movie, you’ve read the fiery tweets and Instagram posts—now, you can discuss Christopher Nolan’s controversial blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey with our expert Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and the most recent translator of Homer’s epic. In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Mr. Mendelsohn will briefly outline his own take on the film, which he reviewed at length for the Review, and then open the floor to questions from and discussion with audience members. Among the topics to be addressed are the debate over the film’s sets, ships, and costumes; the film’s handling of its female characters; and the question of whether the director’s vision of Odysseus represents a betrayal of the epic’s values.

Register

In the Review’s June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne writes about a recent oral history of the New York School poets and poses himself a challenge: “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?” His essay suggests that the poetry in the scene, by writers ranging from Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, emerged in part from their social and family lives. The vivacity of their work drew from the eclecticism of their world, or, as Dunthorne quotes Notley, “We’re inside each other’s lives.” “Despite the disputes and grievances that run through these pages,” he continues, “there is a sense that what survives of these poets, apart from their poetry, is the generative and spiky sociability that brought them together in the first place.”

Dunthorne is an eclectic writer in his own right. He is the author of three novels, including his debut, Submarine (2008), which was adapted into a film by Richard Ayoade; a collection of poetry, O Positive (2019); and a family memoir, Children of Radium (2025), which was reviewed in our pages by Francine Prose. His criticism, essays, poems, and stories have appeared in, among many other places, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books.

I wrote to Dunthorne this month to ask him about the sociability of art, writing while broke, and the first New York School poet: William Wordsworth.

Aleander Santos: What was your first encounter with the New York School poets? What did you think of them, then and now? Do you think a scene like the School could exist today?

Joe Dunthorne: I was lucky enough to be taught by Daniel Kane at the University of East Anglia when I was an undergraduate. At that time, he’d just published All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,and he introduced us not just to the poetry but to the whole social world of it. They were instantly alluring, this witty, catty, playful coterie who seemed to toss out brilliant poems while talking on the phone or riding the Staten Island Ferry. They made it look not just easy but fun. I loved the irreverence and the silliness of their work, and it opened up possibilities in my own writing. In particular, I remember reading Frank O’Hara’s anti-poetic manifesto, Personism, and thinking: these are my people. I still feel the same today. For me, the New York School is a bottomless source of permission. It’s an open invitation. What I appreciate even more as I get older is the importance of their sociability, how they rubbed up against each other, sparked off each other, argued, had affairs, borrowed money, raised children, but ultimately were all deeply committed to one another. That feels profound. And all the while the poems were just falling off them.

As for the question of whether that kind of scene could exist today, I have to hope that it could! Just not in New York or London. I’d like to think that somewhere a city has the right blend of affordability, sociability, and opportunity to create the conditions for what Lewis Warsh called the “24-hour-a-day salon.”

Many of the writers of the first generation were well off, with Harvard educations and prestigious careers. But people in the second generation often came from harder backgrounds. How do you think these different situations influenced their poetry? Is it possible to make sincere art while also thinking about making money?

One answer to that question is to quote “Motto of the Whores and Poets Guild,” the very short poem that the second-generation poets Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan wrote together: “You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid./But you’ll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you.” One reading of that poem is, yes, great poetry will emerge, regardless of how much money is available, but having money buys the poets the time to do their best work. I think that’s true. But I also think that money and the lack of it can be a productive subject in its own right. Ted Berrigan has a wonderful riff in Train Ride:

                      I like Credit Cards
                                       Alas, I can’t pay the bills,
         but I always spend with the Credit Card
                        in a terrific way!!

                                           *

            I take people to terrific
                                           Restaurants!

                                           *

                              I go to England!

                                           *

                              I buy somebody their
                  return ticket, because they’re
                                           broke.

                                          *

                        I buy a couple of terrific
            shirts,
                              & a pair of pants

                                          *

                        I like to give people
                                    money

                                          *

I hate to be given money. It’s embarrassing!

                                         I do like
                             to get money in the mail.

                   & I like to get paid lots of money
for doing something like reading, talking, or
                                                                 publishing

                                         *

            How come I can’t get paid
            just for writing?

                                         *

I do like to get presents
                                                spontaneously given,
                        or just for me.

                                        *

            But it’s socially awkward that
            some people for almost no reason
            have money, & some don’t.

On the question about the right conditions in which to make “sincere art,” part of what I love about the New York School is that they would never worry about that! It reminds me of a line from Personism where O’Hara talks about the moment his lofty ideas get so lofty that he can’t think about them anymore, “and that’s when refreshment arrives.” For me, the New York School is all about instinct and receptiveness. It encourages a freedom to bring all of life into the poetry, whether you’re swanning around Manhattan with your fancy art friends or you’ve never been to New York. It can all go in.

You write both poetry and fiction. For these genres, what’s your writing process like? How do you start?

Writing poetry is pretty constant for me. It sometimes feels like a semiconscious biological process. Like burping. I’ve never written a diary, but I at least have my poems, which act as a record of my life. I love that I can write them anywhere. On a bus or train or while waiting for a doctor’s appointment or on my phone at night, lit up beneath the duvet. I write my absolute worst work when I sit down and think: now it’s time to write a poem about this important life event! Conversely, my best work usually emerges from a complete lack of expectation. All of which feels quite New York School.

Fiction, however, is another thing entirely. I cannot stumble my way into writing a novel. It has to be somewhat regimented and bureaucratic. I often make a graph to track my daily progress. It’s not romantic. I do still try and bring freedom and playfulness into my process but, in the end, I know that I will have to just put in the hours, the years, of redrafting and restructuring. One of the hardest things is that, for me, novels do not get easier with practice. The more I know about writing one, the harder it is to proceed.

This New York School essay was fairly research heavy. How does writing nonfiction that requires research differ from writing fiction or poetry? Do you feel like you edit or revise differently in each mode?

To me, nonfiction feels more curatorial. It’s about collecting and sifting through information and then putting the right pieces in the right order. With this piece in particular I was inspired by a recent nonfiction book by Rachel Cockerell called Melting Point. It’s a history of a Jewish Zionist project in Texas that’s told entirely through quotations from primary sources. Cockerell absents herself from the narrative—although of course she is there as a curator, an arranger. With this New York School poets essay, I didn’t go quite as far as she does, but I wanted to include as much quotation as I could, to try and make the piece feel a bit like a house party at which you overhear all these different and often contradictory opinions. It helps that the interviews in the book that occasioned the review, Conversations with New York School Poets, are so fun. New York School poets don’t know how to be boring!

What are some works by the New York School poets that you think are most worth reading? Teaching?

There are so many! Here are a few favorites, a mix of New York School founders and contemporary poets who are New York School–inflected.

Shorter ones:

• “[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up,” by Bernadette Mayer

• “The Problem of Anxiety,” by John Ashbery

• “For the Record I Really Wish I Talked Less but I Literally Cannot Help It,” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

Longer ones:

• “The Circus,” by Kenneth Koch

• Train Ride, by Ted Berrigan

• “The Ex-Girlfriends Are Back from the Wilderness,” by Hera Lindsay Bird

Finally, here’s a New York School poem written in London in 1808. I see this as Wordsworth preemptively channeling Frank O’Hara. My hot take: Wordsworth was wasted on the countryside:

• “St. Paul’s,” by William Wordsworth

What are you reading now?

In poetry, I just read and loved Dean Browne’s poetry collection After Party, which finds a really happy balance between New York School chattiness and a more structured Irish tradition. Try this one.

In fiction, I just finished Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton), which felt like an electric shock of a book. It’s very alive and sexy and strange. I recommend.

After that, I wanted to read something a bit different, so I went with Neuromancer by William Gibson, which is just a joy. The dystopian cyberpunk future, as imagined in 1984, is as awe-inspiring as ever. (In many ways, it is a much preferable dystopia to the one we are currently living in.) Gibson is also just a brilliant stylist.

Gaza’s Deadly Soil

Helen Epstein

Long before October 2023, Gaza’s people suffered international sanctions, a humiliating occupation, and periodic Israeli bombardments. Few could leave the enclave, even for medical care; the destruction of crucial infrastructure meant that clean water and electricity were intermittent; and thousands of men, women, and children were killed in periodic wars. Even peaceful protests were met with lethal gunfire. But Palestinians still managed to carve out livelihoods in Gaza, and sustain a rich community life. There were drama, music, and dance performances and beaches crowded with picnicking families. Fishermen, when not fired on or arrested by the Israeli navy, landed sardines, tuna, and other Mediterranean delicacies, and farmers continued an eight-thousand-year tradition of tending olive trees and raising sheep, goats, and chickens.

The war turned this world into some sixty million tons of rubble. Last summer, writes the architect and human rights investigator Eyal Weizman, the Strip was blanketed with “enormous dust clouds containing particles of the different materials that formed the building[s] and [their] environment—concrete, plaster, paint, glass, metal, sand, soil—some of which are synthetic and toxic.” The dust “covered everybody’s skin, eyes, mouths, nostrils, it was present in food and water, and also covered the entire ground like a new layer of topsoil.”¹

In the decades to come, an epidemic of cancer, lung disease, and brain damage caused by this fallout could come to rival in lethality the war’s bombs and bullets. Over the past year Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben-Gurion University, has been mapping major sources of contamination in Gaza by comparing satellite images from before and after the start of the war and combining that information with snapshots, drone footage, and reports from sources on the ground. With this information he is managing to reconstruct which buildings containing which toxins were blown up or burned when and near whom. Other groups, including Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, have also mapped the destruction in Gaza, but Garb’s analysis is starting to provide the most detailed modeling yet of its likely toxicological consequences.

