Safety Is When There’s No One Dying

Mary Turfah

The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund is based in the Blue Building, a medical center across from the American University of Beirut, in the city’s Hamra district. Many of the children whose care it sponsors have come to Lebanon from Gaza, mostly by way of Egypt, after an intensive vetting process involving the Israeli state and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. They require surgeries currently unavailable in Gaza, where Israel’s genocide has obliterated large swaths of the health care sector. Some have lost limbs; others have neurological injuries; most have lost family; all carry the effects of the violence that has fractured their worlds.

Israel has created something unprecedented: the largest population of traumatic pediatric amputees in modern history. (A traumatic amputation is one caused by the force of an accident or attack—say, that of a blast.) These children’s injuries—physical, mental, emotional—are complex, and require a complex response; there are many hospitals in the United States that would be unable to tend to them. Waking up from hemorrhagic shock to find yourself maimed, to watch your sister bleed out in front of you, to learn your whole family is gone, to try to fathom what this means when you cannot yet steady a pencil enough to write out your name—all of this takes a psychological toll, by design. The mission of the fund is not only to gather the necessary medical experts, both surgical and nonsurgical, but also to ensure that the child is cared for as a whole human being, by people with whom they feel safe.

When a person has been permanently disfigured, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah explained to me, the goal of surgery isn’t to make them look how they did before, which is often impossible, but to restore a kind of recognition—to make them feel once again that their body belongs to them. Abu Sittah is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who, before 2023, was mostly based in London, traveling to Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere to see patients wounded in various wars. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza he has focused his attention on treating children injured by Israeli attacks. In 2024 he cofounded the fund in Beirut, historically a hub for medical care in the region. With the extension of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign into Lebanon, the fund has begun providing this care to Lebanese children as well.

Two days before I sat down with Abu Sittah, I spoke to a boy from Gaza with a spinal cord injury that had left him unable to move his legs. He was staying with his mother in a hotel a short distance from the fund that hosts many of the families who are in Beirut for treatment. At one point he pulled up a photo on his phone of what looked like the inside of a tent and a mattress covered in blood. This was where he’d been when the missile struck. His mother told me that others had taken him to the morgue and pronounced him dead. She had found him there and insisted that no, her son was alive.

Later in our conversation the boy talked about how he had been super into cars, fixing them, driving them, everything. He showed me a video of a boy driving a car, shot from the passenger seat. The face on the screen was full, looking from road to camera with a relaxed smile. I asked the boy earnestly who that was in the video. That’s me, he answered, beaming. I felt uncomfortable, as if I had inadvertently pointed out how much he had changed, and in an attempt to redirect his attention I said that I meant who was recording and talking in the background, who had added those two heart emojis to the corner of the frame? My friend took it, he answered, and then: he’s a martyr.

Abu Sittah had just seen the boy in clinic the day before; he was happy with how much weight he had gained. He was skin and bones when he got to Beirut, he said. The boy was, as far as I could tell, still quite thin. Still, the fact that he had shown me that video indicated that he was beginning to be able to recognize himself again.

I spoke with Abu Sittah about an aspect of the conversation with the boy and his mother that weighed on me. In an effort to begin with an open-ended question, I had asked the mother to tell me what happened to them, how they ended up in Beirut. She responded with her own question: “What hasn’t happened to us?” I didn’t know what to say, so we waited in silence until she was ready to pick up the conversation again. At some point I asked her if she was still in touch with family in Gaza and she responded that, really, they had no one left.

Was Abu Sittah familiar with this kind of strained communication, I asked, with what felt like the lack of a common scaffolding on which to build a conversation? The architecture of their lives is totally gone, he said. In a recent essay for The London Review of Books, the human rights researcher Eyal Weizman writes about the disorientation imposed by Gaza’s total destruction, how it leaves people with no point of reference. Weizman quotes an Israeli bulldozer operator who says that if a Palestinian tries to return home, they “will be returning to nowhere…. They will not know where their home is. All they will find is sand.” He then writes of one Palestinian asking another, “If we survive this war…what would be our meeting point?”

