After working at Time magazine for five years, John Gregory Dunne quit and married Joan Didion, “which was,” writes Charlie Lee in our May 28 issue, “possibly the best decision an ambitious young writer and high-society aspirant could have made in the year 1964.” But by the early 1970s, “overtaken by a creeping, directionless despair” and feuding with his wife, Dunne “traveled to Las Vegas with a plan to spend the summer slumming among its seedier denizens and writing a portrait of the city.”

The resulting book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season—which was reprinted last year with a new introduction—was a fitting assignment. Dunne “was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack.” And in Vegas he found the perfect material:

Dice salesmen, exterminators, contraceptive wholesalers, bail bondsmen, toupee stylists, bookies, bellhops, pimps: they all want to talk about money, who has it and who doesn’t, and what you can buy with it, and how to get more of it right now. Dunne haunts the city’s health clubs and steam rooms, eavesdropping on “the dialogue of the used-car tycoon and the parking-lot mogul.”

Below, alongside Lee’s essay, are five of Dunne’s articles about the distasteful and the gutter-bound from our archives.

What Happened in Vegas

Charlie Lee

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: flip through his interviews and you’ll discover a recitation of dollar figures, buyout clauses, basis points. The man rattles off contract terms as a priest recalls the catechism. Here are some snippets from a 1996 interview ostensibly on the “art of screenwriting”:

He paid off our contract at forty cents on the dollar.... To our amazement it sold to some studio, I think it was CBS, which paid us fifty thousand dollars.... We’ve written twenty-three books between us and movies financed nineteen out of the twenty-three.... Six figures a week if you’re any good, hundred grand at the minimum.... Look. It pays a lot and it’s fun.

It does sound like fun.

In Dunne’s actual work—that is, the novels, memoirs, and reported yarns he “financed” by writing movies with his wife, Joan Didion—a great deal of the fun has to do with his exquisite sensitivity to such base particulars. He was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack. Reading him is a bit like walking into a mahogany-paneled library only to find smut on the shelves and shag carpet under your feet. Like any worthy gossip he was known to launch into conversations with the phrase “This you will not believe.” And it wasn’t just about money: as a reporter, his other most abiding subjects were the murky, byzantine maneuvers by which people go about getting famous, getting laid, and getting arrested. “I am drawn to the Santa Monica Courthouse,” he confessed, “the way some people are drawn to church.”

Sometimes, if the fates and the whims of magazine editors aligned, he got to cover all those subjects at once—as when, in 1994, he wrote in these pages about the case of O.J. Simpson. He seems to have been less interested in the murders themselves than in what people said about them, in “the facts, the factoids, the allegations, the half-truths, the untruths, the leaks, the smears.” He wanted the jokes, especially the bad ones: “Did you hear that O.J.’s signed a new contract with Hertz... he’s going to be making license plates for them.... The bad news is O.J.’s going to prison, the good news is that Michael Jackson’s taking the kids.” Most of all, he wanted to know who was getting in on the action, and how. Whatever happened inside the courtroom was less revealing, and less delicious, than the fact that a recent girlfriend of O.J.’s had “parlayed her affair with Simpson into a photo feature in the October Playboy,” or that executives at Universal Pictures had plastered an eighteen-wheeler truck with an ad for their latest superhero flick, The Shadow, and parked it outside the courthouse, where it would be sure to appear in the background of all the news coverage. As one executive put it, “What’s a studio to do when they’ve got close to 100 million viewers watching?”

It’s an odd, at times disturbing piece of writing. Dunne has little sympathy for the victims; his fascination with all manner of sleaziness was so totalizing that it could come at the expense of simple decency. But the essay’s failings are revealing in their own way: in Dunne’s telling, the O.J. story was less a tragedy than a farce, and its central, bumbling villains were not the murderer and his entourage but the reporters—himself included—who descended to get it all in print. He found their instincts dubious, to say nothing of their intentions. Before the night of June 12, 1994, he observed, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown had been “characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity.” That is, they had not spent their painful, messy lives trying to make their deaths an intelligible event. But when one of the most famous men in America was arrested in connection with their murders, “all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime,” Dunne wrote. “The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card,” and this the reporters were happy to provide. The story and its moral came together not in the courtroom but in the conversations they had with one another, or with their editors, in bars or restaurants or on the phone after the workday was over, when they could spend their time “refining and polishing a story by accretion, a narrative that may or may not tell the story of what actually happened.”

It’s an idea that shows up often in Dunne’s work and that, in previous decades, had animated some of the best of it: the suspicion that, if you were to examine the soul of a reporter—even one less partial to prurient fare than Dunne—you would find that telling “the story of what actually happened” did not quite number among his highest priorities. The trueborn reporter will keep a little side action going. His darker purpose could be financial, as in most professions; it could be aesthetic; it could be ideological, as Dunne discovered during the five years he spent in the early 1960s working at Time, a magazine he later described as lacking any “pretense to objectivity,” particularly on the subject of Vietnam. Or it could be personal—as I suspect it was for Dunne in the early 1970s, when he traveled to Las Vegas with a plan to spend the summer slumming among its seedier denizens and writing a portrait of the city. He came back instead with Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which in his typical furtive fashion reads more like a portrait of himself.

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

From the Archives: John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003)

• On the O.J. Simpson trial

• On Natalie Wood’s gilt-edged Hollywood

• On the Billionaire Boys Club’s murderous moneymaking

• On the dissolute life of Sam Spiegel

• On working for Time

Fred Astaire was born 127 years ago today. In the Review’s April 5, 2012, issue, Arlene Croce wrote about his more than seventy-year career. From some of the earliest sound films to one of his final public performances, on The Dick Cavett Show, Astaire was an innovator in dance, film, and music. As Croce argues, “any way he cared to entertain us was the right way”

They’re the Top

Arlene Croce

Now that The Artist has whetted our interest in the silent film and the revolutionary impact of sound, it may be time to reconsider the career of the man who made the conversion to sound the basis of a whole new kind of movie, Fred Astaire. The Artist suggests quite accurately that the definitive event of the new sound era was the arrival of the film musical. Sound meant music; music meant jazz. But the technological transition was slow. After the first feature-length sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred Al Jolson, it was six years before the advent of the Jazz Dancer proved that talking and even singing mouths were not nearly as expressive in the new medium as dancing feet, especially and almost exclusively the feet of Fred Astaire. Astaire and the difference he made to the film musical add up to more than the story of one career. No other film genre provided as perfect a synchronization of sight and sound or an experience as exhilarating, and that was very largely Astaire’s doing.

The title of Todd Decker’s highly specialized, richly detailed book, Music Makes Me, comes from the Vincent Youmans song to which Astaire danced his first screen solo, in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Earlier in the movie, Ginger Rogers sang it:

I like music old and new,
But music makes me do the things
I never should do.

As Decker notes, Rogers’s rendition is sexy, but when Astaire blasts off, the meaning changes: music makes him dance. His timing, as usual, was impeccable. Decker places the Astaire of the 1930s at the confluence of the trends in movies, big-band jazz (or swing), radio, and recordings that were changing the tone of American life. The songwriting industry had conformed instantly to this new pattern: suddenly a hit song was no longer sheet music on people’s piano racks; it was the air they breathed.

No matter that as a singer Astaire was not in a class with Jolson and Crosby, or with Crosby and Sinatra. By the end of the swing era he had introduced more outstanding songs than anybody else, twenty-six by Irving Berlin alone. Astaire was himself a songwriter whose skill in manipulating musical material other songwriters knew they could trust. Decker, the first writer to pay close attention to the full range of Astaire’s musical choices, is also a fine judge of his artistic sensibilities. And so was Astaire: in a ringingly declarative sentence, quoted from the uncut manuscript of his autobiography, Steps in Time (1959), he separates himself from colleagues who only performed. That sentence, which Decker uses as a chapter head, is “I am a creator” (Astaire’s italics).

In Hollywood (appropriately, Astaire signed with the studio called Radio Pictures), the one aspect of the business that did not engage him was the content of complete motion pictures. He was not even interested in complete production numbers, leaving the staging of ensembles to others. What Astaire produced was himself, in all his variety—as soloist, as partner, as singer, as actor, as instrumentalist (piano, drums). He choreographed all his own numbers, usually with the assistance of his near double Hermes Pan; he supervised the filming and cutting; and before choreographing a number he worked out its whole musical structure, often basing it on an introductory song by Berlin or Gershwin or Kern or, just as often, on improvisations by rehearsal pianists. His interventions weren’t just tolerated at RKO but welcomed, and he was always the main link between the composers, whom of course he knew personally, and the studio’s musicians and arrangers. In short, wherever you looked in the musical as opposed to the scenic and dramatic process, you found Astaire.

In the connection between tap dancing and swing Astaire seems to have touched a live wire that led straight to the heart of sound-film sensation, and it’s no coincidence that his solos, where he tapped like mad, were also the places where he ventured effects that were only possible on film. For Astaire, these were double-edged innovations. If film could magnify the tap dancer, it could also expose him. If the musical film existed to be set afire by Astaire, it was also his salvation. Beneath the experimentation there was always the fact that he had made his film debut at thirty-four, a dauntingly late age for a dancer. In that one sense, the time for Fred Astaire was out of joint. Ingenious use of the medium became a way of disguising the lessening of his capacities as a virtuoso tap dancer.

It was more than that, of course—any way he cared to entertain us was the right way. I don’t think we realize even now that Astaire was able to make deep connections to the medium in dances that could as well have been performed on the stage, and this is where as a technician he becomes truly uncanny. The title number in Top Hat (1935) was one he actually had done on the stage. With new music by Berlin it became a prized movie moment, Astaire’s signature number.

As with all great dancers, Astaire’s technique was an expression of his imagination. It was the braiding of swing rhythms together with his personal tap technique (which had to have been an extension of his drumming, or vice versa) that made him the great and unique dancer that he was. But as a film phenomenon he was twice as great. Decker is right to insist that Astaire’s persona was a cinematic creation. Graham Greene said much the same thing in a 1936 review when he compared Astaire to Mickey Mouse. Even without movie tricks, against certain musical backgrounds he could seem other than human. (The only good thing in Vincente Minnelli’s 1945 film Yolanda and the Thief is the casting of Fred Astaire as an angel.)

Decker, who wants to move Astaire seamlessly across the divisions in popular music and dance styles from the Twenties to the Sixties, reminds us that by the time of his first television special in 1958 he had long since been doing less tapping and more body movement. The women he partnered had gotten younger and younger and, except for Barrie Chase, his TV partner, less and less accomplished as dancers, and some were virtual novices. In the Fifties and Sixties, aging male stars all had their young female costars. I think Astaire actually may have preferred young partners for their osmotic connection to the youth culture and its dance fads, and also for their malleability; they could be taught. But with ballet-trained Cyd Charisse in “Dancing in the Dark” (The Bandwagon, 1953) he brought off his best romantic duet since the great series with Rogers.

That duet functions beautifully both as pure dance and as plot hinge: Charisse is a ballerina, Astaire is Astaire. Dubiously cast together in a new show, they need to know if they can be dance partners. Tentatively at first, then more decisively, Charisse responds to Astaire’s touch. Decker devotes three pages of approval to this dance, but none at all to the one it is modeled on, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (from Follow the Fleet, 1936). This is recognizably a “seduction” number, of the type that Astaire patented with Rogers, but with one crucial variation: Astaire does not want to seduce Rogers but to bring her back from the brink of suicide and restore her to the living. The whole scene is presented as a drama complete in itself, isolated from the rest of the movie. Although Decker is as impatient as Astaire was with issues of integration and motivation, he accepts “Let’s Face the Music” on its own terms as a book number.

But he is quite wrong to say that Astaire’s treatment of Berlin’s great ballad “lacks any dramatic through line.” The two dancers are distinctively characterized: Astaire is the continually active partner, while Rogers is continually passive, gradually gaining confidence until she is able to join him in that huge burst of a side-by-side exit. The drama is so deeply embedded in the dance that it may take several reseeings to grasp it all, as I was finally able to discover to my regret, years after having published a rhapsodic account of the number; the artist in Astaire simply wouldn’t let him “act” a story when he could dance it. We all love “Never Gonna Dance,” the lyrical climax of Swing Time (1936), but it may have contained too much plot-dependent dancing to suit Astaire. Today, in large-screen DVD viewing, “Let’s Face the Music” stands as the apotheosis of Astaire-Rogers.

In MGM’s Royal Wedding (1951), Astaire and Jane Powell play characters based on himself and his sister Adele, notwithstanding the fact that Adele was nearly three years older than Fred and Powell was thirty years younger. Fred and Adele Astaire are still remembered as one of the greatest acts to play the Broadway and London stage, but compared to her brother, Adele, the star of the act, is now almost forgotten. Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires is the first full-length study of a fantastically charismatic figure. That charisma and the lateness of the hour make it a necessary but problematical book.