The first paper drawn from this research will document asbestos contamination in two of what are likely to be many hotspots. Widely used as roofing in Gaza’s urban refugee camps and above the stairwells of apartment buildings, concrete containing asbestos is safe when intact, but when shattered it releases tiny fibers that are easily inhaled. Over decades they tear the lungs apart as the cells of the immune system futilely try to extract them, a process that frequently leads to emphysema and mesothelioma, an especially deadly form of lung cancer.

One place where asbestos was ubiquitous is the former site of the large, densely populated Jabalia refugee settlement, once home to 70,000 people before it was flattened completely in what even a former Israeli defense minister referred to as an act of ethnic cleansing. The demolished Jabalia site was occupied by displaced people for about a year, then largely evacuated in 2025. Now it is divided between depopulated Israeli-controlled territory and an area inhabited once again by displaced Palestinians.

The other hotspot Garb uses as a case study is the former site of Al Qarya as-Suwaydiya, or the Swedish Village, named for the international troops who helped rebuild the small, coastal Palestinian settlement there in the 1960s. Garb observes that the Swedish Village has housed dozens—perhaps cumulatively hundreds—of soldiers since the Israeli military began using the ruins and the few remaining buildings as an outpost in 2024. Each square yard of the village, he estimates, originally contained close to a pound of asbestos roofing, if spread evenly across it. But now that material has been shattered and pushed into the outpost’s protective rubble berms. The regular traffic of heavy military vehicles and repeated reworking of the land with bulldozers would have raised dust clouds full of suspended asbestos particles, no doubt inhaled by the drivers and soldiers downwind.

In other areas Garb has identified the blown-up remains of warehouses that once contained thousands of tons of dead lead-acid batteries, which Israeli restrictions long prevented Palestinians from exporting for safe disposal or recycling. Elsewhere he has detected black streaks on the ground, some more than half a mile long, indicating likely carcinogenic hydrocarbon contamination from industrial sites. The fallout could be similar to that produced by the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which caused elevated rates of nearly thirty diseases, including more than a dozen types of cancer, and killed more people than the attack itself.

To confirm Garb’s estimates, it would be necessary to test soil samples from the areas he has identified as particularly likely to be contaminated. But the Israeli government seems to be obstructing efforts to carry out such tests, let alone assist the current and future victims of this environmental catastrophe. Aid workers and others entering Gaza attend an official briefing where they are informed that it is forbidden to leave the enclave with even small amounts of soil or sand. Once in the Strip, any scientists surreptitiously collecting research material risk being spotted by overhead surveillance drones. At departure checkpoints every piece of luggage is emptied onto a conveyor belt, and border guards carefully inspect each item. Several people told me they knew researchers whose soil samples had been confiscated. Palestinian researchers in Gaza have no capacity to conduct such experiments on their own, since the enclave lost all twelve of its universities and scores of scientists in the bombing. Without the Israeli government’s cooperation, only remote assessment and modeling like Garb’s can even begin to determine the scale and location of toxic contamination in which Gaza’s population now lives.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Homer vs. Hollywood:

A Live Q&A on Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” with Daniel Mendelsohn

You’ve seen the movie, you’ve read the fiery tweets and Instagram posts—now, you can discuss Christopher Nolan’s controversial blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey with our expert Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and the most recent translator of Homer’s epic. In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Mr. Mendelsohn will briefly outline his own take on the film, which he reviewed at length for the Review, and then open the floor to questions from and discussion with audience members. Among the topics to be addressed are the debate over the film’s sets, ships, and costumes; the film’s handling of its female characters; and the question of whether the director’s vision of Odysseus represents a betrayal of the epic’s values.

Register

This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay, “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzo has performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, both at the Met Opera, and he won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022 for the cast recording of Akhnaten. He is currently the director and president of Opera Philadelphia.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.

Last week’s episode was an interview with Mendelsohn on Homer’s Odyssey, both his own translation and Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. You can read “A Little Iliad” and other essays by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.

Back in May, the Democratic National Committee belatedly and reluctantly released its autopsy of the 2024 election. The report itself was, Daniel Schlozman writes this week in the NYR Online, a mess, “full of truisms and potted histories,” while its publication—from conception down through the DNC’s efforts to suppress it—invited criticism from leftists and centrists alike. Indeed, he continues, “It is probably fair to say that the rising forces in today’s party, from Abundance-pilled moderates to socialists, view the DNC as much less central than their predecessors did.”

Schlozman tells the history of the DNC, from before the Civil War to today, and makes the case that it has been weakening ever since the end of the Obama administration, giving way to a web of ultrarich donors and various unaccountable PACs (lately empowered by the Supreme Court to raise and spend more money than ever). And while there is much to criticize about the committee, Schlozman argues that we may miss if it drifts too far out of relevance: “A heroic party is hard to imagine at this juncture, but it’s still worth trying to build a competent one.… If the alternatives are off-the-record weekends where billionaires and politicians watch glorified TED Talks, then party meetings in sad ballrooms don’t look so bad after all.”

Below, alongside Schlozman’s essay, we have collected five four from our archive about the DNC.

The DNC Against Itself

Daniel Schlozman

“Democracy is a very old institution,” explains the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election, belatedly released in May. “And yet what keeps democracy going is the ability of those who seek to lead to look at the data and determine the source of success as well as setbacks.”

The report that followed did no such thing. It was a bizarre document, full of truisms and potted histories (“The breakthrough tools that powered ‘Yes We Can’ in 2012 proved that they could not keep up just four years later”), poorly documented lists of spending patterns, and a grab bag of comparisons between candidates who performed better or worse than the Harris-Walz ticket. We learn, for instance, that “pulling people in is one of the hardest things to do in elections, especially in a modern information and cultural ecosystem where a lot of people are content to sit on their couch and be on the phone, as opposed to being out in their communities and engaging and learning about what’s going on in the world around them.”

Left unmentioned were nearly all the questions a serious autopsy of the 2024 election ought to have considered: how the Democrats should have responded to the post-pandemic inflation that doomed incumbent parties across the rich democracies; whether the fading president should have run again; whether the nominee in his stead should have had to prevail in a contested process; whether the DNC under Biden’s handpicked chair, Jaime Harrison, should have broken sooner from its role as the president’s praetorian guard; whether Harris should have distanced herself from the administration in which she served; whether to have emphasized themes around democracy, as the Harris campaign did, or the economy, as the leading Super PAC Future Forward did; and how to have handled fallout from the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli government as it prosecuted its bloodbath in Gaza. Not all these questions have definitive answers, still less before all the dust has settled. But to ignore them, as the autopsy did, was to forgo any chance at understanding why a party determined to stop the return of Donald Trump failed in its mission.

For months the autopsy had gone unreleased. In over his head, its author, the longtime New York political consultant Paul Rivera, handed in an incomplete draft last December with no accompanying notes. (Rivera has yet to publicly tell his side of the story, and the details remain murky.) The DNC and its chair, Ken Martin, spent the next several months sitting on it, rather than starting from scratch. Amid weak fundraising and concerns about his leadership, the pressure on Martin accumulated. “What’s in the report that you wouldn’t want publicized?” the podcaster and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau asked him in a cringe-inducing interview in April.

When Martin finally released the document, on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, the DNC had included prominent red boxes that identified mistakes and uncited sources. “I am not proud of this product,” he said in his announcement. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.” It was a telling statement. By virtue of being so godawful that the party spent months trying to bury it, the autopsy has, ironically, opened up questions that a mere mediocrity never could.

Not least of these are questions about the DNC itself under Martin’s troubled leadership. Since the 2016 primary, when the DNC scheduled debates at inconvenient times such as Saturday nights and supporters of Bernie Sanders complained about a “rigged” process, critics from the left have cast the national committee as a powerful obstacle. The reality is closer to the opposite. The DNC has relatively modest influence beyond its formal authority to set the primary calendar, organize the convention, and help maintain the “voter file,” with its troves of individual-level data. With the exception of writing the party platform, a quadrennial activity dominated by the presidential nominee, the committee’s role is rarely ideological in a straightforward sense.

The DNC is full of scheming and plotting, alliances and rivalries. But the turmoil tends to the internecine. The crucial work that the party undertakes in a decentralized political system—informally coordinating across all the politicians, donors, interest groups, and activists jostling for influence—largely happens elsewhere, whether at conferences ostensibly devoted to new progressive ideas or policy agendas, or at discreet confabs where donors and pols rub shoulders. The first serious study of the national committees, a 1964 book by the political scientists Cornelius P. Cotter and Bernard C. Hennessy, was called Politics Without Power, and the title remains apt.