Reading the article, I recalled a family friend’s description of her return to southern Lebanon at the end of 2024, after the cease-fire that wasn’t—how she arrived in Bazouriyeh, the town where she grew up, and found that everything familiar was gone. Not just her parents’ house but the other houses, the street signs, the shops, the trees, anything that could tell her she was here and not there. She called out for help orienting herself. Someone from the town whose eyes had already adjusted came to her side and guided her.

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

This jam-packed, supersized newsletter covers the art and illustrations in the May 14, May 28, June 11, and June 25 issues of the Review. It’s brought to you by Lewis Carroll’s Alice: The Photographs, Books, Papers and Personal Effects of Alice Liddell and Her Family, the catalog for a 2001 Sotheby’s auction that I recently found in my ex-husband’s basement, where I had left it many years ago after using it to research an old project. I enjoy reading history via auction catalogs, and, paging through this one anew, I was struck by a number of details I’d forgotten or missed the first time around. Alice’s lorgnettes and letters; that her sister Lorina Liddell was called “Ina”; that part of the lawn of the Deanery Garden where Carroll and Alice first met was a grass tennis court; that Alice was taught to draw by John Ruskin; and that she received a pearl horseshoe from Prince Leopold as a wedding present.

The most interesting objects in the catalog, though, were Lewis Carroll’s glass negatives. Seeing those famous photographs of young Alice but in eerie inverted tones made me think of the scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest that he shot with an infrared camera to depict the energy and desperation of a young member of the Polish resistance. The negatives hinted at the zone of discomfort Carroll often inspires.

The May 14 issue was our annual Art Issue, and we inaugurated a new feature, “At the Galleries”: timely, brief reviews of smaller art shows.

For the issue cover we chose firoza (2022), a painting by the Kabul-born, Berlin-based artist Tamina Amadyar. Her work was recently featured in “Auto-Paragone,” a group show at Berlin’s Galerie Guido W. Baudach. I was introduced to her art by the book editor Friederike Schilbach, who came to New York in time to join one of the monthly dinners Balthazar has been throwing for our contributors.

I found a vigorous portrait of our pink-faced president by the French artist Didier Viodé to accompany Fintan O’Toole’s essay about the irrationality of Donald Trump. Viodé’s painting is part of “The Comedians,” a series he made in 2018 depicting world leaders. We used Jess Allen’s decidedly literate painting Book Piles 3 (2021) to illustrate Clare Bucknell’s review of a cultural history of pedantry. Michelle Mildenberg drew Patrick Radden Keefe and the city he writes about in his new book London Falling, reviewed by Mark O’Connell. And Yann Kebbi drew a sagacious Seamus Heaney for Nick Laird’s essay about the poet and his voluminous achievements. Kebbi recently had a show at the Gallery of L’Académie des beaux-arts in Paris.

For the cover of the May 28 issue, I could not pass up the chance to feature our logo and coverlines in the negative space in Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting The Death of Marat. The painting’s proportions are ideal for our magazine’s dimensions, and its subject matter nodded to Lynn Hunt’s review of two books about Marat. It was the shortest cover meeting in four years.

Vivienne Flesher made room in her schedule to draw Ben Lerner for Christopher Tayler’s review of his new novel. When the editors weighed in on her sketch, she told us our feedback was “more erudite and humorous” than she gets from any other publication. For David Wheatley’s review of some contemporary poetry books, I tried out a new illustrator, the Boston-based Naï Zakharia, for a double-portrait of the Scottish poets Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson; and for Charlie Lee on John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, I returned to our stalwart Grant Shaffer for Dunne’s likeness.

I’ve been hoping to work with another new contributor, the Ottawa-based illustrator Mike Haddad, and he made a seemingly totalitarian bookstore for Louisa Lim’s essay about the pressures facing fiction writers in Hong Kong.

The series art for the issue is by John Broadley.

The painting on the June 11 cover, Orangenkiste (2018), is by the New York–based artist Jule Korneffel, whose work appeared in our pages earlier this year, alongside an essay about algebra by Dan Rockmore. One of the editors pointed out that the language of the Marianne Boruch poem inside the issue, “Voices in Rome,” coincided nicely with Orangenkiste: “in rain. A blur, like another language is/a mix of color.” Korneffel’s work is bold, bright, and brainy, and she recently had a show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, on the Lower East Side.