Riley, a passionate enthusiast of all things Astaire, is an academic historian engaged in what seems to be an all-out struggle with the limitations of theatrical biography. The question that nags the biographer of performing artists—but what did they do?—appears to have goaded her into injudicious attempts at interpretative description. The dizzying accolades Adele collected in her fifteen years of stardom (1917–1932) seem to call for some authoritative word of explanation. It is not to be had. One may describe actors—after all, they have texts—but trying to describe dancers in motion is a no-go proposition, the more so when they are theatrical wunderkinder, one of whom last performed publicly eighty years ago and was never filmed.

Even at the time, reviewers labored fruitlessly to pin Adele down in print. Her capacity for conquest was apparently limitless. At one end of her range she spread beauty and enchantment; at the other she mugged outrageously, earning the sobriquet Funny Face. She loved to cause scandal; she had a dirty mouth to do it with, and the sweetest of grins. Fred could only shudder and mark time until the riot died down.

Riley enters some new facts in the biographical record and quietly corrects others, such as that the Astaires, born in Omaha, came from a comfortable, “respectable” middle-class family. Their father, Frederic (Fritz) Austerlitz, emigrated from Vienna when he was twenty-four. Their mother, Johanna (Ann) Geilus, was the first-generation daughter of parents from East Prussia. Fritz’s parents were Jews who converted to Catholicism before he was born. In Vienna, Riley writes, Fritz had been “drawn longingly to Vienna’s café society, its artists, writers, musicians, and theater folk, and to life on the Ringstrasse, the elegant apotheosis of Jewish cosmopolitanism.” His desultory pursuit of a living in the New York of the 1890s ended when a business opportunity led him to Omaha, where he eventually became a beer salesman (not a brewer, as is commonly written), a job he kept probably because it favored his incipient alcoholism. Fritz was ineffectual, good-humored, affectionate, ever the cane-twirling dandy. His musical talent was passed on to his children, who adored him, especially Adele.

Ann Geilus was brought up in a strict Lutheran household. Her father was a furnace man in the Union Pacific shop and a drunkard. She was a gentle, retiring, responsible girl, swept off her feet by Fritz’s raffish worldliness and in the end defeated by it. They separated when Adele and Fred were eight and five, after a local dance teacher urged them to put the children on the stage in New York. Fritz saw a child act as the fulfillment of his theatrical ambitions; Ann saw an escape from a dead marriage and a chance to lead an independent, venturesome life. The two never divorced. Fritz stayed in Omaha (where as time passed he may have become a bigamist) and wired Ann money while she shepherded the kids through New York’s dancing schools and boardinghouses. When Fritz visited New York, they all ate at Luchow’s.

In vaudeville, the grinding schedule of rehearsal and performance made a workaholic of Fred and a slacker of Adele. With her huge natural talent, sparkling presence, and spontaneous wit, she could go on stage with no preparation and improvise, to his intense dismay. Nearly a head taller than her brother at that point, she dominated the stage. The children took their opposite personalities from their parents: Adele had her father’s frivolity; Fred, his mother’s reticence and grit. One has to wonder about gentle, sweet-faced women (the mother of Lillian and Dorothy Gish was another) who, from God knows what combination of desperation and ambition, subjected their young children to the frightful ordeal and sordid atmosphere of vaudeville. Maybe when the act went over Ann Astaire could feel justified. When it flopped, the children went to their dressing rooms and cried. Backstage, Adele thumbed her nose at the audience and stuck out her tongue.

Riley’s coverage of the vaudeville years is basically an expansion of Astaire’s own vivid chapters in which recollections of scarifying reviews drove him constantly to bewail his inadequacy as Adele’s partner. The inferiority complex lasted into the big time. Without jiggling Adele’s perch, Riley rights the balance:

The New York opening [of Over the Top] on 28 November 1917 met with mixed reviews, but most critics singled out the Astaires as a rare highlight in an otherwise mediocre entertainment, with the honors divided almost evenly between brother and sister. Louis Sherwin of the New York Globe wrote: “One of the prettiest features of the show is the dancing of the two Astaires. The girl, a light, spritelike little creature, has really an exquisite floating style in her caperings, while the young man combines eccentric agility with humor.

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

Halfway through her review of Liza Minnelli’s memoir, in our May 28 issue, Frances Wilson talks about love. Minnelli, she writes, has the “capacity to fall in love instantly, as though hypnotized.” This kind of helpless love is a trait that seems to unite many of the subjects Wilson has written about in the Review. Sybille Bedford’s “hunger for love was insatiable”; Patricia Highsmith could fall “in love at first sight and she could fall in love several times in one night.” In the Mitford family, the women “fell in love with their masters, whom they then worshiped,” and in Iris Murdoch’s world, “falling in love always happens instantly.” It also provides Wilson a window into her subjects’ deeper concerns, whether it’s George Orwell’s love for roses demonstrating the value he gave to pleasure or Minnelli’s love for her mother reflecting her fear of becoming her. This is not to say that love defines these people, but it certainly sets the stage. “Enter Minnelli’s ghoulish fourth husband,” Wilson writes, “the one we have all been waiting for.”

Wilson is a historian and biographer in her own right, having written books about D.H. Lawrence, Thomas De Quincey, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Muriel Spark, among others. In our pages she has also written about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Tove Jansson, Katherine Mansfield, and Charlotte Brontë, and her essays about everyone from Princess Diana to Charles Dickens to Clarence Thomas can be found in the TLS, The New Statesman, The Guardian, and many other publications.

I wrote to Wilson this week to ask her about Minnelli, ghostwriters, addiction memoirs, and the pursuit of style in biography.

Chandler Fritz: I gather you aren’t a true Liza fan—that is, you didn’t go into this assignment knowing every word of “Say Liza (Liza with a ‘Z’)” by heart—but did reading about her life and watching some of her performances shake anything loose for you? Is there something about her art form that will stick with you?

Frances Wilson: Reading Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! certainly shook something loose for me—that’s a fine way of putting it. Minnelli’s appeal, like that of Princess Diana, is that she has suffered as much as her fans; she performed with empathy, and I became fascinated by how her emotional load fired her performances and stirred up her audience. What I had not recognized before about her art was its closeness to exorcism, and also to matricide: Minnelli was exploding Garland out of her system. Even on the small screen, watching her break the sound barrier was like participating in a cult ritual.

You describe the book, which was cowritten by two journalists using transcripts of conversations between Minnelli and her close friend Michael Feinstein, as “a team effort not unlike the construction of a musical.” This seems a perhaps more than usually frank acknowledgment of the industry involved in publishing books, especially celebrity memoirs. How do you evaluate ghostwritten memoirs relative to those purportedly written by their credited authors? Do you grade on a kind of curve?

Most memoirists Botox out their own imperfections, but celebrity ghostwriters tend to do the full face-lift, which is not surprising given that celebrity memoirs usually serve as promotional material. I don’t at all think that ghostwritten, or team-written, memoirs are inferior—quite the opposite. I like the idea of detaching the subject from their story. I was relieved, for example, that Prince Harry didn’t write Spare himself; would that all memoirs were as articulate.

Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans have done an excellent job catching Minnelli’s conversational energy while maintaining the contradictions in her character: if I were to grade ghosted memoirs, Kids would get top score. It is, as you say, unusual to acknowledge the teamwork that goes into making books of this kind, but the most curious aspect of Kids is the serenading of Michael Feinstein, who surely did little more than turn on the tape recorder and have a chat with his friend. Crediting him on the cover is wonderfully ironic given the significance for Minnelli of being billed alongside her mother for the London Palladium. Adding to the irony is Garland and Minnelli’s shared history—described by Minnelli in detail—of putting their lives in the hands of gay men. This is quite literally what she has done here.

I’m fascinated by the transactions involved in ghostwriting. The relationship is as bound by loyalty as the one between the psychoanalyst and their client, so it is rare to hear the inside story. Jennie Erdal’s Ghosting describes her experience of writing for twenty years on behalf of the louche publisher Naim Attallah; when Attallah wanted to put his name on a 1,200-page book of interviews with famous women, Erdal wrote his questions and transcribed the answers; she also ghosted his novels and his articles for the Erotic Review. Her role in Attallah’s life, she says, was akin to selling her soul, and his demands on her time destroyed her marriage.

Several of my friends have ghosted, and what they all say is that the putative author always believes, once the book is finished, that they in fact wrote it themselves and the ghost was simply the scribe. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I once heard an “author”—who had done absolutely nothing—tell his ghost as he vigorously shook her hand. Attallah even took credit for Erdal’s exposé of him: “One of the things I have achieved, I recognize talent, if you like,” he boasted in an interview with The Bookseller. The ghosts themselves don’t always stay invisible but leave their trace on the page. “Writing is always personal,” Erdal concedes. “You reveal yourself to yourself.”

Minnelli’s memoir doubles as a story of recovery. You’ve written a whole book on the original addiction memoirist, Thomas De Quincey. Has much changed in the genre since Confessions of an English Opium-Eater?

I’m glad you asked that question because I thought a good deal about De Quincey, the subject of my biography Guilty Thing, while I was reading Kids. De Quincey invented the genre that we now call “quit lit,” although he lied, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, when he said that he was freed from the curse of opium—or rather laudanum, because he dissolved the drug in alcohol. There wasn’t a day when De Quincey didn’t take opium; his Confessions were written on opium; he even described opium as the “hero” of the book, and he continued to take it for the rest of his life. His lie would have put him in the stocks today, but in 1822 there was no presumption that a memoirist was required to tell the truth.

De Quincey’s hymn to the celestial substance that was “the secret of happiness” was so enticing that he was accused of creating a nation of addicts. But the readers of his Confessions were a nation of addicts to begin with because opium was the only available pain relief, as essential to a household as aspirin today. Even dogs were dosed with it. De Quincey blamed his addiction on the emotionally numbing effects of the drug itself—“Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket”—while Minnelli describes her addictive personality as burned into her DNA. Her grandmother, mother, and siblings were also addicts. In addition to pills and alcohol, her never-ending need to love and be loved also read as addictive to me.

Recovery memoirs now are two a penny and should be filed under self-help. What’s interesting about Kids is that while Minnelli claims to be telling a tale of addiction, she—or her ghosts—keep going off track, and the theme that becomes central to the story is her fear of becoming her mother.

In your review of Roger Lewis’s dual biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you note how Lewis’s strange writing style recreates, in a way, the strangeness of his subjects’ stardom. What do you think is the proper function of style in literary biography? Should the biographer’s style put us in the mind of her subject?

My constant gripe about biographies is how poorly written they often are, and Roger Lewis is an exuberant exception to the rule. I wish literary biographers paid more attention to style rather than providing the usual roll call of facts and dates, as though they were compiling an obituary or Wikipedia entry. Janet Malcolm was right in The Silent Woman when she described how readers of biographies tolerate any amount of bad writing in the belief that they are having an elevating experience. Her insight should be torn out of the book and pinned above the desk of every biographer.

I don’t think the literary biographer’s style should put us in the mind of their subject, but imbibing a writer’s style is one way of accessing their mind. It is impossible, when a biographer is totally immersed—or possessed—by the subject, not to merge with them in some way; Muriel Spark was surprised to find, when she revised her life of Mary Shelley thirty years after its first publication, that she had unconsciously taken on something of Shelley’s style.

I consciously write bespoke biographies, cutting my cloth to fit my subject. It’s a form of homage for me to write a De Quinceyian life of De Quincey, a Lawrencian life of D.H. Lawrence, or a Sparkian biography of Spark.

Did you ever meet Dame Muriel? Were there any challenges that came with writing a biography of someone whose life overlapped with your own, rather than a historical figure?

I didn’t meet Spark, although I know many people who did. Meeting her would have made little difference to the book because Electric Spark is about understanding her as a writer rather than as a woman; she put everything she was into her novels and instructed us to read them “between the lines,” so this is what I did. Although I discovered Spark in the 1980s, I did not see her life as overlapping with my own in Electric Spark because my focus was on her time as an apprentice mage in the Forties and Fifties, before she became famous. It was a strange experience, however, to write about someone so recently dead, before her reputation has settled. Her presence was still so fresh that I felt at times as though I, too, were ghostwriting.

Whither the Nerd-Bully?

Ben Tarnoff

When I was thirteen, I snuck into a theater to see South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The film is so vulgar that the Motion Picture Association of America insisted on giving it an R rating, which is why I had to sneak in. I’m glad I did. I have never laughed harder in my life.