The DNC, as observers often say about Congress, is a “they,” not an “it.” The chair is the all-important fundraiser-in-chief, and, especially when the party is out of power, an emissary who tamps down disputes and builds up the brand. Underneath the chair, the staff do the work of the institutional nerve center, spending on ads and operations and liaising with all the outside vendors. Finally there is the sprawling, fractious committee itself, whose membership comes predominantly from state parties. The approximately 450-strong roster—the DNC does not maintain a public list, though leaked ones circulate—includes the chair and vice chair of each state and territorial party, plus more than two hundred members elected by those parties in proportion to population and Democratic vote. The remainder are “at-large” members chosen by the chair and ratified in bloc, who are party insiders and figures from important constituencies like labor; and then a grab bag of representatives from entities like the National Democratic County Officials and the Young Democrats of America.

In Martin, the longtime chair in Minnesota, the state party stalwarts with the bulk of the votes saw a chance to put one of their own at the apex of the party. In February 2025 he relied on their support to win his race for DNC chair over his more nationally prominent Wisconsin counterpart, Ben Wikler. And yet by electing Martin the state parties have only further emphasized the limits of their power—and indeed those of the DNC itself. In recent decades, state parties have found themselves on the backfoot in an ever costlier and more nationalized politics. The Democratic Party is shaped far more by the interlocked worlds of money, media, and ideas in New York, D.C., and maybe California than by the loyalists grinding it out in Augusta or Jefferson City.

Since assuming the job Martin has increased funding to the state parties, funneling them guaranteed dollars every month. But he has struggled to command respect from the party’s other principals. The DNC’s financial position is dire, with debts larger than its cash on hand as it heads into the peak of the midterm spending cycle. And the more the DNC’s members expend their energies on internal contests for prestige and recognition like the one that got Martin elected, the more the committee isolates itself from the larger drama of where the Democrats ought to go, and how they ought to get there.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: Party Blues

• Randi Weingarten on what Democrats can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign (2025)

• Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld on the disastrous aftermath of Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election (2024)

• Joseph O’Neill on the moral case for saving the Democratic Party (2020)

• Joan Didion on the Democrats’ ill-advised turn to focus-group politics (2004)

This week in the NYR Online, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Steven Spielberg’s latest science fiction movie, Disclosure Day. Twenty-four years ago, in a season that seemed to predict the future—like this year, the summer of 2002 also featured a Spider-Man movie, a Star Wars movie, and a Christopher Nolan movie—O’Brien reviewed another Spielberg sci-fi epic, Minority Report.

Prospero on the Run

Geoffrey O’Brien

Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” which was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe in 1956, posits a future America in which crime has been virtually abolished through the employment of mentally retarded people—”gibbering, fumbling creatures, with…enlarged heads and wasted bodies”—who possess the wild talent of seeing crimes before they happen. Wired to a network of computers, the “pre-cogs” transmit visions of future events, on the basis of which future criminals are arrested and incarcerated in a vast detention camp.

The story’s tricky but oddly perfunctory narrative hook—the director of the Precrime program is himself fingered by the pre-cogs as a future murderer—provides the occasion for a run-through of paradoxes associated with prediction, particularly the notion that knowledge of how things will turn out makes it possible to change the outcome. The “minority report” of the title refers to a dissenting pre-cog’s variant vision of the future, proven wrong by the concurrence of two majority reports, a situation which is likened to the use of multiple computers to verify a solution. Of the story’s relevance to actual problems of cybernetics or to the laws of probability I am not competent to speak; to a lay reader it has more the effect of a discussion of mathematical theory overheard in a dream.

With its background of postwar devastation and a murky, top-secret contention between military and civilian branches of government, its concern for the fate of thought criminals, and its troubling linkage (under federal auspices) of brain damage and computer science, “The Minority Report” is a dream—a bad dream—straight out of the 1950s. Written relatively early in Dick’s prolific career, it offers only rudimentary traces of those virtual realities and industrially marketed simulacra characteristic of his remarkably influential later fiction. Also suggestive of the 1950s is its no-frills prose style, which evokes a perfectly dull future devoid of exoticism or poetic resonance: “Cold, light rain beat against the pavement, as the car moved through the dark streets of New York City toward the police building…. Helplessly, Anderton watched pedestrians hurrying along the rain­swept sidewalks. He felt no strong emotion.” We might have stumbled into the middle of The Pre-Cog in the Gray Flannel Suit.

The movie that Steven Spielberg has made from this by now somewhat distant source is couched in a style far removed from Dick’s flatly functional prose. Its first reel is as bravura a display of style as Spielberg has ever offered, as we watch a movie-within-a­movie of adultery, jealousy, and homicidal rage being assembled from the visions of the pre-cogs by Tom Cruise and his team of Precrime techies who must race against time to find within these images clues to the location of a murder before it is committed. The rapid cutting between the “real” events, the stylized, fragmentary visions of the pre-cogs (a trio of semi­dormant prophets lying on their backs in a glassed-in pool), and the zooms and enlargements effected by Cruise with a mere wave of his hands to the tune of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, each image interlarded with billowing layers of reflections and superimpositions, is a relentless display of the futuristic technology on which it comments: even the smoke and mirrors have smoke and mirrors. Spielberg seems to want to make a catalog of his own devices, to lay bare the inventory of tricks available to him, in a mood compounded of exhilaration and dread.

If I can do this, he appears to suggest, then the future that the film is about has already arrived. Unlike the other Dick-derived films of recent decades—Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall—Minority Report is not so much a work of elegiac or satiric anticipation as it is an acknowledgment that it is already too late to turn back. Even if the screenplay raises moral issues about free will and advance knowledge, insisting somewhat stridently that one can always choose a better course of action, the dazzling and enveloping stylistic maneuvers imply that such independent renunciation is henceforth likely to occur only in the movies. The technology is just too powerful for the characters to assert an existence apart from it. The very notion of background and foreground is obliterated by a visual field in which the people are little more than swirls of information oscillating among other analogous swirls. If Spielberg’s last film, the much-underrated A.I., culminated in a tragic apprehension of human limitation, Minority Report charts a more self-contradictory path. At its strongest it unleashes mythic forces that it then tries to contain with relatively flimsy last-reel fix-ups; it’s as if the Cumaean Sibyl were uneasily cast in a remake of The Fugitive.

Dick’s story plays with the idea of multiple future time-paths, something like Borges’s garden of forking paths. In its early stages Minority Report—with its casual interaction of present-­tense humans with three-dimensional talking archival holograms and live­action prophetic visions—suggests the idea of a movie in which past, present, and future can unfold simultaneously. Tom Cruise’s Precrime “theater of operations” could be seen as the ultimate film studio, capable not merely of imitating but of intervening in reality, and getting its inspired script concepts not from a bunch of contract screenwriters but from a captive team of seers, throwbacks to the most ancient oracles, who soak endlessly in a high-tech aquarium (called, appropriately, the Temple) complete with an infatuated, half-mad scientist-companion. These early scenes of the lab at work have a charm that must be autobiographical, since they amount to a metaphorical description of Spielberg’s daily routine making movies. In that light, it is easy to imagine that considerable personal anxiety underlies the notion (suggested by Cruise’s fate after the pre-cogs identify him as a murderer-to-be) of the director shut out from his own studio—barred from using the equipment that he has so incomparably mastered, accused, as it were, by his own creation.

Prospero on the run: except that Prospero in this version is a damaged man in perpetual mourning for his mysteriously vanished six-year-old son, separated from his wife, and addicted to a drug that he buys from a drug dealer with empty eye sockets. The revelation of those dreadful holes is part of an elaborate pattern of eye­related motifs summed up in the female pre-cog’s repetitive question: “Can you see?” In the world of Minority Report, public security is maintained by random eye-scans, and criminals have their eyes replaced in order to elude the scanners; crime is suppressed by the transmutation of the pre-cogs’ inner visions into electronically reproducible form; the memories of past anticipations are downloaded electronically from the brains of the pre-cog seers. The symbolism looms portentously—was it to invoke the totemic presence of Ingmar Bergman that Max von Sydow was cast in the picture?—but with undeniable effectiveness.

By the time Tom Cruise is having his eyes surgically removed by a grotesque doctor-and-nurse pair holed up in a generically sleazy tenement apartment, the symbolism has veered into the realm of a horror-movie creepiness that Spielberg has never—or at least not since Jaws—explored with quite such enthusiasm. Like the best horror movies, this segment derives its effect more from what we don’t see than from what we do, but the power of suggestion is sufficient to conjure up a mood of deep unpleasantness from which the rest of the film wants in some sense to escape, just as the spectator wants unquestionably to escape from the clamps that pin Cruise’s eyes open in preparation for his operation. The film seems to gain a cumulative power—laced with grotesque humor—the deeper it drives its protagonist into darkness.

While the blindfolded hero (he must wait twelve hours for his replaced eyes to heal) submits to uncontrollable inward visions—like home-movie playbacks—of his son’s disappearance, police investigators unleash small electronic eye-scanning spiders into the tenement where he’s hiding out. We are given an aerial view as the spiders swarm through the building, “reading” the eyes of tenants as they quarrel, make love, or sit on the toilet, their activities scarcely interrupted by the incursion.