The issue opens with an essay adapted from a lecture Zadie Smith gave at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the purpose of making art—especially at a dangerous historical moment. Smith suggested a few images to illustrate it, and we most liked Thomas Hart Benton’s painting City Building, from 1930.

I asked Harriet Lee-Merrion to draw Makenna Goodman for Joanna Biggs’s review of Goodman’s second novel, Helen of Nowhere.

After reading Christopher Byrd’s essay about the novelist Mathias Énard, and then looking for pictures of Énard, I determined that Henning Wagenbreth, whom I felt might share a certain eclecticism with the French novelist, would make a good portrait.

For Jonathan Mingle’s review of a book about methane and global warming, I looked for paintings about “atmosphere.” The Canadian painter Nancy Friedland’s pink-skied and slightly smoggy painting Hush (2024) fit the bill. David Blight wrote about the ideologues attempting to claim American history for certain ideas about the national character—and the need to reclaim history from them—so to illustrate it one of our assistant editors found a glorious 1859 painting by Albert Bierstadt of a thunderstorm over the western frontier.

M. W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin wrote critically about sociobiologists’ attempts to determine genetic causes for social inequality, and Paul Sahre illustrated the sociobiologists’ mad quest with a DNA harpoon. Michelle Mildenberg returned to draw Hu Anyan for Rumaan Alam’s review of Anyan’s memoir of life as a package courier in Beijing.

The series art in the issue, titled Currents, is by a recent School of Visual Arts MFA graduate, Bernardo Bagulho, who cold-emailed me looking for illustration work.

It’s an unofficial, largely unacknowledged tradition that we (I!) try to put a swimmer on the cover sometime during the summer months, so at the cover meeting for our June 25 issue I quietly suggested Emerging, an energetic painting by Terry Ekasala of three swimmers bathing languidly in green water.

The first two essays in the issue are about AI. Dan Chiasson considers the technology’s effect on writing and thinking—how it eliminates the opportunity to get stuck and have to rethink one’s thoughts. He references the pools of ink that accumulate in Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, indicating where her pen stopped on the page midthought, so we thought a page from her herbarium would be an apt illustration. Chiasson’s editor, a native of Canada like me, sent a note about the pressed trillium—“nice Ontario content”—as it is our official provincial flower. The second AI essay is by Meghan O’Gieblyn, who considers the strange rhymes and disjunctions between teaching AI and raising children. Something in her writing brought to mind ideas of iteration and transmission, and I remembered a painting by the filmmaker Gus Van Sant, Untitled Mona Lisa 10 (2021), that I’d seen at a boutique outside Palm Springs in March.

After the London-based illustrator Paul Davis read a draft of Michael Gorra’s review of a book about American literary agents, he drew one flying through the air on wings of pages, brandishing a martini and scalpel. At the last minute, he added talons to her feet.

Camille Deschiens drew a sensitive likeness of Harriet Clark for Laura Miller’s review of Clark’s debut novel, The Hill. Deschiens sent some references to the Belgian illustrator Jean-Michel Folon’s dreamlike landscapes with her sketch. Fun fact: seeing Folon’s work in a small show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was fifteen set me on a course to one day live in New York City.

I asked the Berlin-based Sophia Martineck for a portrait of Thomas Mann in a sanatorium to go along with Adam Kirsch’s essay about Mann and The Magic Mountain. Martineck described her sketch: “My idea was to show Mann in a typical room inside the sanatorium with a wooden lounge chair. The doors to the balcony are closed while an avalanche hits the balcony as a metaphor of the Great War raging in Europe.”

The writer and designer Oliver Munday gave us a colorful collage of the New York School poets for Joe Dunthorne’s essay about a new book of interviews with, among others, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, and Ted Berrigan.

The series art in the issue, by Lorenzo Gritti, is called Highlighter Pens and a Brush 01.