What I remember most clearly is a scene that involves Bill Gates. It begins with a US Army general briefing a group of soldiers. In the middle of his presentation, his computer crashes. He demands to see Gates, who is promptly hauled out. “You told us that Windows 98 would be faster and more efficient, with better access to the Internet!” yells the general. “It is faster,” Gates insists—and the general shoots him in the face.

Everyone in the theater cheered when this happened. Loud, joyous cheering. How hated do you have to be, I remember thinking at the time, for your point-blank execution to elicit such unanimous delight?

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

Mommie Dearest

Frances Wilson

On May 28, two days after the body of her eldest sister, Suzy, was found in her Las Vegas home, [Judy] Garland took an overdose in Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. She was in a coma for more than fifteen hours, and the tabloids excitedly reported the star’s death. On June 12, her divorce from Luft not yet finalized, Garland married [Mark] Herron in a ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. On July 20 she cut her wrists in London, and on July 23, only hours out of the hospital, she sang—against medical advice—at the Palladium for the charity gala Night of a Hundred Stars. The applause was rapturous. The Palladium saved her, and she was determined to return. That November, no longer able to do a show on her own, she invited her eighteen-year-old daughter to join her. “A lot of people have tried to explain the history of this concert,” Liza Minnelli says in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, her riveting new memoir. “Here’s what really happened.”

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

‘Facing the Past’

Christopher Tayler

When we meet the unnamed narrator of Ben Lerner’s latest novel, he is holding an unread book and toying with his phone. The setting is a train to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is going to interview an eminent German polymath named Thomas, his old mentor from his college days there. It’s 2024; Thomas has just turned ninety. It’s possible that this will be their last meeting, not to mention Thomas’s last published interview. The narrator needs to think up a good opening question, but he can’t focus on the great man’s latest book because he has a seat “facing opposite the direction of travel…. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am ‘facing the past.’” Instead he texts with his wife, then dozes and has an uneasy dream.

By the end of this unemphatic three-page sequence, Transcription has dealt out most of the cards that it will go on to manipulate with some dazzling flourishes and much use of misdirection. There’s a kernel of drama—the looming encounter with a figure with whom the narrator has a charged, quasi-filial relationship—and there are already three generations in play, with the narrator, who’s forty-five, having to worry about all of them.

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

Indiana’s Indiana Jones

Nina Siegal

In April 2014 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the family farm of Don Miller, a ninety-year-old electrical engineer and amateur archaeologist, and seized thousands of artifacts, skulls, and other bones that he had stolen from indigenous burial grounds and cultural heritage sites across the globe. Miller had hoarded his plunder in his house, his barns, and a disused fallout shelter in Rush County, Indiana.

Investigators found that he had also created eccentric and morbid displays: “arrowheads hammered into a skull for dramatic effect, a baby’s skull repurposed as an apple bowl.” Bones were mixed with animal remains, “strewn across shelves and stuffed into tote bags…. They were filthy with grime and black mold, infested with silverfish.” Mice were nesting in skulls. In a locked room, there was a nearly complete skeleton laid out on red felt cloth in a glass case labeled “Sioux Warrior, 19th Cent.,” which Miller claimed was the remains of Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota leader of a rebellion against the US military. Miller was so attached to it that he told his friends, “I want you to bury me with my Indian.”

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

More from the May 28 issue…

• Christopher de Bellaigue on Iran’s political future

• Lynn Hunt on Marat’s afterlife

• Jarrett Earnest on the liberatory power of pop music

• Samuel Earle on Walter Lippmann’s twentieth century

• Charlie Lee on John Gregory Dunne’s descent into Vegas

• Adam Hochschild on the dream of the Bundists

• Louisa Lim on contemporary Hong Kong literature

• Prudence Peiffer on New York’s 1960s avant-garde

• David Wheatley on two poets who transcend Scottish sentimentalism

• poems by Dan Chiasson and Emily Berry

On the inconstant list of reasons given by United States officials for initiating a war in Iran, at least one seemed to indicate an interest in a better future: “All I want is freedom for the [Iranian] people,” President Trump said in late February. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christopher de Bellaigue asks how that’s going:

Iranian democrats who were “against the war” desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.… The agony of ordinary Iranians, meanwhile, is forgotten.

Iran is entering a new winter of political failure that will be harder than that of the prerevolutionary period, when the experience of being insulted and infantilized by a crowned despot was alleviated somewhat by rising living standards. There is no such comfort now.

The destruction of civilian infrastructure by US and Israeli bombs has contributed to catastrophic inflation and the further immiseration of ordinary Iranians. The assassinations of Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders, meanwhile, have entrenched a new generation of rulers and strengthened the Revolutionary Guard, which has tightened its control over civic life and continued the violent suppression of dissent. As Bellaigue reminds us, “War breeds tyrants.”

Below, alongside Bellaigue’s essay, are six articles and from our archives about the ongoing disaster in Iran.

Iran’s New Winter

Christopher de Bellaigue

n 1953 Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was toppled in a coup planned by MI6 and the CIA and carried out by Iranian army units and hoodlums supportive of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s British-run oil industry and allowed Iranians more freedom than they had ever known; the constitutional monarchy he favored was a path between the extremes of royal tyranny and popular radicalism that had beset the country for the previous three quarters of a century. In the years after Mossadegh’s overthrow, as the Shah built a dictatorship backed uncritically by the United States, Iranian democrats and liberals sank into a despondency that was expressed in works of art, perhaps the most lasting of which, the poem “Winter” by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, describes the insidious effect of political failure on the spirit of the individual and the cohesion of society:

They do not wish to return your greeting, their heads are buried in their collars,
No one dares raise their head to greet, to acknowledge friends,
They see no further than their own foot,
For the path is dark and slippery,
And if you stretch a kindly hand toward someone,
They withdraw their hand from their coat-pocket with reluctance,
So searing is the cold.
The breath that rises warm from the chest turns to a dark cloud,
Standing like a wall before your eyes,
So much for breath; what do you hope to gain from meeting the eyes of friends
Near or far?

The revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979 was supported by the country’s liberals and leftists, but the government that replaced him was captured by hard-line theocrats and their followers in the Revolutionary Guard. Iran spent the next four and a half decades waging wars hot and cold, covert and declared, its hostility toward the West hardly wavering, regardless of the price to be paid in hardship at home and ostracism abroad.

The Islamic Republic was a pariah long before its latest war with the United States and Israel. Its economy has been crippled by sanctions and the corruption that is their concomitant, its middle class increasingly inured to privation, its workers crushed by inflation and the nonpayment of salaries, and life for all marred by the power outages, water shortages, and unchecked pollution that are the ambient signifiers of the failing state.

And yet the regime has repeatedly belied predictions of its demise, saved by revenue from the oil it sells to China and by a hard core of ideologues who retain a monopoly on force and a readiness to employ it against dissidents whom they view, without irony, as the agents of Satan. In January they suppressed mass protests with unprecedented savagery at the cost of thousands of lives. In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists. My Iranian dentist in London was congratulated by his Malaysian, Pakistani, and Indonesian patients on the pluck exhibited by a regime he detests, which shows how cleverly the Islamic Republic wages the propaganda war.

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

From the Archives: War in Iran

• Will Alden on the pro-Pahlavi community in Los Angeles

• Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s disembodied warmongering

• Caitlin L. Chandler on Europe’s timid response

• Amir Ahmadi Arian on a helpless view of his homeland from abroad

• Orly Noy on being Iranian in Israel

• Arang Keshavarzian on what fueled the protests that preceded the war

Join New York Review contributor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson for a four-part seminar on the New Testament. Sessions, to be hosted on Zoom, begin May 6. Purchase tickets here.

Two hundred and eighteen years ago today, French troops occupying Madrid in support of Napoleon’s bid to install his brother as the king of Spain rounded up and executed hundreds of Spaniards and executed them in the streets. In 1814, with Joseph Bonaparte safely deposed, Francisco Goya painted The Third of May 1808, a commemoration of the victims of Napoleon’s campaign.

In the Review’s June 29, 1989, issue, Robert Hughes wrote about a major Goya show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and included an extended analysis of The Third of May 1808, a painting not in the Met’s show.

The Liberal Goya

Robert Hughes

1.

I think most of us would agree that the Goya exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is the most powerful show in town. We can say this even though it doesn’t give us the whole Goya. We can feel it because he speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible century, Goya looking in at a time worse than his.

You can make a proto-modernist out of Goya, just as the nineteenth century made him a proto-Romantic and then a proto-Realist. His dismembered carcasses in the Disasters of War directly inspired Géricault’s. Manet assiduously imitated him—his Parisiennes on the balcony are Goya’s majas transposed to Paris, his bullfight is a direct homage to Goya’s Tauromaquia. Dali constantly invoked him and from L’Age d’Or to The Exterminating Angel Luis Buñuel’s films elliptically refer to Goya and constitute a cinematic parallel to his eighty prints about the sexual and social follies of Spanish society high and low, the Caprichos.

Picasso, of course, meditated on Goya from first to last and was always scared of the comparison. Among Americans, to name only a couple, Goya surfaces dramatically in late works of Philip Guston (so many of which seem like homages to the Caprichos) and in the tragic blacks and humped profiles of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic.

But you cannot make Goya into a proto-post-modernist. He is never trivial enough for that. It is the wholeness of his fiction, its unremitting earnestness, its desire to know and tell the truth, that our art has currently lost.

This is what used to be meant when a great artist was called “universal.” The term can’t be taken literally—there is no imaginable Goya that could mean as much to a Chinese as to a European—but it does suggest the power of such artists to keep appealing through their imagery to very different people along the strand of a common cultural descent, so that even when beliefs have lost their fervency, when both the oppressors and the oppressed are dead, when the references of religion and popular culture have changed, as they certainly have between Madrid in 1809 and New York in 1989—still we venture to claim Goya as our own. Our ability to describe ourselves is somewhat inflected by this man’s paintings, drawings, and prints.

We could not claim this for any of his Spanish contemporaries. It doesn’t entirely rest on his greatness as an artist either, since other great painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries don’t have Goya’s ability to project their images from their time into ours. No matter how much we love Watteau, his sense of society is closed to us forever; we will never be able to imagine ourselves taking part in those rituals on the shaven lawns of the paradise garden. But Goya is a different matter.

Two paintings that are not in the Metropolitan show underscore why nobody should call it a Goya retrospective, an event that now will never take place. The paintings commemorate a rising that touched off Spain’s War of Independence against France. On May 2, 1808, in the Puerta del Sol in the very heart of Madrid, a crowd of citizens turned into what authority would call a mob and attacked a detachment of Mameluke cavalry—the predecessors, one might say, of Franco’s Moors—led by the French general, Murat. One painting by Goya records the moment: the Dos de Mayo. A second, the Tres de Mayo, commemorates the next night’s reprisals, in which about forty madrileños found with weapons were summarily shot by French firing squads behind the hill of Principe Pio, outside Madrid.

The Second of May is a fine painting but not a great one; it is renovated Baron Gros with its heroic rocking horse, without the French etiquette of violence, and more abandoned in expressions. The Third of May (see page 28) is not renovated anything. It is truly modern and its newness seems to have ensured that, though a state commission, it remained in storage for the first forty years of its life.

The surface is ragged, for Goya is suppressing his fluency in the interests of a harsher address to the eye. Occasionally the signs of that fluency break through—one is the saber and sheath of the French soldier closest to us—a mere scribble, but what a scribble, of burnt umber, lightened by a swipe of yellow that begins in a round splotch at the tip of the sheath and swings right up the form. Elsewhere the improvised bluntness of his painting is tragically expressive, even—or perhaps especially—down to the blood on the ground, which is a dark alizarin crimson put on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that its sinking into the grain of the canvas mimics the drying of blood itself: it looks crusty, dull, and scratchy, just like real blood smeared on a surface by the involuntary twitches of a dying body. The wounds that disfigure the face of the man on the ground can’t be deciphered fully as wounds, but as signs of trauma embodied in paint they are inexpressibly shocking: their imprecision conveys the sense of something too painful to look at, of the aversion of one’s own eyes.

Signs of past art are there: I suspect that the array of French barrels and bayonets carries a small sharp echo of a more triumphal and chivalrous military piece, well-known to Goya: the palisade of lances in Velasquez’s Surrender of Breda. Above all, there is the man about to be shot, whom we saw dragging the Mameluke backward off his horse on May Second. There he now stands, in his clean white shirt, throwing out his arms in a gesture that irresistibly recalls the Crucifixion. It is a gesture of indescribable power: it takes the spread arms of the passive crucified victim and makes them active, a flinging out of life in despair and defiance. Indeed, he has a face—coarse, swarthy, dilated in its last moment of vitality. All his fellow victims have faces too. By rendering them as national portraits—the faces of the pueblo—Goya grants the living their individually right up to the edge of the mass grave. The landscape, however, is featureless: a bare hill and bare rocks. And so are the soldiers, whose row of backs still strikes us as the first truly modern image of war because it is the first to register the anonymity, the machine-like efficiency, of oppression. Nothing personal.