The whole episode is a kind of giddy parody of an early 1930s movie in the Street Scene or Dead End mode (complete with camera angles worthy of Busby Berkeley). The tenement itself is a retrograde reminder of a vanished pre-techno world of milk bottles and peeling wallpaper, while the electronic spiders—like all those symbolic eyes—evoke nothing so much as the made-for-Hollywood surrealism of Dalí’s designs for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. (In a similar way the slimy and cynical eye doctor and his aging peroxide-blonde companion seem to have crawled out from an obscure Graham Greene novel adapted into a Bela Lugosi movie.) This ought to be indigestible but it’s exuberantly sustained, as if to show just how many moods and cultural references and potential plot turns Spielberg can telegraph from one shot to the next. Like much of Minority Report, the sequence has an air of willful gaudiness seeking constantly to surpass itself.

“Put the camera down,” a hologram of Cruise’s estranged wife tells him only half-jokingly in an early scene, in a three-dimensional home movie retrieved from happier days, to be endlessly replayed in his moments of drugged, anguished leisure. The voyeuristic nastiness of, say, the camera­-obsessed killer in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is not so far away, and a good deal of the fascination of the movie’s early scenes lies in wondering just how far the director is willing to push things. One so wants Cruise to live up to the seedy aura of these first scenes, to be less of a hero than he must finally become to satisfy the requirements of the chase thriller into which the movie gradually evolves.

The tone shifts with a needlessly protracted flight-and-pursuit sequence—all soaring and swooping and dragging through the mud, sliding through burning tunnels and crashing through floorboards—that seems designed chiefly to wake up anyone who might be dozing over his popcorn. The computer-­game wizardry continues with an elaborate but empty scene in a car factory, with Cruise and his pursuers fighting it out on the assembly line to the point where Cruise ends up built into the car and driving it off the line, a variation on an unrealized Alfred Hitchcock gag intended for North by Northwest, realized in the manner of a James Bond punchline. But then changes of emotional register seem almost the point here: each episode resembles a movie in itself—the suspense plot, the marriage plot, the technology and ethics plot, the mystical wonder plot—so that the cynicism of one scene is contradicted but not annulled by the hopefulness of another.

Read the full review for free on the Review’s website here.

For his latest IMAX extravaganza, the filmmaker Christopher Nolan has turned from the comic book operatics of The Dark Knight and the elaborate narrative convolutions of Inception and Interstellar to Homer’s Odyssey, a story that anticipated the need for wide screens by nearly three thousand years. For our August 20 issue, Daniel Mendelsohn, the magazine’s editor-at-large and an expert in Ancient Greek literature—his translation of the Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025—reviews Nolan’s adaptation:

Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the “accuracy” of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.

But Nolan’s talent for intricate plotting is undercut by his preoccupation with tortured antiheroes:

This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways.

Below, alongside Mendelsohn’s review, we have collected an excerpt from his translation of the Odyssey, an interview about the translation, a memoir about his relationship with the epic, his review of the movie Troy—an adaptation of the Iliad—and an episode of our podcast Private Life, in which Mendelsohn and Jarrett Earnest talk all things Homer.

Artful Weaving

Daniel Mendelsohn

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t all that impressed by Odysseus’s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship of a story’s “essential” meaning to its constituent episodes, that

the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essential; everything else is episodes.

This summary will strike many as odd. Where, you wonder, are the famous adventures that most people think of as the meat of the great epic—the numerous escapades that showcase the ingenuity, wiliness, and derring-do of Homer’s hero during his decade-long return from the Trojan War? The Lotos-Eaters, who eat of a flower that erases memory? The seductive nymph Calypso, who holds him prisoner for seven years, offering to make him immortal if only he would stay with her—an offer he movingly refuses in favor of returning to his aging, mortal wife? His yearlong dalliance with the witchy Circe, who turns his men into swine? Or his lengthy sojourn among the effete Phaeacians, with their opulent wealth and glittering palaces, their taste for dancing and music—one of the many cultures that the epic presents as a tempting alternative to Ithaca—whose royal family the hero, deploying his famed rhetorical skills, wheedles into bringing him home?

Nor is there any mention here of the voyage to the Underworld, where, in one of the epic’s most moving moments, Odysseus attempts—and fails—to embrace the wispy ghost of his mother, of whose death, during his long absence, he had been unaware. And no mention either of the lengthiest of the adventures, the encounter with the one-eyed giant Cyclops, whom clever Odysseus—repeatedly celebrated by Homer as polymêtis (“greatly cunning”), polyphrôn (“having many kinds of intelligence”), polymêkhanos (“able to contrive many solutions”), and poikilomêtis (“of multifaceted wiles”)—vanquishes by means of an artful pun on the word “nobody,” the false name he gives the Cyclops when they first meet.

All this, in Aristotle’s summary, is reduced to “a storm-tossed journey.”

In part this is because he rightly emphasizes the importance of that other, far vaster part of the Odyssey, what he calls “the situation at home”—the crisis that the hero’s long absence has created for his city, whose political institutions are collapsing; his wife, Penelope, who is besieged by the Suitors; and his young son, Telemachus, who strives to live up to the grand reputation of the father he never knew. These constitute what screenwriting courses refer to as the “stakes”—the crisis that must be resolved by the hero’s eventual return; otherwise the homecoming has no point. Only four of the epic’s twenty-four books are devoted to the adventures, which are narrated by the notoriously smooth-talking hero himself before the mesmerized Phaeacian court: his greatest feat of verbal artistry.

But the main reason Aristotle gives short shrift to the adventures has to do with the epic’s structure. In the section of the Poetics devoted to the Odyssey, he’s primarily interested in the workings of plot. The Odyssey’s plot is one that he admires as being “complex” (the many ups and downs of its characters, the multiple scenes of recognition with which the poem concludes) and commends because of its “double thread”: the ascending arc of its hero’s rehabilitation and eventual triumph, twined around the descending arc of his enemies’ downfall.

While satisfying to Aristotle, the very complexity of the Odyssey’s narrative, constantly moving as it does between past and present, reminiscence and action, Ithaca and those far-flung voyages, is no doubt what has made it so difficult to bring successfully to the cinematic screen—this despite the fact that the adventures in particular seem to cry out for big-screen, special-effects treatment. The problem isn’t merely the vast amount of incident that needs to be covered. Homer also has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are reported within other lengthy conversations. The most famous instance of this technique occurs in book 19, when an elderly housemaid who is bathing the feet of the disguised Odysseus recognizes a telltale scar that the hero had incurred during a boar hunt in his youth. At the moment she realizes that the “beggar” before her is her long-lost master, the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the day of the hero’s birth, before circling back to the present.

How to represent any of this—the structure and the technique as well as the vast tale itself—in the course of two or three hours?

Read the full review on the Review’s website here.

Odysseus Saved from the Sea

Homer, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Homer, The Odyssey, 5.388–450

And then he drifted about—two nights, two days—driven
By the surging waves, and his heart looked destruction
straight in the face.
But when Dawn with her lovely braids brought
the third day into the world
The wind died down and a calm, clear and still, descended
And look!—he caught a glimpse of land, right over there,
As he peered ahead intently from the crest of a towering wave.
Just as a father’s children would welcome some sign of life
When he’s lying deep in sickness suffering harsh pain,
Slowly wasting away, attacked by some fiendish Power—
And then—O welcome sight!—the gods set him free from his illness:
Just so was the sight of land and woods welcome to Odysseus.

Read the full excerpt on the Review’s website here.

Translating from Troy to Ithaca

Daniel Mendelsohn, interviewed by Lauren Kane

“My theory is that there’s something special the Odyssey has, something that the Iliad does not have at all. I want to call it a sort of ‘post-ness.’ It’s obviously a postwar poem, but it’s also a sort of post-everything poem. The old order has disappeared. The gods have receded. They’re almost not present at all, except in a couple of crucial moments, and certainly not in the way they’re present in the Iliad, where they’re all over the action and fighting in the battles. You feel the gods have withdrawn. Odysseus is a lone guy in a strange world with no familiar landmarks. The whole poem is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can. That may be what’s speaking to people.”

Read the full interview on the Review’s website here.

Finding a Path through the Odyssey

Daniel Mendelsohn

I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem. The literal meaning of aporia is “a lack of a path,” or “no-way.” I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment; I couldn’t think of a new project. I was, in the Greek way of thinking, pathless—the adjective, as it happens, that in the Odyssey is used to describe the sea, the terrifying blank nothingness from which Odysseus must extricate himself, literally and figuratively, in order to reclaim his identity and find his way home.

Read the full essay on the Review’s website here.

A Little Iliad

Daniel Mendelsohn

Fueled, no doubt, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings—by classical times, the debate wasn’t so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as rather, as in Plato’s Symposium, who was doing just what to whom—Benioff makes Patroclus Achilles’ “cousin,” a bizarre choice that (particularly in an era when family ties have never counted for less) has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching Troy, you’d think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage. “He killed my cousin!” Achilles shrieks at Priam when the latter comes begging for his son’s body at the end of the story. “You’ve lost your cousin, now you’ve taken mine,” a mournful Briseis (in this version, Hector’s cousin) tells Achilles. “When does it end?” This film’s notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one’s collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making.

Read the full review on the Review’s website here.

Study the Odyssey

with Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed online seminars on Homer’s masterpiece, from autumn 2025, are now available for purchase. Gain complete access to the six seminar sessions, including Mendelsohn’s introductory lectures and the lively seminar discussions.