We see only backs, braced forward into the recoil of those big .70-caliber flintlocks. And without knowing it, Goya piercingly anticipates our sense of modern documentary with that lantern: the minimal cube with its objective white light, presently to be invoked, in homage to Goya, by Picasso’s electric light in Guernica. In sum, this painting is as unlike all previous war paintings as Wilfred Owen’s writings from the trenches are unlike all Georgian and Victorian war poetry. And the difference is that Goya speaks for the victims: not only for those killed in French reprisals in Madrid, but for all the millions of individuals destroyed, before and since, in the name of The People. The Third of May is not a piece of reporting—any more than the Disasters of War will be. Goya didn’t see this scene; he almost certainly wasn’t there, though he was in Madrid. In any case it can’t have looked like this. But we can’t forget what he didn’t see.

I have dwelt on this painting because it exemplifies what is somewhat underplayed in the Metropolitan show. The idea of Goya as a man of the Enlightenment stops a long way short of explaining why his work has such a purchase on our imagination. The light of this lantern is not the light shed by Rousseau’s assumptions about the goodness of mankind, or by the hopes of the Spanish reformers that Goya saw crushed at the very moment in 1814 when he was painting The Third of May. They were crushed when that parody of kingship, Ferdinand VII, entered Madrid and, instead of restoring the rights of the Spanish people that Napoleon and the war had taken away, abolished the Constitution of 1812, and reinstated the Inquisition. To employ Milton’s stunning phrase about the illumination of Hell, it is “no light, but rather darkness visible.” Because The Third of May excites our pity and terror as no other painting of war has done—or, I suppose, will ever do—we incline to suppose that it does so in the name of liberal ideology.

But here our emphasis may be wrong. Perhaps in claiming Goya as a liberal we are only repeating the process by which successive moments of taste have appropriated him. There have been more than a few Goyas in the two hundred years since his birth. There was Goya the Romantic, the creation of writers like Théophile Gautier. We have had Goya the Man of the People, critic of established power and French imperialism, whose work argues for an immutable bedrock of his culture, the ser auténtico. His offspring is Goya the Incipient Marxist, in whose work the class struggle is set forth and predicted from the eye-line of the workers, a view based partly on his own humble birth—though it ignores some of Goya’s opinions of the common people, and creates problems when it comes to explaining his social climbing and canny self-interest. Then there is Goya the Surrealist, whose uncensored access to his own worst dreams would not be approached until the 1930s, with the anxious maturity of Picasso—and will certainly never be equaled.

There are other Goyas too—the existential one suggested by André Malraux’s Saturn, for instance—and in each a culture later than his own strives to locate itself, its own dreams, its own self-image. They are all partly true, and none of them wholly excludes the rest. For Goya’s personality was one of the richest and most various that an artist ever had: a remarkable blend of introspection, opportunism, and relentless curiosity; gluttonously drawn to the social framework but always alone among his fantasies.

He turns in the dark space of Bourbon history like a ball with mirrored facets, immediately casting back whatever pencil of light the specialist directs on him. He demands interpretation, he absorbs it and always seems to want more, because his work is so rich and so variegated.

So the latest Goya—the one the Metropolitan show invokes and to some degree invents—is Goya the Liberal. The use of the word “liberal” in its political sense began in Spain in his time, to distinguish reformers from the serviles, the conservatives who wanted no change in social ranking and the power of the Church and the Inquisition. It only got into English around 1830. Maybe the Spanish today want to stress Goya’s liberalism because they see their present king fulfilling the liberal promise of his ancestor Charles III in Goya’s time—and because Goya was too often claimed as “quintessentially Spanish” during the long Franco years. Maybe we like to hear it because American liberalism has taken such a beating from political speechwriters and TV preachers. That they could so easily turn America’s noblest tradition of political thought into the “L-word” is obscene, and perhaps it’s natural that survivors of this linguistic mugging should want to claim Goya as an ancestor for their own opinions about human freedom and rights. And there is a good deal of evidence for this in his work, especially the Caprichos, brilliantly explicated by Eleanor Sayre in the catalog. But it is not the whole story.

Goya’s liberalism is bound up with his class ambitions. In the late eighteenth century, which also saw the first phase of Goya’s career, Madrid had a thin veneer of ilustrados, whose influence was largely dependent on royal approval—which they got in plenty from Charles III. Their liberalism was safeguarded not by popular movements, but by the direct sympathy of the monarch. Like many of the aristocrats who supported the French Revolution in its pre-Jacobin years, they perceived their king as the caretaker of liberal reform.

But the common people and artisans from whose ranks Goya had risen were far more conservative. There was an immense chasm between popular and elite culture in Bourbon Spain. To the majo on the street, the ilustrado in the salon with his Frenchified ideas was virtually a foreigner. People rarely like the humanitarian plans of their social superiors. The culture of the Madrid pueblo had nothing to do with Beccaria or Diderot—or with Goya’s court portraits, for that matter. It was immersed in folk tales, superstitions, and ferociously dirty jokes. It clung to the bullfight; to flamenco singers and hellfire preachers; to the grotesque pantomimes known as tonadillas; to phantasmagorias full of witches and demons; to crude woodcuts and to a popular theater whose heroes were bandits, smugglers, and other enemies of authority; and to the codes of brash laconic dandyism and male bonding that were signified by the word majismo.

Aged forty-six, Goya painted himself as a majo (see page 29)—a costume which for an established court painter in the 1790s was roughly equivalent to black leather and jeans among New York artists in the Sixties. Populism stood for liberty—of a rough, conservative, intensely xenophobic kind, sentimental and hard-eyed by turns. And it was indissolubly linked to old Spain, black Spain, the Spain the ilustrados hoped to cure with their judicious enemas of liberal ideology. What the majos really thought of their would-be doctors and their medicine became brutally clear to Goya (and everyone else) after the Peninsular War broke out. They thought liberals were French quislings. The title of one plate from the Disasters of War is Popolacho, meaning “rabble” or “mob”—definitely not people; the victim on the ground is a liberal defrocked, and the instrument he is about to get the point of is a media luna, a tool with a half-moon cutter used to hamstring bulls. It was not etched by a man with stars in his eyes about the natural goodness of common folk.

The roots of Goya’s imagination were fixed deep in this world, and its imagery pervades his work. It is in some ways its deepest source. Yet his late work moves beyond purely Spanish concerns, though its dress is Spanish, and its encyclopedic despair and skepticism are just as much to do with his disillusionment at the failure of French revolutionary promises as with his loathing of the return of Spanish absolutism after the Peninsular War. He had followed the liberal blossoming of 1789, and the Paris bloodbath of the 1790s. He was the first great artist to bear witness to the atrocities committed by ideologues in the name of liberty. This was the Gorgon’s head of modern history. David could not look at it. But Goya could. And still he chose to spend his last years in France, and to die there. The developing drama of his work unfolds from his effort to move between these two mental worlds of the ilustrados and the pueblo, even as political events in Spain were tearing them apart. But the view he took of those events was deeply colored by his memories of the French Revolution, which is why no simple view of Goya as either a liberal or as a man of the people fits the late work.

When I first saw the current show in Boston I wanted to accept the Enlightenment view of Goya wholeheartedly, because it promised a way out of earlier stereotypes of the artist. It enables us to reread many of his images, even the most famous, such as the capricho El sueño de la razon, “The sleep of Reason brings forth monsters” (see opposite page). The figure of the artist dozing over the midnight oil and beset by foul imaginings is rooted both in the present and the past. In the present, because it seems to repeat the pose in which, in 1798, he painted the economist, writer, and educational reformer Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, whose Informe or report on agrarian law was the bureaucratic cornerstone of the Spanish enlightenment, and who was made minister of culture and justice by Charles III’s successor, Charles IV, for a brief nine months in 1789–1790 and was then banished to a long and frustrating exile for his liberal views. Goya paints this intellectual meditating on the cares of office in the splendors of the palace, symbolically blessed by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

In the etching, as Dr. Sayre shows, Minerva’s role is filled by a protective lynx, the symbol of alertness and skepticism—these big cats have night vision and can pierce the gloom of ignorance. The owl is a telling variation of Minerva’s emblem: it is offering the sleeper a pen with which to record error and superstition. And there is no doubt about the meaning of the bats, cats, and other critters that swarm through the sky to take over the man’s dreams. Goya’s owls on the sleeper’s back—one with its wings spread, the others staring at you—come from the similar cluster of owls on a ruined, inscribed tomb-slab which is the opening plate of the Scherzi by Giambattista Tiepolo, who had died in Madrid in 1770.

And then one recalls other and older images that Goya knew from the royal collections, such as those of Hieronymus Bosch, that favorite of the gloomy Philip II; in particular, the theme of Saint Anthony tempted by devils, of which the Escorial had no fewer than four versions. Eleanor Sayre points out that Goya didn’t want to paint “a dreaming artist surrounded by a wild phantasmagoria of bizarre, Bosch-like beings.” Certainly Bosch’s hellish little androids scuttling around the saint and his pig are fantastic in a way that Goya’s owls and cats are not. And yet I find it hard to suppose that Goya’s image is not a recycling of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, and harder still to believe that this was not a partly deliberate choice, signaling his own rootedness in a tradition that predated the Enlightenment by centuries. Indeed, until Goya’s own moment, it would be difficult to name a denser landscape of hysteria than in northern Europe between 1480 and 1550, with its pogroms and religious wars, its flagellants and prophets proclaiming the imminent arrival of the millennium—in some ways like the Middle East today, with priests instead of imams and right-wing rabbis.

Bosch’s importance to Goya can hardly be overestimated. Because of the influence Surrealism has had, inducing us to think of Bosch as though he were a Surrealist, coupled with the extreme difficulty of decoding the actual meaning of Bosch’s images—and the opacity of some of Goya’s as well—we are apt to get this slightly skewed. But it seems likely that Goya was drawn to Bosch not only by the unmatched power of the long-dead painter’s fantasy, but by his reputation as a moral allegorist. Here is Brother Joseph de Siguenca, an early seventeenth-century monk attached to the Escorial, defending his king’s favorite painter against the charges of frivolity and heresy.

I should like to point out that these paintings are by no means farces, but books of great wisdom and art, and if foolish actions are shown in them they are our follies, not his: and, let us admit it, they are a painted satire on the sins and fickleness of men…. Others try as often as possible to paint man as he looks from the outside, while this man has the courage to paint him as he is inwardly.

This is very close to Goya’s own statement for the Caprichos: “The author,” he writes,

is convinced that censoring human errors and vices—though it seems the preserve of poetry and oratory—may also be a worthy object of painting. As subjects appropriate to his work, he has selected from the multitude of errors and stupidities common to every civil society, and from the ordinary obfuscations and lies condoned by custom, ignorance or self-interest, those he has deemed most fit to furnish material for ridicule.

A full study of Goya’s debt to Bosch, and to later demonological painters, has yet to be made, and when it is done it will connect with Goya’s delight in demotic and populist fantasy, and unlock more of him than we now have.

Working from direct observation fixed by incessant note taking, he had the genius to make this symbolism of the body concrete, rather than schematic, so that we are always left feeling that such monsters may be chatting to one another, in darkness or sunlight, just around the corner. It was a thought that occurred to him when preparing to publish the Caprichos. “He who would catch a group of goblins in their den,” he wrote, “and show them in a cage at ten o’clock in the morning on the Puerta del Sol, would not need any rights of primogeniture to an entailed estate.” It was a joke: he meant that they’d be such curiosities that their owner would get rich. But it wasn’t a joke: to cage these goblins, these duendecitos, in the white sunlight of the printed page was to have power over them, more power than mere birth could give you; it was to have dominion over your own fears and society’s as well.

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

Last year the right-wing Passage Publishing, whose mission—“to push forward new ideas and ways of thinking that can break us out of our cultural and political cul-de-sac and open up new possibilities for art and publishing”—has led primarily to the production of texts by Internet intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and the pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist, added a curious title to its booklist: The Hardy Boys. “Why would a publisher as selective as Passage take interest in these hokey detective stories?” asks Daniel Lefferts this month in the NYR Online. “To find out, I read the Passage editions of the first three Hardy Boys books alongside the standard revised versions published by Grosset and Dunlap. Much like Frank and Joe Hardy at the start of every book, I sensed trouble in the air, a mystery, and I returned to their idyllic world to try to solve it.”

Lefferts’s debut novel, Ways and Means (2024), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, is also something of a grown-up riff on the Hardy Boys, following a young striver who stumbles into a mystery centered on a sinister billionaire and the crumbling of American institutions. Lefferts’s other writing, including fiction, criticism, and reporting, has appeared in, among other magazines, GQ, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. He is currently at work on a second novel.

Last week, I wrote to Lefferts to ask him about mysteries, reprints, and the study of the right wing.

Daniel Drake: Where in the evolution of your literary taste did the Hardy Boys fall? Were they, for example, some of your first “chapter books,” or did they introduce you to genre, or how might you say they fit into the larger picture of your reading life?

Daniel Lefferts: I started reading the books when I was probably seven or eight. I have a very vivid sense memory of those bright blue Grosset and Dunlap hardbacks, and they were certainly some of the first “real” books—with chapters, suspenseful plots, full narrative arcs, etc.—that I can remember reading. They were absolutely foundational for me. I don’t know that I had the sophistication at the time to grasp that they belonged to the mystery genre, which is maybe a way of saying that I initially thought all novels were mysteries, and perhaps they are.

As I grew older I found myself drawn to the basic scenario that animates the Hardy Boys—a menacing force lurking under a seemingly idyllic surface—in other things I read and watched, particularly the films of David Lynch (who described his 1986 Blue Velvet as “the Hardy Boys go to hell”). I even came to find something Hardyesque in the novels of Henry James, with their fresh-faced, curious, naive American heroes losing their innocence in encounters with sinister and seductive elements. And there are aspects of the mystery genre, and arguably shades of the Hardy Boys, in some of my own fiction. At one point I even started writing a kind of contemporary, literary retelling of the Hardy Boys, but I quickly (and I think wisely) abandoned it. I can’t escape them.

One of Passage’s stated motives for their reissues of the Hardy Boys books was to restore the original editions, which had been abridged in the 1950s to, among other things, remove offensive, occasionally racist language. How do you think publishers ought deal with reprints of older books that contain outmoded language or views? It seems like Passage explicitly presents one option—trumpeting the return of slurs—while an earlier reprint of the Hardy Boys opted to include a proto “trigger warning,” but I wonder if there might be still more interesting or careful ways to think about when or how to recontextualize reprints.

I think the first point to make is that a publisher conveys a lot about its motivations for reissuing books by the very nature of its overall operation. Passage is expressly focused on publishing right-wing literature, which tells us something about how it views the Hardy Boys novels and their place in its overall mission. The other publisher, Applewood Books, simply specializes in reissuing historical texts without any political objective. So the circumstances around the publication of a text already do a lot to frame that text and shape its audience.

I’m generally a supporter of keeping texts alive, warts and all, and I agree with Passage (and with Applewood) that the original Hardy Boys books are worth reading as artistic and historical artifacts. In my essay I reference an article, “Returning to the Hardy Boys,” by the literary scholar Tim Morris, and as Morris says, the novels “are sources for sophisticated understanding of narratology and plot convention, as well as primary sources that offer a rich sense of American cultural history.”

When it comes to books that contain outmoded depictions of women or racial or ethnic minorities—to say nothing of outright slurs—things get trickier when those books are intended for children. The job of how to present such reissued texts falls mostly to parents, and Passage-patronizing parents may present them differently from Applewood-patronizing ones. But I also suspect a large part of the audience for the original Hardy Boys novels is made up of adults who remember reading them as kids or who simply see them as literary curiosities, and for those readers some kind of ancillary critical material (in the form of an introductory essay or a collection of short scholarly analyses) would be welcome. Ideally, that material would avoid edgelordish celebration of offense on the one hand and nervous pearl-clutching on the other. I’d love to see these books issued with that kind of treatment.

In addition to this investigation into the operations of a right-wing press, you’ve previously written about gay men who voted for Donald Trump and gay men who work in finance. What about this anthropological mode appeals to you? What larger question might you be trying to approach, in your investigations into people from perhaps similar class or professional backgrounds or “identities” who nonetheless seem to reject some of your values?

I tend to be interested in subjects that confound me or strike me as enticingly improbable—I guess you could call them mysteries. The idea of a press publishing anodyne children’s novels alongside Bronze Age Pervert confounded me, as did the idea of gay men supporting a political party that has done much to militate against their interests. In the case of my essay on men in finance the central conundrum, really, was why I found them interesting in the first place. In each of these subjects I felt a tension between familiarity and strangeness. I’m gay—and so are these Trump supporters. I love the Hardy Boys—and so does this far-right publisher. I find finance boring at best and evil at worst—and yet I’m always closely observing men who work in it. When I look at these people, do I see something I recognize? And if so, what does that say about them, and about me?

You’re working on another novel right now. Do you find that your nonfiction work ends up overlapping with your fiction work? That is, have you noticed ideas or details generated in one form sneaking into the other?

There’s definitely some cross-genre sneaking, and I would say that, so far at least, my process has involved investigating a question first in fiction and then in nonfiction. My first novel concerned a gay finance student and featured a subplot about a gay MAGA art project, and then after it was published I wrote my essay on men in finance and my article on gay Trump supporters. Maybe I need to tackle a subject in the relative freedom of fiction before I can address it in fact. When it comes to my current fiction project, I’m hesitant to share too much, but let’s just say my interest in the contemporary far right that I explore in the Hardy Boys essay didn’t come out of nowhere.

The extraordinary qualities of salt lakes are not always evident at first glance—almost any description of them will contain the words “overlooked” or “misunderstood.” A rainforest announces its magnificence in a photograph, and thirty seconds’ worth of footage of a coral reef should be enough to make the case for its protection. Salt lakes are not so charismatic; it’s often difficult for the casual observer to understand how crucial they are to their ecosystems. To be fully appreciated, they need context, which the geographer and writer Caroline Tracey sets out to provide in Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History.

Unlike freshwater lakes, which drain through rivers or streams, salt lakes have no outlet to the sea. Some people call them “terminal lakes,” although scientists seem to prefer the less striking, and less menacing, “endorheic lakes” (from the ancient Greek for “internal flow”). They exist mainly in the driest parts of the world, forming where water gathers at the lowest point of closed basins. Rivers flow in, but they cannot get out: the only way for water to escape is to evaporate, leaving behind the dissolved minerals that were suspended in it.

Over time—tens or hundreds of thousands of years—the salts from these minerals become more and more concentrated, although salinity levels vary widely from lake to lake. Deep Lake, in Antarctica, is so saline that the water never freezes; should you find yourself in the area, you could row across it in the middle of winter. The Dead Sea, in the Jordan Rift Valley, has a salt concentration about ten times that of ocean water, and it is capable of supporting only highly adapted microscopic life: any fish that swim in on the Jordan River die immediately. The Caspian Sea, between Europe and Asia, is only about a third as salty as the open ocean and has a number of endemic species, including a little seal with no ears.

Around the world, birds flock to salt lakes, drawn by the flies and brine shrimp that live in them, and by the relative absence of predators. (I was exhilarated to learn that brine shrimp are the same creatures that American children were always tangling with in the sitcoms I watched as a kid: sea monkeys!) The lakes in the American West are major refueling points for more than three hundred different bird species, some of them endangered, along the Pacific Flyway, the migratory route extending from Alaska to Patagonia. A 2023 survey at the Salton Sea in Southern California counted 250,000 shorebirds on a single day in August: avocets, western sandpipers, black-necked stilts. Up to 90 percent of the world’s population of eared grebes—small waterbirds with golden feathers fanning out from behind their eyes, making them look like something you’d find on a coat of arms—stops at the Great Salt Lake in Utah every spring and fall.

Many salt lakes are what I would have to call ugly: gray alkaline flats whose most distinctive feature is their hellish smell, produced by the sulfurous gas that is released as bacteria break down organic matter. Others are luminously, freakishly beautiful, in ways that seem designed to appeal to beings from other solar systems. If you were an alien, you might choose the highlighter-pink Lake Hillier in Western Australia, its water colored by a type of salt-loving algae, as the place to set down your spaceship, or you might relax at the sight of the jagged white calcium-carbonate towers spiraling out of the water of Mono Lake, near the Sierra Nevada in eastern California, reassured that you could come to no harm in a place where such strangeness has been permitted to thrive.

Mark Twain might disagree. In Roughing It (1872), he calls Mono Lake “a solemn, silent, sailless sea” in a “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert.” No stream of any kind flows out of it, and “what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.” The only thing that lives beneath the surface of the lake, he writes, is “a white feathery sort of worm.... If you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these.” He goes on at jubilant length about the flies that eat the worms as they wash up on the beach.

Because the water they contain is generally undrinkable and unusable for agriculture, salt lakes have been seen as expendable, somehow beside the point. As Tracey observes, Mormon settlers in Utah came to view the Great Salt Lake with something like indignation, even disgust. What was anyone supposed to do with it? All that God-given freshwater from the rivers and the rain, channeling improvidently into the brine. Tracey cites an 1870s article in the church-owned Deseret News that called the Great Salt Lake “worthless...for uses of navigation and commerce,” “worthless for irrigation purposes,” and, finally, “worthless for any purpose.”

As Tracey works hard to demonstrate, salt lakes must be viewed in more generous terms, not least because they are drying up. For decades the rivers that once fed them have been diverted for use in irrigation, and because of climate change, the water that does get to the lakes now evaporates more quickly. The Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the largest salt lake in Central Asia and the fourth-largest in the world. But since the 1960s, as a result of the Soviet Union’s demand for cotton, its water level has decreased so rapidly that the lake has just about vanished altogether—it’s barely visible on satellite images. Its disappearance is now a kind of shorthand for ecological catastrophe.

To the west, the Caspian Sea—the world’s largest inland body of water, covering about 149,200 square miles—is also shrinking. In the United States, the Salton Sea is rapidly disappearing, and Owens Lake in eastern California is nearly gone. The Great Salt Lake has lost 70 percent of its water. Tracey points out that “far more of us than we realize are implicated” in the disappearance of these ecosystems. “If you live in Los Angeles, your drinking water comes at the expense of two salt lakes, Owens and Mono,” she writes. “If you live in San Diego, your drinking water once fed the Salton Sea.”

We underestimate the consequences of losing them. For one thing, their disappearance represents a public health crisis, already well underway in some parts of the world. The lake beds exposed by the receding water contain residue from multiple pesticides, arsenic, mercury, and other industrial and agricultural toxins. They become poisonous deserts whose dust storms can lift thousands of tons of contaminated sediment into the air.^* Women in the Aral Sea region are warned against breastfeeding because of the levels of toxicity in their milk, and cancer rates are exceedingly high. Children who live around the Salton Sea have reduced lung function and “a novel form of asthma.” Scientists are worried that the air in Salt Lake City could eventually become lethal to breathe.

For another, if the lakes go, then so do the birds. The species that depend on these “freakish habitats” have nowhere else to feed, molt, and double their body weight during migration. In the Great Basin—a 220,000-square-mile area that spans six states in the American West and contains more than twenty major salt lakes, including Mono, Owens, and the Great Salt Lake—waterbird populations have declined by 70 percent since 1973. Tracey describes mass death events in which “the carcasses of eared grebes...piled up dead on the shore, looking like deflated toys” at the Great Salt Lake and the bones of so many fish accumulated on the beaches of the Salton Sea that they could be mistaken for seashells.

Perhaps most significantly, their disappearance indicates that things have gone seriously wrong. The existence of salt lakes depends on a delicate balance between inflow and outflow—because they are the end point of larger water systems, changes in the volume of a river thousands of kilometers upstream, for instance, will have a profound effect on water levels and salinity. As Tracey observes, “When the strange, hidden salt lakes start dying, it means entire ecosystems are in bad shape.” The speed at which they are shrinking is a very loud warning about unsustainable water use. Think of salt lakes as the canary in the coal mine, or the alarm that goes off when a nuclear reactor starts melting down. Keeping watch over what is happening to these places is a good way of keeping watch over everything else.

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

Join New York Review contributor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson for a four-part seminar on the New Testament. Sessions, to be hosted on Zoom, begin May 6. Purchase tickets here.

In the October 21, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler wrote “Ghosts in the House,” about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century, including the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In this episode of Private Life, Filler’s essay is read by Maya Lin. Best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. while she was still an undergraduate student, Lin’s forty-year career has also included the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the landscape architecture project Wave Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Filler in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Ghosts in the House” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

No sooner had the printing press been invented than the typo appeared. For the NYR Online this week, Jo Livingstone visits an exhibition of errata slips, publishers’ sometimes humble, sometimes proud, occasionally sarcastic, and surprisingly poetic acknowledgments of mistake(s) in their already printed books. Since the fifteenth century they’ve been dropping these compendia of “faults escaped in printing” into the pages or pasting them onto the backboards of everything from atlases to bank directories to Ulysses. “Publishing is a terrifying business precisely because mistakes are inevitable,” Livingstone writes. But there is comfort in knowing that even the Good Book is subject to human error:

The paradigmatic misprint happened to a Bible. Three little letters didn’t make it into an English printing in 1631. An incredibly dangerous joke? Satan guiding man’s hand? Either way, a whole batch of Bibles went into the world commanding, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Below, alongside Livingstone’s essay, are five articles and one extensive letter from our archives about errors, typos, and mistranslation.