Purchase here

In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Baghdad: The Illusion of Peace

Nabil Salih

Close to midnight on Tuesday, April 7, a loud explosion rattled my family’s house in a suburb of Baghdad. A column of white smoke shadowed the alleys nearby. Men murmured, milling about in the street. Policemen drove past, unsure what had landed where. Downstairs, two days before her eleventh birthday, my niece shivered in her mother’s arms.

Soon we learned that militiamen had fired a barrage of rockets and suicide drones across the city. One pierced the concrete reinforcement of a neighbor’s house, smashing into a vacant bedroom. Another killed eight-year-old Siraj Qadouri and his father, Mohammed, on their doorstep in nearby al-Amiriyah—the same neighborhood where, in 1991, American “smart” bombs incinerated some 408 civilians, including my great aunt Rajiha and her children, in a bomb shelter. Iraqis remember that inferno as al-Fajr al-Hazin—the mournful dawn.

The next morning Mohammed’s nephew, a survivor of the night’s attack, roamed the atlal—the ruins—of the crime scene, a blue nylon bag in his hand, gathering splinters from Siraj’s small cranium and bits of his brain. The image invited another from a day more than twenty years ago. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, my second cousin’s father, a security official in the new regime, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen on a highway in al-Seleikh, in the city’s north. During the funeral I looked on as the young boy picked up fragments of his father’s brain, which were strewn on the trunk mat of his red Peugeot.

No party dared or bothered to claim responsibility for the attack on April 7, which was aimed at the US-run Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center and its surrounding structures near the city’s international airport. Known collectively as Victory Camp, these installations served Washington’s embassy and facilitated movement to and from NATO coalition bases elsewhere in the country before the US and its allies shrank their footprint in Iraq earlier this year. (As in colonial times, US and NATO advisers stationed in these bases had often emerged from their barracks to conduct training drills and instruct their disgruntled native peers.) The camp in Baghdad sits on a highway that also leads to a prison, where Islamic State detainees are held after their transfer from Syria by the US, as well as several other security bases, including one for Iraq’s elite force, the Counter-Terrorism Service.

Whoever launched it, the attack was emblematic of the violence always lurking underneath Iraq’s illusory peace. After the start of the US–Israeli war on Iran and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the constellation of Shi‘a paramilitary groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) opened a new front in Baghdad. They have carried out hundreds of missile and drone strikes against NATO positions, Washington’s diplomatic mission, and Abu Dhabi’s consulate, as well as against Kurdish Iranian oppositionists and targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond. They have threatened to lash out against Syria in the event that its new president, the former jihadi Ahmed al-Shara‘, dares move across the border against the Lebanese Hezbollah, with whom Iraqi militias had once allied to defend the Ba‘ath regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Most Shi‘a armed groups in the country, including the larger of the IRI’s members, belong to al-Hashd al-Shaabi (the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF). The PMF came together after Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shi‘a authority in Iraq, issued a 2014 fatwa calling on “able-bodied citizens” to defend their country against the Islamic State. It incorporated existing Shi‘a militias—such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah—and organized volunteers into dozens of brigades, eventually reaching over 200,000 members in total. Some are Sunni; others are Yazidi, a non-Muslim ethnoreligious group stationed around Sinjar, their ancestral home in the north of the country; but the PMF is mostly known as a Shi‘a force in a multi-religious country with a large Sunni community.

Institutionalized by a 2016 law under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (2014–2018), the PMF was then designed to be independent of existing security structures, tied directly to the prime minister and commander-in-chief. It later started receiving some $3 billion from the annual budget. But the network became increasingly involved in politics and the economy over the past four years under Mohammed al-Sudani, who served as the country’s prime minister until ceding the job in May to a young tycoon and political neophyte named Ali al-Zaidi. It was al-Sudani, for instance, who enabled the PMF to establish al-Muhandis General Company, an ambitious conglomerate—now under sanction by the US—that works across construction, agriculture, and other industries.

When, in February of this year, the US and Israel started bombing camps and checkpoints manned by PMF brigades in northern and western Iraq, they seemed to be going after this loosely state-controlled network. In late March, a regional leader and over a dozen PMF members were killed in a strike against a PMF headquarters in al-Anbar, and the coalition went so far as to bomb the PMF chairman Falih al-Fayyadh’s residence in Mosul. Between February 28 and April 8, the PMF has said, eighty fighters were killed and more than 270 were wounded in the “Zionist-American” aggression.

In fact, what Washington had done was resume an undeclared war on the country it had supposedly “liberated” twenty-three years ago. The Americans have hardly been discriminating in their targets. The bombs have fallen both on Washington’s supposed partners in the Iraqi military and on civilians, including Imad Abdul-Dayim, a sixty-three-year-old killed on the Iranian side of the al-Shalamcheh border point with Basra during a trip to secure medicine for his wife.

Al-Sudani spent the early phase of the war making overtures to Trump, promising to rein in rogue militias. He fired intelligence officers in Nineveh governorate, which has been used as a launchpad for attacks on Harir Air Base and Washington’s consulate in Erbil; in late March his forces apprehended four suspects behind an attack that targeted a US base in Syrian territory. In a call with Emmanuel Macron on April 8, he reassured the French president that the militants behind the drone attacks the previous month that killed a French soldier, Arnaud Frion, had been arrested.

Al-Zaidi wanted to transcend al-Sudani’s limitations. In his first months in office he has presented himself as an uncompromising strongman: on June 29 he seemed adamant that he wanted to disarm the paramilitary groups, telling the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that he “will not accept the existence of a state within a state.” The need for resistance “no longer exists,” he said. Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has doubled down on al-Zaidi’s efforts, saying that anyone who illegally “manufactures, uses, or possesses” a drone shall be charged as a terrorist. So far, however, the masterminds behind the attacks have seemed untouchable.

Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, spent the past three months in a no-man’s-land between two wars, and the Western press seemed alarmed more by the fate of Iraq’s oil than by that of its people. Weeks after Iraq’s airspace was finally reopened to civilian traffic, US and Israeli warplanes could still be heard over Baghdad, making it clear that any neighborhood, back street, or building in the former “city of peace” could be struck at any moment.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (2008). Mendelsohn is also the author of the essay collections Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012) and Ecstasy and Terror (2019), as well as Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2022), which were all published by New York Review Books. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.

Next week’s episode will be a reading of Mendelsohn’s essay “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. You can read that essay and others by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.

For the Review’s July 23 issue, Bryce Covert reads Dead Center, the unsettlingly titled memoir by former senator and former Democrat Joe Manchin. As Covert writes, the adamant centrist and underminer of his former party’s legislative efforts has written a similarly frustrating book:

It feels as if he’s speaking from an alternate universe, one where the structures of our political system aren’t being torn down and our neighbors aren’t being terrorized before our eyes by authoritarian violence. His book may have nothing to say about the very real dangers we face, but it is starkly revealing of the worldview that got us here.

And part of that worldview? An uncompromising insistence on compromising Democratic priorities:

Manchin sees power as something to be used as a last resort, if at all.… This, to him, is somehow unthinkable—that a party elected on commitments to increase the minimum wage and send out stimulus checks would use the authority voters had handed it to actually do those things.

Below, alongside Covert’s essay, we have collected five articles from our archive about a handful of the country’s more accomplished legislators.

Compromised Values

Bryce Covert

If one were to imagine an alternate timeline in which Kamala Harris won the 2024 election—persuading voters for whom pessimism about the economy was often the dominant issue—perhaps the decisive episode to revisit would be the death of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package. This, as much as any, may have been the moment when reality forked. Under the plan an estimated 3.4 million Americans would have gained health insurance, families would have saved thousands each year on childcare, and 35 million households would have been able to rely on monthly payments from an enhanced child tax credit, among many other provisions to make life more affordable. Its collapse helped convince voters who wanted solutions to the insecurity created by inflation and the long-simmering crisis of inequality that Democrats lacked the necessary fighting spirit. The legislation passed the House and had support from every Democrat in the Senate—except one.

Joe Manchin opens his memoir, Dead Center, with a meeting in the White House. In stilted reconstructed dialogue, the now retired Democratic senator from West Virginia—who declared himself an independent shortly before the end of his last term—dramatizes his conversation with Biden in the Oval Office on December 14, 2021. The president, calling Build Back Better “my hallmark legislation,” is asking for his vote. Manchin responds that passing the bill would “forever change the psyche of this country to be ‘what more can my country do for me.’” He recounts how, after the meeting, he went on Fox News and announced that he would vote no. “I had just killed Joe Biden’s ‘hallmark legislation,’” Manchin writes, with evident glee.