We Goofed

Jo Livingstone

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, is a temple. Although the Beinecke is cuboid it has the atmosphere of a pyramid, flanked in faintly translucent marble slabs that suck light into the building and radiate it outward at the same time.

A new literary exhibition, “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” is not at the Beinecke; it is ninety feet away in the Hanke Gallery of the Sterling Memorial Library. This other Yale library is hideous in every way that the Beinecke shines. “Gothic revival” is the generous term. In a scathing 1930 critique later published in The Nation, a Yale undergraduate, William Harlan Hale, condemned SML’s combination of ecclesiastical decor and godless floorplan as a “cathedral orgy.” “How can students be educated to artistic appreciation,” he wondered, “under the eaves of an architecture that puts water tanks into church towers, and lavatories into oriels?”

Past SML’s narthex, in a gloomy, wood-paneled corner of its nave, is a small, sarcastic show. It celebrates a loaded little pocket of publishing history: the correction. Since the later fifteenth century, publishers have inserted—or “tipped in”—a piece of paper called an erratum into books printed with a mistake noticed too late. Often titled “faults escaped in printing,” and sometimes included in a later edition as a corrections page, errata often include spelling corrections, legal retractions, errors.

No sooner had the erratum become conventional than it was exploited for fun. A page titled “Faults escaped in the printing, which a wise reader may mend when he sees them” in a 1622 satirical poem turns out to be a poem of its own: “In the last Page, for conscience, read none./In every page, read sence for nonsence.” A century and a half later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was abusing the form with glee. Some of the volumes on exhibition show him continually revising the poem “Effusion XX” post-publication—simply annoying—and using errata to critique the war in France: “Page 61, for MURDER read Fight for his King and Country.”

Practical problem-solving achieves shape and size in errata through the medium of graphic design. The slips are usually cut smaller than the volume and were sometimes pasted to the backboard. Their information appears in three to five columns of lists: page and line, “for,” the mistake, “read,” the correct word. Because every line on an erratum slip starts with a page reference, you could mistake them for sheets of anaphoric poetry at first: Where is the horse? Where is the rider? “Because of that format—you know, for X read Y—you get this poetry that’s really unexpected sometimes,” said Geoff Kaplan, a graphic designer and co-curator of the show.

In the Latin-infested parlance of the sixteenth century, an erratum technically notes a publisher’s fault; an author’s fault is conveyed via a corrigendum. The exhibition’s curators, Kaplan and the editor Rachel Churner, who co-run no place press, explained to me that they see an erratum as a kind of apology: “an attempt to hold oneself accountable,” as Kaplan put it. When you mislead readers, you must fix it, to make the world itself whole again. But an erratum, they also suggested, is at the same time a species of compliment, since you wouldn’t bother correcting a book whose mistakes didn’t matter to anybody. “We joke that it’s our own sort of redemption song,” Churner said. “We’ve made our own mistakes so many times. But look—other people have, too.”

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

From the Archives: We Apologize for the Mistake

• Evan Kindley on errors that make the canon

• Daniel Drake on Trump’s typos

• John Kidd on why Ulysses: The Corrected Version is incorrect, plus a letter correcting Kidd’s corrections

• E.A.J. Honigmann on the case for a second King Lear

• Vladimir Nabokov on an “infelicitous translation” of Pushkin

New York Review contributors Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, and Suzy Hansen come together for a wide-ranging conversation on what the war in Iran means for the future of US politics and America’s place in the world.

This conversation originally aired on April 22, 2026.

Pankaj Mishra is an essayist and novelist, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books and The New Yorker, and the author of two books of history, From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger: A History of the Present. His most recent book is The World After Gaza: A History of the Present. He is a cofounder of Equator, a new magazine of politics and culture.

Ben Rhodes is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor to MSNBC, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers—After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We Made and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House—as well as the upcoming book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity. From 2009 to 2017, he served as Deputy National Security Advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama, participating in all of the President’s key foreign policy decisions. His work has also been published in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.

Suzy Hansen is a journalist, author and editor. She is the author of From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan, which is being published in April 2026. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan award. She has taught writing at Bard College and Princeton University, and in 2020, she was a fellow at New America. She lives in New York.

Art for Our Age of Chaos

Jed Perl

“Whitney Biennial 2026” is an enormous show, with works by more than fifty artists filling much of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the opening exhibition at the New Museum’s greatly expanded quarters on the Bowery, is even bigger, with works by more than a hundred artists filling the entire building. The scale of these exhibitions can feel aggressive, even defiant in a period when nearly all cultural institutions are confronting an increasingly distracted public as well as financial challenges that began long before the current administration came to power in Washington. Although the Biennial aims to take the temperature of contemporary art and “New Humans” is a historical show that explores the moral and philosophical impact of the technological advances of the past hundred years, the layouts of the exhibitions are surprisingly similar. In both of them, works that fill entire rooms are juxtaposed, sometimes uneasily, with offerings that are almost miniature, as if the curators had decided there were only two ways for a work of art to persuade the public: either by shouting or by whispering.

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

Manet and Morisot: Game On

Susan Tallman

In the spring of 1870, Berthe Morisot was fretting over one of her submissions to that year’s Paris Salon. Still in her twenties, Morisot was a respected painter, best known for her landscapes, and had been tutored by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the influential Barbizon school painter of fluttery fields and woodlands. She had shown in all but one of the previous six Salons, but the new work was a departure—a double portrait of her beloved sister Edma and their mother, seated together while Mme Morisot reads.

On the advice of the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Morisot had reworked her mother’s head but was still dissatisfied. Seeking another set of eyes, she turned to Édouard Manet. He and Morisot had become friends—their families ran in the same circles, and she had served as a model (clothes on, with her mother in attendance) for his enigmatic set piece The Balcony (1868–1869). He came round to consult and, Morisot reported, thought her double portrait “very good” with the exception of the lower part of Mme Morisot’s dress. To show how it might be fixed, he grabbed some brushes and added a few accents. Then he kept going. By the time he put the brushes down, hours later, the figure of Mme Morisot had been retouched from hem to head. Berthe was mortified.

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

‘The Music of What Happens’

Nick Laird

To many, Seamus Heaney is the preeminent Anglophone poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. He’s certainly one of the most celebrated. He was born in County Derry in 1939, and when he died in Dublin in 2013 his death reverberated around the world. It was reported with a huge photograph on the front page of The New York Times—above the fold. “Not even Frank got that!” as a New York cabbie said to a friend of mine.

By the time he died Heaney was much more than an Irish poet, more than the “smiling public man” of his Nobel predecessor Yeats’s later years; he had entered the kind of literary stratosphere where one is not only quoted by emperors and presidents but visited by them.

His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber and Faber in 1966 and was followed by eleven other volumes of poetry, as well as collections of literary criticism, anthologies, translations, and verse plays. The past few years have seen a consolidation of his work: The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2023) was followed by The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2024), and last October came The Poems of Seamus Heaney, comprising the collected work and some two hundred uncollected poems. A full-length biography by Fintan O’Toole is in the works. In 1995 Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Is it possible to imagine such a poetic career happening now?

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

A Vital Unconscious

Coco Fusco

In the middle of the twentieth century the Cuban-born painter Wifredo Lam made the African presence in his homeland the driving force of his oeuvre, in drawings and paintings filled with totemic figures that often float in dark, monochromatic spaces. It has taken a long time for the originality of that aesthetic and political orientation to be fully appreciated in the United States. His most famous painting, La jungla (The Jungle, 1942–1943), was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, but for many years it hung by the coatroom in the museum’s entrance. In an infamous essay published in 1988, the critic John Yau called attention to the negative implications of that marginal location. Some four decades later MoMA has finally taken a major step by reconsidering the artist’s relevance to the canon. “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” is the most comprehensive survey that Lam has ever had in the US. Thanks to the thoughtful curatorial efforts of Beverly Adams and Christophe Cherix, Lam’s imaginative attempts to capture the beliefs and the spirit of resistance of Black Cubans can finally be seen for what they were: an effort to decolonize European modernism.

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

More from The Art Issue…

• Clare Bucknell on know-it-alls

• Nicole Rudick on June Leaf’s unique vision

• Elaine Blair on the Guerrilla Girls

• Rosa Lyster on the evaporating salt lakes

• Julian Bell on Joseph Wright of Derby

• Dennis Lim on low-resolution cinema

• Martin Filler on David Adjaye’s demons

• Mark O’Connell on a boy’s death in London

• Fintan O’Toole on the president’s precarious insanity

• Poems by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Paul Muldoon

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Micheal Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.)

Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, The Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York Review Books.

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.

As the war in Iran and Lebanon enters its eighth week, Donald Trump’s seesawing declarations of violence, peace, raining hellfire, ceasefire, civilizational destruction, and international comity—a manic approach to negotiating typically euphemized by reporters as “mixed messages”—have grown increasingly deranged. In the Review’s May 14 issue, Fintan O’Toole writes that it is high time to dispense with the notion that the president is simply feigning madness.

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are five articles from our archives about mad kings.

‘The Right Amount of Crazy’

Fintan O’Toole

In January, when The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.

Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”

But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:

He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.

One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”

Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

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

From the Archives: Daggers of the Mind

• J.H. Plumb on mad King George

• Mary McCarthy on Nixon’s bizarre behaviors

• Charles J. Sykes on the GOP’s embrace of their own mad king

• Lisa Appignanesi on Trump in the psychiatrist’s chair

• Fintan O’Toole on how Trump treats his friends

In the Review’s May 4, 1972, issue, shortly after nearly 75 million Americans filed their income taxes, then presidential candidate George McGovern published his campaign’s proposal for tax reform—an effort to make the American system of taxation “truly progressive.” As the economist Wassily Leontief wrote in his introduction to McGovern’s program, the federal tax code is “one of the most effective means of bringing about a distribution of income compatible with the prevailing standards of social justice.”

Tax Reform

The purpose of taxation

In the United States, taxes pay for those activities which we wish to have carried out by government rather than by the private sector. The costs are supposed to be carried by each income group paying its share and by those within each income group paying a similar amount. The progressive tax system asks those who are better off to bear a greater share of the load than those who have less ability to pay. In general, the progressive system is one of the most positive elements of our tax system.

Individual income taxes

Previous efforts at tax reform have failed to bring our system closer to a truly progressive one. Every effort at reform shows that the cloth of our tax codes is so worn that every patch rips another hole somewhere else. Even more importantly, efforts to promote fairness by giving everyone his own loophole are slowly dismantling the progressive federal income tax.

The actual tax system is just about half as progressive as it is supposed to be, according to the tax rates adopted by Congress. While nominal rates range from 0.1 percent at low incomes to 69.2 percent for those with incomes over $1 million per year, actual rates on average range from 0.7 percent to 34 percent.

Two taxpayers with the same annual income pay quite different taxes. A factory worker or a schoolteacher whose taxes are withheld from his wages cannot take advantage of loopholes. He may expect to pay almost $1,000 in taxes on earnings of $10,000. A wealthy person who receives $10,000 income from state and local bonds will pay no federal taxes at all. Clearly this system is unfair.

And these inequities are not theoretical. On the basis of 1969 tax returns, the last year for which figures are available, some 21,317 people earning more than $20,000 paid no federal taxes whatsoever. That includes fifty-six people with incomes in a single year of $1 million or more.

Because the effort to close one loophole at a time has been a failure and because to do so would still leave a great number of inequities until all were closed, we should shift to a really effective minimum tax. While a minimum tax was created in 1969 tax legislation, it is actually window dressing and is not effective. Recent reports indicate that some who earn over $1 million still pay no taxes.

I propose a minimum income tax so that the rich could not avoid their share of the tax burden no matter what loopholes they used. One possible formula would be a minimum income tax to apply to all those with total incomes in excess of $50,000. The entire income of any person in this range would be subject to payment of taxes at a rate of 75 percent of the current statutory rates at the rate that they would have to pay if there were no loopholes. All income regardless of source would be included. (Of course, if the computed tax exceeds the minimum tax, it would be payable.)

If this minimum income tax were now in effect it would bring in approximately $5 billion during the present fiscal year and $6 billion in fiscal 1973. That would amount to about a 7 percent increase in receipts from the individual income tax. This increase would be paid by the wealthiest 411,000 out of the 76 million federal taxpayers.

This basic tax reform would not unfairly penalize the wealthy just because they were well off. It would simply ensure that they could not dump their tax load onto the backs of already hard-pressed middle-income taxpayers.