The tone of this passage is typical of a book that—somewhat incredibly, given the political moment in which it was published—reads like a valedictory address. “The greatest conundrum in politics today is the relentless pressure to align fully with one side or the other,” Manchin writes. The other problems that consume him include the size of the national debt, the possible desecration of the filibuster, and the price tags of various pieces of legislation. It feels as if he’s speaking from an alternate universe, one where the structures of our political system aren’t being torn down and our neighbors aren’t being terrorized before our eyes by authoritarian violence. His book may have nothing to say about the very real dangers we face, but it is starkly revealing of the worldview that got us here.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: The Bully Pulpit

• Richard H. Rovere on Joseph McCarthy vs. the reds (1965)

• Garrett Epps on Jesse Helms vs. the liberal media (1987)

• Nicolas Lemann on Huey Long vs. propriety (1992)

• Julia Reed on Bob Packwood vs. the Ethics Committee (1996)

• Robert G. Kaiser on Mitch McConnell vs. himself (2016)

“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. The metaphor asks not only what kind of child we are raising, but what kind of mothers we might be to what is an increasingly mysterious entity. For example, O’Gieblyn notes that in an interview with a New York Times podcast, Anthropic’s so-called “Claude mother,” Amanda Askell, “worried about the relationship between AI and humanity—not because AI might destroy the world, or take all our jobs, but because its feelings were getting hurt.” According to Sam Altman, the basic etiquette people employ when typing to their chatbots has cost OpenAI millions in computational costs, and he believes that “this was money well spent. (‘You never know,’ he wrote.)”

O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.

Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.

Lauren Kane: What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?

Meghan O’Gieblyn: I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.

This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.

I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.

It’s interesting to revisit your book God Human Animal Machine today. In it there are inklings of ideas that have come to pass, like AI that impersonates dead loved ones; other things seem very much the same, such as the way that we continue to form humanlike attachments to chatbots. How have the concerns and preoccupations of that book developed since you wrote it? What would be the first chapter you would update or revise, and how?

The hazard of writing about AI is that any insights or observations are bound to become dated almost as soon as the book is printed. The thought of rewriting any portion of the book feels impossibly daunting. It was very much a product of the time in which it was written, from 2017 to 2020, which was, considering the rate at which this technology is evolving, eons ago. That’s not to say that the questions I ask in the book—about what it means to be human, or about the dangers of outsourcing decision-making to opaque systems—are no longer relevant. In some ways, they’re more urgent than ever. It’s more that the tone feels out of sync with this moment. I was writing before the arrival of commercial language models. Everyone in the tech world was raving about the wild advances in machine learning, but the general public was largely oblivious, immersed in the pandemic and the more immediate chaos of the first Trump term. There was a scattering of arts and humanities people who were paying attention to AI and who generally approached the technology with an attitude of open curiosity. That’s how I approached it too, as the starting point for some intriguing thought experiments: What might a technology that mirrors human intelligence reveal about how we understand ourselves? How do the questions AI raises invoke much older philosophical and theological problems that have haunted intellectual history?

That impulse to speculate about the existential dimension of AI increasingly feels like a luxury, given how thoroughly it’s been integrated into virtually every sector of our economy. Writers and academics have turned—rightly so—to the political problems of compensation, data justice, and the automation of creative fields. At the same time, I worry that this need to hold the line against the practical harms of AI inhibits the larger philosophical speculation that this technology demands of us. I’ve noticed in myself a reluctance to think about those bigger questions, if only because it risks ceding ground to the presumption at many of the major labs that this technology might be sentient, or deserve rights. I would like to think there’s a way to retain skepticism about anthropomorphism while also continuing to think about the way AI is unsettling long-standing assumptions about creativity, reason, and emotional intelligence.

I get the sense that as a writer with a religious upbringing you have been at times considered a kind of messenger from the other side who can explain religion to the secular world. Is that true? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being seen that way? What are some misconceptions you’ve noticed?

It’s a role that I’ve admittedly never felt comfortable with, but I can see how some of my work invites that expectation. I started writing about Christianity because I was frustrated by how frequently secular commentators were getting it “wrong.” I kept reading about evangelicalism in coastal newspapers and magazines, op-eds or pieces of cultural criticism that contained the worst kinds of misunderstandings and were prone to cheap shots and sneering condescension. I’d left the church by that point, but I would get weirdly defensive of the faith I’d abandoned. I felt that any substantial critique had to start by taking the church’s doctrine and theology seriously. I started writing mostly as a way to correct certain premises, and I drew on my experience because that was really the only authority I had. I’d studied theology formally, but I was by no means a theologian or a scholar of religion. I was simply someone who’d experienced religion from the inside. I still value experience as the ultimate form of authority, especially when it comes to spirituality. There are certain things that you simply cannot understand unless you’ve been immersed in a religious tradition for many years.

The risk with any attempt to explain religion to a secular audience is playing into the misapprehension that American Christianity is monolithic. I’m often asked to write things about trends in Pentecostalism, for example, or Catholicism, traditions that are very different from the faith communities I’ve experienced directly. This was true even when I began writing about Christianity back in the early 2010s, but the attempt to say anything definitive about the faith today is even more treacherous. Christianity is so fractured, not just within denominations but within individual congregations, within individual families. There are no longer religious figures like Billy Graham who serve as the unofficial spokespeople for American Christianity. Instead, there are countless influencers, preachers, and personalities who have created niche movements with their own theologies and political alignments. It’s just not possible to speak about what is happening in the faith in any kind of general way.

As an essayist, where do you get ideas for a piece of writing? What do you think, above all else, an essay should set out to do?

Good question! It’s hard to say where ideas come from. I don’t have the kind of privileged access to my mind that would allow me to answer that with confidence. It’s largely a mystery. And it’s a process. An argument rarely comes to me fully formed. It’s something that emerges through the writing itself, as I try to respond to some inchoate inner tension that’s caused, for example, by a challenging passage of philosophy, or an assumption that is being repeated, unthinkingly, in public discourse. The essay is basically a record of that process. At its best, it serves as a map of the writer’s mind as they try to articulate a problem and figure out what they think about it.

Who are the philosophers who have most shaped your thought? Who do you like to disagree with?

I’m always returning to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, two philosophers who warned about the dangers of cognitive and moral atrophy. It’s remarkable to me how prescient, and enduringly relevant, their writing on technology is, given that it was produced during the middle of the last century. Both were concerned with the automation of thought, the temptation to outsource reasoning to opaque systems—be they ideological, mathematical, or technological—and the possibility that we might arrive at a position of total dependence on processes we don’t really understand.

In The Human Condition, Arendt envisioned a future in which our actions become too complex for our brains to understand, “so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.” In one of Weil’s political essays from the 1930s, she imagines a civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” Both of them pointed out that the abdication of thinking was not unique to our relationship with technology: it’s something we do naturally any time we defer to dogma, common wisdom, or facile clichés. It’s this observation that has most inflected my technological criticism. It’s not that AI is an entirely novel risk. It simply accelerates our tendency to defer to formulaic templates in order to avoid the difficult work of thinking.

I came to Weil through her political writing because I was interested in her observations about technology. Later on I discovered her spiritual writing, which, it’s fair to say, changed my life. I ended up writing a book about my engagement with her writing on willpower and attention, which will be published this fall. It was a way for me to think more deeply about her work, and to put it in conversation with many other writers and philosophers (Iris Murdoch, Augustine) who have shaped my spiritual life.

Who do I disagree with? So much of my writing is responding, either explicitly or implicitly, to John Calvin. I first read him at Bible college, which was very grounded in the Reformed tradition, and wrestling with his theology was part of what undid my faith. I wouldn’t necessarily say I disagree with him—you don’t continually return to a thinker whose ideas are easily dismissed—but I’ve been having an ongoing argument with him for about twenty years.

Sodade

Ratik Asokan

The bar is no more than a narrow hall. There is barely enough space between the stools and the wall to walk through to a larger room at the back. Beyond the drawn curtains separating the spaces, two musicians are conducting a mic check before rows of mostly empty chairs. No one is paying attention to them; everyone is glued to the saloon television, which was specifically installed for the World Cup.

A bartender announces the next performance. A piano-and-vocals duo will be playing updates of Latin American nueva canción and tunes of kindred nobility from Cape Verde. The setlist was presumably designed to complement the game, which should have ended by now. Instead, the island nation—debutants, the second-smallest competing country, a squad largely drawn from diaspora, including one player recruited via LinkedIn—have taken the reigning champions, Argentina, into extra time.

We are invited to gather our drinks and relocate to the back room. Chair legs creak and arms ruffle tote bags for two agonizing minutes. Ultimately almost no one moves. When a bartender mutes the television out of decency to the artists, a muffled gasp of dismay goes up.

This is bad behavior, as we are acutely aware. Barzakh Café is a performance space, not a sports bar. You come here to learn about other cultures, or at least that is the proprietor’s intention. El Atigh Abba fled Mauritania in 2013, when his freethinking blog came to the attentions of a senior imam, whose literary criticism took the form of a fatwa (the document, with bureaucratic stamps, can be found online). After making his way to the Caribbean stretch of Crown Heights, he decided to set up a kind of Partisan Coffee House for similarly beleaguered Arab intellectuals. No one quite knows how, but within a few years it transformed into a Soviet House of Culture for Brooklyn internationalist hipsters: book discussions and poetry readings, language classes and film screenings, Ramadan and Passover celebrations, DSA fundraisers, and, more to the point, “world music” concerts nearly every night: Qawwali, Flamenco, Greek folk revival, Moroccan Gnawa... (The booking logic seems to be: (i) you will need to look this genre up on Wikipedia; (ii) you will not be subjected to a 4/4 rhythm.)

The clientele, as should be obvious, is self-selecting: thin men with every combination of facial hair, women in long dresses and elaborate scarves, someone always muttering about connecting disparate “local struggles,” graduate students struggling to connect their dissertation to said local struggles. Until tonight we have always been ready to listen to “songs of the left.” We even read translated lyrics that are passed out.