Corporate taxes

The strength of the American economy is due mainly to the dynamic growth of the private sector led by corporations and other businesses. It is sound public policy to create the conditions for business to function effectively.

The federal tax system has been used to help the corporation. As Joseph Pechman, one of the leading tax experts in the United States, points out: “A special tax on the corporate form of doing business is considered appropriate because corporations enjoy special privileges and benefits.” In order to stimulate corporate economic activity, the federal government can and does alter tax rates. That is the principal form of assistance that has recently been given.

The present corporate tax rate is 48 percent of the taxable base defined by law. Of this, 22 percent is the normal tax which applies, without the 26 percent surtax, to the first $25,000 of corporate net income. This feature is of special benefit to small businesses—some 77 percent of the taxpaying corporations. It should be maintained.

In each postwar recession, demands have arisen to stimulate the economy through corporate tax reductions. These have taken the form not of overt tax reductions but of covert rate reductions in the form of increased depreciation allowances and special devices such as the investment tax credit. Such devices transfer profits from the taxable category to the untaxable category. In the process, the corporate income tax is gradually being abolished.

Because of steady reductions in the taxable base over the past twenty years, the effective corporation income tax rate has been cut in half. There is a real question about how much farther we can go.

The time has come to end the dismantling of the corporation income tax and to re-establish a fair balance between personal and corporate income tax collections. As a result, I have opposed the new depreciation guidelines and the investment tax credit. Special loopholes, such as percentage depletion, need not be phased out, but a broad balance also needs to be established between taxable and untaxable earnings of corporations. As it is, we have tipped that balance too far in the direction of untaxable earnings.

I propose that the actual corporation income tax be returned to its 1960 level by the elimination of the special loopholes that have been opened since then. (About two-thirds of the gap between the present level and the 1960 level results from Nixon Administration cuts in the last year.)

This reform of the corporation income tax would raise approximately $9 billion in the current fiscal year and about $17 billion in fiscal 1973 (based on Administration estimates of increased corporate activity).

This proposal for increasing the corporation income tax rate does not mean reduced government assistance to business. If the entire McGovern economic program were to be applied, there would be more stimulus to business than is available from the tax privileges now in effect. This program includes an immediate $10 billion fiscal stimulus to create new jobs and use underutilized capacity, economic conversion from a war to a peace economy with the extensive use of government contracting for specific purposes, and the Minimum Income Grant, discussed below, which would greatly stimulate consumer purchases. Nothing spurs profits like a strong full employment economy, which has the highest priority in my economic program.

In short, our corporations must be healthy and growing if our economy is to prosper. But we have a wider range of tools at our disposal than perpetual reductions in the corporation income tax.

Estate and gift taxation

Most Americans subscribe to a fundamental belief of our Founding Fathers that we should be allowed to keep a fair proportion of what we earn but should not be allowed to inherit great wealth. Yet, in practice, the loopholes in our gift and inheritance taxes are much greater than those in our income taxes. Just 9 percent of all families own 50 percent of all private assets. More than a quarter of all private assets are owned by less than I percent of the population. Although some of these fortunes are based on earned income, most are based on inherited wealth.

Estate and gift tax rates are high. But actual rates are a tiny fraction of the theoretical rates.

Estate and gift taxation should be reformed in the same manner as the income tax. Instead of proceeding to close loopholes one by one, a whole new system needs to be constructed.

Gift and inheritance taxes should shift from a tax on the estate or giver to a lifetime cumulative tax on the recipient. This shift would make it possible to prevent tax avoidance and would be more fair, because it would regard the money received as income to the recipient, which it is.

Read the rest for free on the Review’s website here.

Earlier this spring, Lauren Kane journeyed up to the Cloisters—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s outpost on the northern tip of Manhattan, which houses European art inside a complex of buildings cobbled together from the ruins of several medieval cloisters brought over from France and Catalonia in the early twentieth century—to visit “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages.” As Kane writes in the NYR Online, the exhibition was rife with “transgressive delight”: “saddles rowdy with double entendre, demure coin purses,” “a painting of the Madonna nestled within a yonic wound-shaped frame,” “a large plate embossed with a scene of a wife paddling her husband’s ass,” “a copper aquamanile…in the shape of a woman riding a man,” and many more objets d’art, both secular and devotional, that would raise eyebrows even today, never mind six hundred years ago. But, she notes, it is precisely that projection of prudishness onto the past that can prevent us from understanding it, “a time when something as physiologically routine as arousal could be—and often was—understood as an experience of the divinely miraculous.”

Kane’s writing, often on art, medieval and otherwise, has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Commonweal, and Apollo magazine. She is also the managing editor of The New York Review, where she frequently pitches in to help me with this column—since 2022, she has interviewed twenty-two writers, from Marilynne Robinson to Jacob Weisberg.

This week I wrote to Kane to ask her about divinity, mysticism, the ineffability of the inaccessible, and editing.

Daniel Drake: Was there an exhibit or piece of religious art—medieval, Renaissance, or otherwise—that you encountered at some point in your life that started you writing about the subject? Where did your interest in religious art begin?

Lauren Kane: Like many people, a good number of my enthusiasms were planted in graduate school. I went for a master’s in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, a wonky little degree where I worked on Reformation history and the poetry of John Milton—the seventeenth century, which falls into that “early modern” period just after the medieval. I guess I started writing about the medieval period through a lingering interest in historical methodology, lethally boring as that sounds. There was an exhibition some years ago, also at the Cloisters, about merchants and the emerging middle class in the late Middle Ages. What I found really interesting was how the curator used everyday objects to assemble a biography of a man about whom she knew very little, a merchant in sixteenth-century Exeter. It was like the so-called microhistories by Natalie Zemon Davis or Carlo Ginzburg that I’d loved reading in graduate school, but in a museum gallery. Doing that sort of history by placing objects in vitrines was a fascinating method of curation, a sometimes imperfect, sometimes brilliant way of staging a thesis.

The same thing interested me about the exhibition at the Cloisters, and the religious aspect of the period: we can read these objects aesthetically, as works of art, while also trying to understand what they tell us about the people who once held and beheld them, and the fact that they had a purpose beyond their craftsmanship. This whole period in history is largely—though not entirely, as was very evident at “Spectrum of Desire”—represented to us through religious art. Such work was not made only for veneration or worship, but for education, teaching those who couldn’t read the Bible not so much about Scripture, but about Christian theology, as it developed. Iconoclasts weren’t wrong that these were not strictly Scriptural images or objects, and that’s kind of their point. I’m not trained as a medievalist, I’m really writing about these things from the position of a lay person looking at and thinking about a museum exhibition, but there is a germ of religious history from my time at div school that still tends to guide my interests.

You note that, in appreciating medieval art, in this case medieval art that evinces a perhaps surprisingly erotic charge, one must attempt to lift the “imaginary veil of propriety” that we moderns presume exists between us and the “prudish” people of the past. Such empathy makes it possible to see across the chasm of time and understand our ancestors in all their carnal humanity, but I wonder also about the opposite case: Do you ever encounter work from the past that seems impossibly strange, that seems to embody a way of being that is inaccessible to us now?

This may not be exactly what you mean, but perhaps because we’re talking about the Middle Ages what springs to mind is mysticism, a classification of writing and of person—the mystic—that is reiterated again and again over time, in different ways and in different places. The figure of the mystic seems to have access to something that we people more weighed down by the world around us want to understand but can’t. This may have been especially true in the medieval period, or perhaps it’s that there is a distinct tradition that survives, from the writings of Julian of Norwich or the Cloud of Unknowing—both theologically rather good for being the work of amateurs, one of whom had a bad fever—to the barmier stuff by Margery Kempe.

Centuries later there are strains of it in people as different as the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, and Madame Blavatsky and her seances and theosophy. Simone Weil comes along, motivated by the social and moral world of the twentieth century, not a recluse by any means, yet she works in a similar mode and gets labeled a mystic. There’s a rich tradition, and yet there is no one answer to what mysticism is, how to define it or neatly sum it up. It can be all of these things, expressed often through writing. But part of that definition is that it is in pursuit of the inaccessible, whatever that might look like.

What are some of the best exhibits or collections of medieval and religious art you’ve seen?

The Musée de Cluny in Paris is the Cloisters of the continent: originally a fourteenth-century abbey, it was repurposed in the nineteenth century to house a collection of medieval (and Renaissance) artwork, an immersive experience. Like the Cloisters, the Cluny boasts a room of millefleurs (“thousand flowers”) tapestries—that French medieval style where all negative space is jam-packed with floral patterning—featuring not the story of a unicorn hunt, as at the Cloisters, but a unicorn nonetheless, in more static scenes alongside a lady. Five of the scenes are understood to represent the five senses—in one, the lady plays a dainty organ, in another, she beholds the unicorn in a handheld looking glass. In the sixth scene, she receives a box of jewels under a tent with a banner on which is written “À mon seul désir”—“To my only desire.” I gather that lots of scholarly debate has grown up over what this means: a renunciation of the world for God or a betrothal, or a bit of both, or something else lost to time. But its simplicity resonates with poetry to me. I loved it so much I bought a poster of it for ten euros, and I’ll admit I still have it.

I also have to mention a late medieval altarpiece at the National Museum in Warsaw, dated somewhere between 1420–1520 and from the region around Gdańsk (not Hans Memling’s famous Gdańsk altarpiece, The Last Judgment, which is in that city, and which I hope to visit someday). The three panels explode with juicy narrative and visual complexity. Here a medieval hilltop city, there the temptation of Christ by a dragonlike Satan, here two swans bathing, and there Christ the boy king on his throne. The colors are lush and the paint rich. I was there some years ago with my partner while he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Warsaw, and we spent the better part of an hour with it, falling at whim into individual details and moments.

But I find the most moving pieces of religious art, I’m sure from any part of the world, are those still in their original chapels, cathedrals, temples, or ruins. My focus has been on Western Christian religious art, but obviously religions of every variety are the impetus for the creation of beautiful objects, paintings, statues everywhere. There’s nothing quite like the captivating feeling of coming upon, say, a faded relief on a stone wall in some unassuming place, and finding that the work is so much better than it has to be, has a mastery of skill or an originality of thought beyond its purpose. It’s a feeling of elevation I like to believe is akin to what people have sought in those spaces for centuries, and that collapse of space and time is its own kind of mystical sensation.

You are, of course, a writer and an editor. How do you find that those two modes interact with each other? How does facility in one help the other? Or does the editorial impulse ever make it harder to write? Does your writer’s soul ever resist sound editorial judgment?

I edit myself in the back of my mind while I am in the act of writing, and it’s awful. I think it makes my drafts come out in the prose equivalent of standing at a party with a drink in your hand not sure who to talk to—self-conscious and awkward. I’d love to loosen up and relax a bit. But it has certainly clarified to me how the push and pull between writer and editor is necessary. The editor needs someone willing to be a bit unselfconscious and messy and forthcoming, and the writer needs someone doing the work of making them sober up.

In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy. In this episode of Private Life, “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye.

Listen on all platforms here.

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring a conversation with Serpell. You may read “The Banality of Empathy” at this link.

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.

The Hardy Men

Daniel Lefferts

In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would form an “enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left.”

For too long, he argued, conservatives had stood by stuffily as the left commandeered arts and entertainment and bent mainstream institutions to its ideological will. Keeperman wanted to change that. By drawing on the energies of the so-called New Right and its various overlapping cohorts—red-pilled Silicon Valley types, Dimes Square podcasters and playwrights, manospheric influencers, proselytizers of raw milk—he hoped to show that the right could produce culture that was just as vital, just as possessed of spiritedness and “thymos,” as that produced by the left, if not more so. “If you are telling the truth about the world,” Keeperman told Douthat, “then you are going to make right-wing art.”

Passage may be a small operation but it has gained considerable influence in its political orbit. Last January, on the eve of Trump’s return to office, it hosted a “Coronation Ball” that was attended by Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec, Dasha Nekrasova, and other members of the reactionary glitterati. Thanks to Passage, Keeperman has become part of this glitterati himself. The Guardian has described him as a “celebrity” of the New Right and a “tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement.” Douthat for his part seemed seduced by his stardom: he opened his interview by telling Keeperman that he looked “fantastic” and remarking on his “amazing head of hair.”

Passage’s output consists of titles by both contemporary far-right thinkers and their intellectual forbears. Its publications include Gray Mirror: Fascicle I, Disturbance, the first volume in a planned four-part treatise by the blogger Curtis Yarvin in which he systematically if unpersuasively advances his signature theory that America should be ruled by a technocratic king; collections of writings by the “race realist” Steve Sailer, the antiegalitarian accelerationist Nick Land, and the former National Review mainstay John Derbyshire; an anthology of speculative fiction with contributions by the far-right influencers Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist; and reissued memoirs by two Russian noblemen who fought for the White Army as well as the German nationalist Ernst Jünger.

The books vary in genre and tone, but together they offer a clear vision of the world as seen by the far right. It’s a world in which men have been domesticated—or, in the parlance of the manosphere, “longhoused”—by an effeminate culture bent on dispossessing them of their virility; in which a fixation on inclusivity and equal opportunity has scrambled natural hierarchies, elevating the weak at the expense of the strong; and in which large-scale immigration and “suicidal empathy” have poisoned Western civilization and imperiled its rightful supremacy. Each of Passage’s books contributes directly or indirectly to this overall ideology.

Last year, however, Passage put out what at first seemed like a very different set of books—books beloved by millions of readers around the world, very few of whom, presumably, would consider them far-right texts. In two handsome box sets with illustrated covers by Alex Wisner (a comic artist who has published two graphic novels with the press about an anti-Bolshevik Russian general), Passage released the original versions of the first six Hardy Boys novels, which began entering the public domain in 2023.

Lest anyone think Passage was broadening its curatorial horizons to include nonpolitical material, or simply making a cash grab by appealing to young readers, the press made clear that it considers these tales of sleuthing teen heroes to be of a piece with its revanchist worldview. The product page for the “Passage Children’s Bundle” (which also includes an edition of Treasure Island) asserts that “Passage is committed to making children’s literature great again.” On X it promoted a sale on the books with the discount code EATTHEWEAK.

Why would a publisher as selective as Passage take interest in these hokey detective stories, and in the “original” versions of the books in particular? What were the novels I’d gobbled up as a child doing on the same shelf as Raw Egg Nationalist? To find out, I read the Passage editions of the first three Hardy Boys books alongside the standard revised versions published by Grosset and Dunlap. Much like Frank and Joe Hardy at the start of every book, I sensed trouble in the air, a mystery, and I returned to their idyllic world to try to solve it.

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

April 22, 2026, at 1 PM EDT

Join us for an online discussion on what the war means for the future of US politics and America’s place in the world. The conversation will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public. Registration is required.

Register Here

Art Newsletter No. 42 covers the art and illustrations in the April 9 and April 26 issues of the Review, and it comes to you from the kitchen sink. I’ve always loved the term “kitchen sink.” It can mean a surplus of something, as in “kitchen sink cookies,” which contain pretzels, gummy bears, or whatever’s on hand; or it can mean a kind of working-class realism, as in the “kitchen sink realism” of postwar British dramas, set in cold-water flats and bedsits. I sometimes like to stop and appreciate the random still lifes that form inside my kitchen sink: a marble repository, variously filled with wilted flowers, carrot peels, dirty dishes, and sponges.

The cover of our April 9 issue is a 2023 painting titled Orange Squeeze, by the New York–based artist Rachel Domm. After unintentionally designing two covers in a row that featured paintings of people bundled up, Domm’s cheery, bright depiction of a thumb and finger holding a citrus was a welcome promise of vitamin C, and spring.

For Pablo Scheffer’s review of two books about tennis rivalries, I found a lemon-lime-colored print of a court scene by the artist Leah Horowitz. For an essay by Yi-Ling Liu about the remarkable pace of construction in the city of Shenzhen, I wrote to George Wylesol for an illustration. He sent a clever sketch of a stable reflection of a wobbly cityscape skyline, followed by the colorful final. Romy Blümel sent a crimson-haired Muriel Spark portrait for Miranda Seymour’s essay on a new biography of the Dame, as well as an edition of her letters. For Ben Lerner’s introduction to a new edition of John Berger’s novel G., Adrian Tomine drew a handsome, cigarette-puffing Berger, staring into the middle distance.

I loved reading Dan Rockmore’s essay on four books about the art of mathematics. All the numbers and pebbles he mentioned reminded me of paintings by the artist Jule Korneffel. Her bright pink and green Kaktüsse, featuring thirteen slightly irregular orbs, went perfectly with the piece. On Instagram Korneffel wrote, “Mathematics has always been part of my DNA—my father was a mathematician, and—I believe—his way of thinking profoundly shaped my approach to abstraction. Before words, there were numbers; I experienced them as vivid, distinct fields of color from an early age.”

Laura Breiling is great at packing plot and detail into her portraits, which is why I thought of her after reading Omari Weekes’s review of Tyriek White’s Brooklyn-based novel We Are a Haunting. She drew White surrounded by ghosts in Jamaica Bay. I loved the lines from Gizella Hervay’s poem “Superior Pink Toilet Soap” that Ange Mlinko quotes in her essay about a collection of poetry by Hungarian women. This kitchen-sink-adjacent subject reminded me that the photographer Jason Fulford had visited Hungary in 2000, so I asked him to send some of his work from that trip. He had a wonderful image of women’s hats in a Budapest shop window. The illustrator Karagh Byrne had written me a few times, inquiring about a commission, so I offered her Cathleen Schine’s review of Steve Stern’s novel A Fool’s Kabbalah. She drew a fine-lined Stern sporting a scarf.

The playful, twisty series art, titled “Ductwork,” is by the designer Oliver Munday.

The April 23 issue was our Spring Books issue, and the cover was a sort of whodunit, drawn and lettered by the Paris-based illustrator Fanny Blanc. Her first sketch of a tea party included a naked man gardening outside. We asked her to go a bit further, so her second draft put a body beneath a bush. Blanc wrote to me, “On a table, there are gardening gloves, perhaps repurposed; a shoe lies on the floor; a pot contains a datura plant (for its toxicity, even though it's not exactly the season, as they normally bloom in early summer).”

For an essay by an anonymous resident of Tehran about the experience of living under siege, we considered some wire images of the city, but at the last minute we opted for something a little less familiar, a painting of rooftops—one of the motifs in the essay—that I did in 2022. (The view is in fact of the Lower East side, not Tehran.)

Francine Prose reviewed two colorful novels, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach, and after reading Prose’s descriptions of the prosthetics, diapers, assault weapons, and sex dolls in the books, I asked the illustrator Paul Davis if he was up for the task.

I hadn’t worked with Jason Kernevich, from the design firm The Heads of State, for a few months, and I wondered what they might do with David Cole’s essay about birthright citizenship. All the sketches they sent in were wonderful, some playing with hospital-issue pink and blue baby blankets, but we went with one that featured infant footprints and post office return stamps. For Hermione Lee’s essay about Virginia Woolf’s letters, I wanted to see what Yann Kebbi might do with Woolf’s famous and fabulous face. He took the job and sent us a wonderfully woeful ink likeness.

Georgie McAusland illustrated Trevor Jackson’s review of two books about retirement. She sent sketches of a protest march made up of senior citizens. I asked Alain Pilon for a drawing of Alfred Tennyson to accompany Kathryn Hughes’s article about Tennyson and science, and he sent a sensitive sketch of the poet. His work increasingly reminds me of drawings by the late Pierre Le-Tan, whose art, along with Jean-Michel Folon’s, inspired me, at age fifteen, to study editorial illustration.

Maybe it was too easy, but I asked an Italian to draw the Italian writer Domenico Starnone for Tim Parks’s review of his newest novel. Andrea Ventura never disappoints, and his rough-hewn likeness of the novelist fell in nicely and unexpectedly with the Kebbi and Pilon. We tucked a new collage by our longtime contributor Lucy Sante into the issue, from a show currently up at the Academy of Arts and Letters.

The series art in the Spring Books issue is titled “Textile Library,” by Ciara Quilty-Harper.

Last Thursday, as part of its broader destruction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Trump administration proposed easing the standards that govern how coal companies dispose coal ash, which often contains heavy metals that contaminate groundwater.

This week in the NYR Online, Scott Stern writes about “a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s” when a coalition of Texans, facing pollution-choked smog, “mysterious effluent” dumped into freshwater by factories, “acrid odors,” blackened vegetation, and a “pervasive” blue haze banded together to “[rise] up against environmental degradation like never before.” And while their popular campaign for the right to a clean environment was eventually quashed by legislators with strong ties to the oil industry, Stern writes, there are lessons for the present to be drawn from the unlikely flourishing of a green movement in the Lone Star State.

Below, alongside Stern’s essay, are five articles from our archives about the history of the American environmental movement.

‘Go Out and Sue a Polluter’

Scott W. Stern

Shortly before Christmas in 1969 a dense fog rolled in across the bayous of the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than four days it blanketed a vast region, as far west as San Antonio and as far east as Port Arthur. Flights were grounded, cars crashed, and all traffic halted in the Houston Ship Channel, one of the busiest ports in the world. The murk posed a real threat to Texans with emphysema or asthma, to the elderly or the infirm. “These people are going to suffer more acutely,” a local physician told the Houston Post. Indeed, one Houston hospital reported a 240 percent surge in patients with breathing issues; a health officer noted a “tremendous increase” in upper respiratory symptoms.

To many Texans the source of the haze was, ironically, clear. It was “pollution-fed fog,” as the Post put it in a front-page headline, a glaring manifestation of a problem that plagued the industrialized parts of the region. So contaminated was the air that water droplets could cling to pollutants, slowing evaporation; the resulting scrim of moisture inhibited vertical air movement, trapping more pollution in turn.

At the moment the fog descended, Texans were rising up against environmental degradation like never before. Just days earlier State Representative Rex Braun, an intense, ruddy-faced man, warned an Arlington audience about the long-term effects of living with pollution. If the state couldn’t reduce it, he told the crowd, “you will drown in your own sewage, be buried in your own garbage or choked to death on your own bad air.”

Braun and a coalition of environmentally minded supporters pressed their case at a city council hearing soon after the haze cleared. A mother carrying an eleven-month-old baby in a yellow dress followed Braun at the podium; the child’s name was Tracy Lynn, a spokesman told the councilmembers, and her asthma was so severe that during the days of fog the doctors weren’t sure if she would make it. They advised the family to leave Houston; the air was too bad. Two days after the hearing a class of junior high school students unrolled a fifty-foot-long petition down the middle aisle of the city council chamber in nearby Baytown. “We, the undersigned, deserve the right to breathe clean air,” it declared, above some two thousand signatures. Under pressure, the Houston city council agreed to stop rubber-stamping grace periods for local industries to comply with air pollution regulations, a move that several councilmen described as “drastic.”

By March 1970 environmental furor had reached such a peak that Braun could mock “the Johnny-come-latelies to the anti-pollution battle” in a letter to a friend, recalling how, just a few years earlier, “we could only muster a handful of votes for my tough bills to curb air and water pollution.” Back then, he wrote, “rich Republican oil men didn’t even know what pollution was, much less how to spell it.” A month later, at an Earth Day rally in Texas, the progressive legislator and labor lawyer Bob Eckhardt similarly marveled at how quickly times had changed. “Now,” he told the crowd, “you are in the environmental upheaval.”

More than fifty years later, the story of Texas’s environmental upheaval remains little-known. Yet for a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Lone Star State was the site of a homegrown, populist environmental movement. Its partisans were not, principally, elite conservationists or representatives from national green groups but working-class activists with material concerns and unusually motivated allies in local government. “Our trees are dying, our metal is rusting, our house paint is falling off and we cannot breathe,” one official in the shipping and refining hub of Galena Park told the press.

Their movement was especially strong in Houston and its heavily industrialized, polluted environs—the adopted home of Rex Braun. Today Braun is an obscure figure, but for a brief period, from his first legislative campaign in 1966 until his electoral defeat in 1972 and his early death in 1975, he was perhaps Texas’s leading environmental crusader. Over three terms in the state house, representing the most polluted district in Texas, he fought to win a “right” to a clean environment and then translate it into better conditions on the ground. To Braun and his constituents, as well as a largely forgotten cohort of environmental populist politicians, the battle against pollution was inseparable from the fight for industrial safety regulations, a minimum wage, and public health.

For more than six years I’ve been searching for records related to Braun and the fight he helped lead. Because he left behind no personal papers, I’ve compiled documents from far-flung archival collections across Texas. These papers help reconstruct the story of courageous campaigners battling what Braun called “a few greedy and callous men who think they have the right to dump their industrial garbage into the air.” But they also return us to a Texas in which populist environmentalism was imaginable, with a strong social base in labor unions and community organizations. As union density fell, the organs of civil society failed, and the environmental movement professionalized, the promise of this kind of environmental populism faded—which is not to say it can never return.

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

From the Archives: Red Light, Green Light

• Bill McKibben on the central problem for conservative environmentalists

• Scott W. Stern on the working-class roots of the environmental movement

• Leah Aronowsky on how fossil fuel companies avoid consequences for polluting

• Tim Flannery on how Bush-era conservatives vilified environmentalists

• Daniel J. Kevles on the legacy of Rachel Carson