Now we abandon our principles with exuberance, even righteousness. An auntie wonders why a show was booked during such an important match. In her preamble, the vocalist stresses the enduring relevance of nueva canción and ponders the multifarious significance of the term sodade (longing for home, nostalgia for the pre-imperial past, island epistemology, general spiritual melancholy, et cetera). The audience score: five for music, maybe thirty-five for sports.

Ibou, a soft-spoken bartender, is from Lumumbashi. I learned this during the group stage, when the Democratic Republic of Congo were setting one national precedent after another: first World Cup goal, first point, first knockout appearance clinched. In the spirit of cross-cultural understanding, I enquired about the dashing celebration led by Yoane Wissa: hands spread apart in both directions, the right rising far higher than the left, before meeting again near the waist. Was it connected to traditional drumming? “No, man,” he set me straight. “It is a beating, a whooping.”

He is supporting Argentina, which I find unconscionable. What happened to standing up for underdogs? To pan-African unity? “Not Argentina,” Ibou clarifies. “I’m for Messi.” A few others admit to the same disposition. “If I could transfer Messi to Cape Verde, I would,” the guy behind me offers. He is met with glares from the newly minted Cape Verde fans. Our Messi is Vozinha, the forty-year-old goalkeeper, who made seven saves in an opener against the European champions, Spain. Few of us could name another player.

An already tense game is made tenser still by the unusual audiovisual configuration. Instead of the crowd noise—which has been noticeably lacking in this gold-plated edition—or the oafish American commentary, the players are accompanied by the unseen duo, who open with spare compositions by heroes of the left: Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra. Against these somber tributes to hope, to solidarity, to the future, the Argentine assault appears hectic, disjointed, petulant. In the absence of a proper ball-carrying midfielder—Enzo Fernández only comes to life when someone is defending beside him—they aim long for wingers, who run a few meters down the channels and then, what else: pass to Messi. Let no one claim this is an attractive brand of football.

The goal comes, as it increasingly does these days, from a corner. Or was it a cross? In any case the ball sails over the box, eluding wrestling attackers and defenders before finding its way to Lisandro Martínez, who has had a rough few years: if playing for Manchester United under the dour Dutchman Erik ten Hag were not taxing enough, successive injuries have almost ended his career three years in a row. All that turmoil is forgotten as he stops the ball dead, takes a touch to get it out of his feet, and rifles it into the roof of the net from a tight angle.

What explains the mysterious felicity that all footballers from the southern cone possess, even center-backs like Martínez? Eduardo Galeano’s explanations—the culture of the backstreets, sublimated anarchism—were always romantic and are now surely out of date. These gladiators are scouted in their preteens and paid millions. They are creatures of global capitalism. Messi earns more every five minutes he wears an Inter Miami shirt than Vozinha did all season in the Portuguese second division.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

This spring New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new permanent space right at the entrance: the 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, which are dedicated to fashion. “How did rooms focused on fashion become the first galleries visitors now encounter on entering the Met?” asks Jed Perl in the Review’s July 23 issue. “I’m worried about what all of this portends for the future of one of the world’s greatest museums.”

Perl visits the Nast Galleries’ inaugural show, “Costume Art,” which pairs gowns and suits with artwork from the museum’s other departments. This effort to draw out the continuities between clothing and other forms may “offer ways of thinking about art and fashion through the ages,” but ultimately, writes Perl, it “is little more than a show of recent fashion masquerading as a scholarly exhibition about the historical relationship between clothing and the arts more generally…. Behind the fun and games there’s a fashion industry fat with money and prestige and apparently determined to have its way with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Below, alongside Perl’s essay, we have collected seven articles from our archive about fashion and style.

Fashion Forward

Jed Perl

Jean Cocteau opened his 1918 polemic, Cock and Harlequin, with a zinger of an epigram: “Art is science in the flesh.” That’s probably the kind of intellectual provocation that Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, was aiming for with “Costume Art,” the show that inaugurates the museum’s Condé M. Nast Galleries. Designed by the Brooklyn-based Peterson Rich Office, these are now the first exhibition spaces visitors encounter after entering the Great Hall.

In the show, items of clothing are juxtaposed with works of art from the museum’s seventeen curatorial departments. “The study of dress,” Bolton explains in the catalog, “offers a privileged vantage point from which to reconsider the history of art itself.” He believes that “the history of aesthetics cannot be disentangled from the history of the body that clothes it.” Even if that’s true—I’m not so sure—“Costume Art” isn’t about the body but about the clothes. It’s an infomercial for the fashion industry.

The Condé M. Nast Galleries have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique. The show is sterile—a plod. Even fashions that might originally have had some comic pizzazz (a dress by Batsheva Hay emblazoned with the word “HAG” or Jean Paul Gaultier’s jumpsuits ornamented with drawings of old-fashioned tattoos) are presented as if they demand serious consideration. Many of the mannequins loom high above us, an army of chic automatons. They’ve been specially designed in sizes that acknowledge that the world includes people with different physiques, but where their faces would be, there’s a mirror. Someone must have figured that the mirrored faces would encourage museumgoers to bond with the mannequins—la mode, c’est moi. As for the works of art included, they’re generally small and almost invariably overwhelmed by the clothes. A lot of them are tucked away in vitrines that serve as pedestals for dresses by some of the world’s most exclusive designers. An ancient Greek vase, a Dürer print, a sculpture by Jean Arp, and a Meiji-period hanging basket are given perfunctory presentations. They’re giveaways in an ultra-posh swag bag. The clothes are the heroes of the show.

There is much to be said not only about “Costume Art” but also about the Condé M. Nast Galleries, which are going to be dedicated to Costume Institute exhibitions, while occasionally available for other museum projects. How did rooms focused on fashion become the first galleries visitors now encounter on entering the Met? Why is this space being used in this way? I’m worried about what all of this portends for the future of one of the world’s greatest museums. But before grappling with the questions that are raised by the dedication of these premier spaces to fashion, I think it’s worth considering some of the important artistic issues that the show provokes, although it doesn’t do much to answer them. “Were I an art history professor,” Alex Greenberger wrote in ART news in one of the rare critical assessments of Bolton’s work, “I would have no choice but to give this show a failing grade.” Greenberger ascribes that failure to the often arbitrary juxtapositions of clothes and works of art as well as to the vague or poor labeling of many of the objects, but it goes much deeper. Bolton and his collaborators want to celebrate a synergy between fashion and art, which they view as equal partners in the evolution of style, at least when they’re not coming right out and arguing that fashion precipitates art. What’s missing is anything like a lucid account of style as a cultural phenomenon that shapes and is in turn shaped by the work that creative people do.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: Fashion Backward

• Francine Gray on Coco Chanel’s closet

• Alison Lurie on the semiotics of fashion

• Anne Hollander on “the language of clothes”

• Diane Johnson on trickle-down couture

• Hilary Reid on the subjective nature of “vulgar” fashion

• David Salle on Rei Kawakubo’s philosophy of beauty

• Adam Thirlwell on Karl Lagerfeld’s legacy

The words of the Declaration of Independence are now 250 years and one day old, but the document itself wasn’t completed and signed until August 2, 1776. In the Review’s November 21, 2024, issue, Andrew Raftery wrote about the history of the parchment—and the many efforts over the years to preserve it as well as market it with florid redesigns and a variety of “official” reproductions and prints.

Rescuing the People’s Parchment

Andrew Raftery

It is safe to say that most of the 1.1 million annual visitors to the National Archives Museum, in Washington, D.C., enter John Russell Pope’s magnificent temple on Pennsylvania Avenue to see the permanent exhibition, “Charters of Freedom,” which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and, shown separately, the Bill of Rights. After some displays relating to the Revolutionary War, they encounter the stone-and-bronze case holding the parchment of the Declaration, written in a large, clear hand (or “engrossed,” as ordered by Congress) by Timothy Matlack, an officer in the Continental Army. In his competent clerk’s script, Matlack transcribed the text adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, rendering it in the form and materials then used for significant legal documents. It was ready to receive the fateful fifty-six signatures on August 2.

Visitors peer through thick glass into the helium-filled case to see the Declaration illuminated by soft green light. We can recognize the familiar configuration on the parchment, but the text is not completely legible and the signatures are barely there. The classical architecture of Pope’s sanctuary, the subdued lighting, and the hushed atmosphere make the space into a giant reliquary. The direct witnessing of an object of such historical consequence is not less affecting for being imperfectly discernible.

We know what it once looked like thanks to an engraving commissioned in 1820 by John Quincy Adams when he was secretary of state. Adams was concerned about the already evident deterioration of the parchment and wanted to publish an authoritative replica of the document he revered. He hired a young Washington engraver, William J. Stone, to make a facsimile. In a decade of technical and artistic innovation in the graphic arts, including Goya’s late lithographic portfolio, The Bulls of Bordeaux (1825), Blake’s engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), and the young Delacroix’s lithographs for Faust (1828), Stone produced one of the most remarkable prints. Like those harbingers of Romanticism, who introduced expressive techniques and novel interpretations of biblical and literary texts (Goethe felt Delacroix’s images had exceeded his own imagination), his work looked forward—in his case to a new standard of clarity that would be codified with the introduction of photography in 1839.

Stone did more than execute the calligraphic text in the smooth curves inherent to engraving, as earlier engravers would have done. After all, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when penmanship was learned from engraved copybooks, it was natural to bring the writing back to its printed origins. Instead he took fidelity into fresh territory by scrupulously rendering the effect of iron gall applied to parchment with a goose quill, capturing the slight drag that happens when the pen crosses over still-wet ink. Splatters, stray marks, and blobs are reproduced with consummate virtuosity. The rough edges on the large strokes of John Hancock’s signature suggest that ink had already chipped off by the time Stone made his copy. His facsimile is utterly convincing, even though we can no longer compare it with the original. It is the iconic image of the Declaration, endlessly multiplied in history books, classroom posters, and online.

It must be remembered that Stone accomplished his Olympian feat of verisimilitude by incising lines in reverse, using this slowest of methods to replicate signatures that probably took less than a minute to write. But how did he transfer the image so perfectly onto the copper? The plate itself gives a few hints.¹ Some inadvertently unfinished items of punctuation that are outlined but not shaded show that Stone scratched the contours of each letter into the surface before reinforcing the shapes with deep grooves made by the engraving tool. A process of dampening the actual document and running it through the press to make a reverse transfer onto the plate has been suggested, but I find this highly unlikely. The ink had been oxidizing for fifty years and was deemed somewhat abraded.

That was a poor prospect for the perfect image Stone required and a risky proposition in any case. I believe he made a precise tracing in graphite on translucent paper that was transferred in reverse onto a copperplate coated with a waxy substance. The text would have been retraced with a fine point that firmly pushed the contours through the paper into this receptive surface, Stone then following those outlines with a sharp steel stylus, all the while checking his accuracy against the original. A very particular John Quincy Adams verified Stone’s work as it proceeded. The final resolution—firming edges and creating the effect of solid black ink using closely spaced crosshatched lines—happened letter by letter with ever more attention to exactitude. It took three years.

Adams ordered two hundred vellum prints of the Declaration to be distributed to the three living signers, the Marquis de Lafayette, branches of the federal government, state governors and legislatures, and universities.² The State Department retained the plate, but Stone was allowed to periodically issue impressions on paper. In 1833 a large edition of facsimiles was ordered for Peter Force’s American Archives (1837–1853), a monumental history of the nation as told through documents from Columbus through the Constitution. The initial order was for four thousand copies, but by the time the volume on the Continental Congress was published, in 1848, interest and funding had foundered, suggesting a smaller run of 1,500. This is still well beyond the thousand or so fine impressions one can expect from a copperplate. The matrix, now in the National Archives, is indeed very worn, but it yielded good copies the last time a few were made, for the bicentennial. Stone’s engraving is uniquely authoritative, but it was not the first and far from alone in the field of printed versions of the Declaration of Independence. Published by the State Department in limited editions and aimed at government and academic audiences, it was overshadowed by competing prints that were widely distributed throughout the nineteenth century.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

The old saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is, in fact, not all that old, and not really a saying. It was written by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for an advertising campaign in 2003, nearly thirty years after John Gregory Dunne traveled to Sin City and broke its now golden rule by telling what happened. Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which came out in 1974 and has recently been reissued by McNally Editions, is his chronicle of his descent into “the uncanny beauty and desolation of the place,” writes Charlie Lee in our May 28, 2026, issue. In contrast to Vegas’s marketing, “Dunne found something about the city strangely soothing—its transience and uniformity, the feeling that people were not living in the moment but in the long aftermath of whatever the moment had been.”

Lee is a literary critic and senior editor at Harper’s. He has previously written for the Review on novels by Ed Park and Victor Heringer, and his criticism has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In writing about Dunne’s Vegas, Lee identified the great obsession of the man’s life: money. “I defy you to find a writer, a good writer, living or dead, who has talked about money as incessantly and with as much impenitent relish as John Gregory Dunne. He lived, it seems, for the grubby little details.” In that spirit, I wrote to Lee to discuss Dunne, New Journalism, and the grubby little details of the writing life.

Chandler Fritz: Were you happy with the fee you received for this review?

Charlie Lee: Oh, I’ll never be happy. That’s the conclusion you come to if you read enough Dunne. A lot of his best work is about the Hollywood studio system—he wrote all these process pieces about how a certain movie did or didn’t get made, how the contracts were hammered out, who walked away happy and who got screwed. The sheer density of dollar figures on the page is dizzying. You almost get a contact high.

I should say: Dunne was obviously obsessed with money (Didion was, too), but I don’t think that’s only because he liked being rich. For one, he was often funny and self-deprecating on the topic. (After a heart surgery, Dunne said, “Do you know how long I was out on the operating table? Five hours and thirty-seven minutes. I know this because the anesthetist charges by the minute.”) And he clearly just enjoyed all the nice, chewy language you get to use when you talk about this stuff: “buck-a-word,” “basis points,” “back-end profit participation,” that kind of thing. His ear was tuned to whatever perverse poetry might be found in a phrase like “extraordinarily profitable fiduciary rapport.” Maybe this is going too far, but it seems like he thought about money in almost metaphysical terms, as if it made up the very structure and texture of reality. How much money someone has, how they go about getting it or getting rid of it: this doesn’t just tell you something about who they are, it is who they are. The world is made of the cash that flows through it. That’s his slant.

You write that Dunne’s choice to marry Joan Didion was “possibly the best decision an ambitious young writer and high-society aspirant could have made in the year 1964.” I don’t think the same could’ve been said of marrying John Gregory Dunne. What do you think she saw in him?

I mean, who knows. It seems like they understood each other to an unusual degree, but a marriage is a black box. I’ll happily speculate, though. They both show up constantly in each other’s work. There are lines in Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect,” which she wrote after they met but before they were married, that remind me of Dunne: “If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.” Or: “People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me.” Dunne had many faults, but I don’t think he had many illusions about himself. Maybe Didion admired him for that.

There’s this story in Vegas about how Dunne discovered his voyeuristic tendencies. When he was young and living alone in New York City, he used to spy on the woman in the apartment across the street. He’d watch her eating meals, getting dressed, having sex. “I told no one except the girl I was later to marry,” he writes. “She came back to my apartment with me one night and we sat and stared, neither of us saying a word, until exhaustion finally took us to bed with each other for the first time.” I have no idea if this is true. I hope it is.

I often feel that writers working in the New Journalism vein were self-conscious about being failed novelists. Do you get the impression Dunne felt this way?

That’s true of a lot of journalists of the era, but I wouldn’t call Dunne a failed novelist. His reputation has dwindled in recent years, and not without good reason—there’s a lot of ugliness in his work, especially his attitude toward women. When I told people I was writing about John Gregory Dunne, I often had to follow up with, “Joan Didion’s husband.” (On multiple occasions, this was met with some version of, “Oh, the guy who died!”) But he was hugely successful in his day. True Confessions, his 1977 noir novel based on the Black Dahlia murder, was a best seller even before the De Niro/Duvall adaptation came out.

Many of the pleasures of that novel are similar to those you find in Dunne’s nonfiction, especially the grubby fascination with corruption and dealmaking, even at the smallest possible scale. Here he is describing a corrupt cop eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant: “A meal on the cuff and a twenty in a fortune cookie and Frank would let the Mah-Jongg game in the back survive for another month. Live and let live. It was the same with Frank’s suits. He knew the head of security out at Warner Brothers and Crotty would buy Sidney Greenstreet’s old suits after every picture for a dollar each.” Dunne’s feel for these types of petty conspiracies conveys a richly detailed, cloistered social world, usually in some Irish Catholic urban enclave. Some writers have a talent for describing families; his was for neighborhoods.

That said, I do think that Dunne, for all his success, had a terrible case of status anxiety. Nobody who talks about going to Princeton as much as he did can be entirely without insecurity.

You mention that Dunne used the profits from his screenplays to fund books like Vegas. Why do you think this kind of writing—reportorial, novelistic, confessional—was more meaningful to him than writing for Hollywood? After all, A Star Is Born made him a lot of money.

Dunne was suspiciously adamant about this: screenwriting is not writing. He and Didion turned out great scripts, but I think he viewed those moments at the desk as just one small part of the screenwriter’s job. The rest was all sausage-making. “Finish a book and there is a sense of accomplishment,” he once said. “Finish a script and the shit starts.” He compared it to working at Time magazine, where it didn’t matter who first put pen to paper—the final product was unrecognizable, and could only really be said to have been written by Time itself. He thought screenwriting should be done only by people who primarily either write books or direct movies, because you’re only really making art if you have a degree of creative control. Without that, you’re just someone’s employee. (“Writing scripts and not wanting to direct them is like wanting to be a copilot,” he once wrote.)

Why do it at all, then? I like the answer Dunne gave to this question in 1974, the same year that Vegas was published: “Because the money is good. Because doing a screenplay is like doing a combination jigsaw and crossword puzzle—it’s not writing, but it can be fun—and because the other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand. I never did that at Time.”

Las Vegas has obviously changed a lot since the 1970s. Did reading Dunne’s book make you want to visit more or less?

Dunne’s book made me a more selfish and venal person. I’d go if the money was good.