In our June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne opens his essay about a new oral history of the New York School poets with an ironic gambit: “One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed.” Of course, this sort of insouciance is one of the defining features of an indefinitive group that, across several generations, was otherwise mostly united around geography and the freedom that came from a moment in New York City’s history when rent could be, as Ron Padgett recalls, “about sixty dollars a month.” So, Dunthorne asks, “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?”

Below, alongside Dunthorne’s essay, are five articles from our archives about New York School poets alongside four poems from our archives by New York School poets (alas, Frank O’Hara’s poetry never did appear in the pages of the Review).

When the Rents Were Low

Joe Dunthorne

One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed. “You can join the New York School for $5 if you want” was how Ted Berrigan often put it. Part of the lasting appeal of this loose group of poets is their disinterest in assessing their own legacy. Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: “Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.” All of this makes them a challenge to write an academic book about. How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?

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

From the Archive: The New York School

Alert to Reality

Langdon Hammer

James Schuyler was a great nature poet. But that way of putting it is misleading because he usually observed nature from indoors, framed by a window, and the nature he was writing about was often a city view with skyscrapers, or an arrangement of tulips on a table, or the fanciful names in a flower catalog. And the word “nature” isn’t right because it refers to something large and abstract, whereas Schuyler was writing about “the day,” meaning the sheer offhand presence of the world, which is always particular and local.

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

Payne Whitney Poems

James Schuyler

Arches

of buildings, this building,
frame a stream of windows
framed in white brick. This
building is fire proof; or else
it isn’t: the furnishings first
to go: no, the patients.…

Read the full poem here.

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

Lucy Sante

Ashbery’s was marked above all by a calm, discursive voice, going along at a walking pace, often seeming to have been caught in midstream, maybe half-heard from outside through the curtains. That voice could occasionally sound explicitly poetic or expressionistically fractured, but more often—and more consistently as time went by—it sounded conversational, demotic, mild, even-toned, deep-dish American. Its apparent placidity allowed for all sorts of things to appear bobbing happily in its current: recondite allusions, philosophical asides, foreign idioms, schoolyard jokes, forgotten cultural detritus of all sorts, even the occasional narrative or analysis or argument.

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

Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse

John Ashbery

We were warned about spiders, and the 
occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our 
neighbors. None of them were home.
We nestled in yards the municipality 
had created,
reminisced about other, different places
—
but were they? Hadn’t we known it all 
before?…

Read the full poem here.

Crossing the Invisible Line

Dan Chiasson

The solemnities of art are, in [Eileen] Myles, everywhere undermined: “I like to get really stoned/and revise everything I’ve ever done/Leaning/against the refrigerator,” she writes in “La Vita Nuova.” You’d score that a win for life, if it weren’t for the fact that we hear about it in lines of verse. The title alludes to Dante; “leaning”—with the unshowy pun on Myles’s first name—is among the most important words in American poetry, handed down to Myles from two of her New York heroes: Whitman (“I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”) and especially Frank O’Hara in “The Day Lady Died” (“I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 Spot”). It is deeply characteristic of her that the most Dionysian moments are also her most vocational. Only a poet who agreed with Robert Frost that poems are “play for mortal stakes” would boast about getting stoned and heedlessly working on revisions.

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

Lark

Eileen Myles

Anything
could possibly
become any
thing else. It
was the condition
of this
dream…

Read the full poem here.

The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street

Geoffrey O’Brien

Allen Ginsberg said of O’Hara’s New York poems, “It’s like having Catullus change your view of the Forum in Rome,” and indeed one has to go back to fairly remote periods—ancient Rome, eighteenth-century London—to find poetry as meticulous in its gossip and as minute in its urban observation as O’Hara’s. He made himself the patron poet of a this-worldly magic emanating chiefly from the magic city of New York: a utopia of freely circulating desire articulated by sex, talk, drink, art, ballet, parties, movies, and lunch dates, with occasional necessary forays to the Hamptons and Paris.

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

You’re Welcome

F.W. Dupree

Life does not present itself to Kenneth Koch as picture or symbol or collector’s item. It talks, sighs, grunts and sings; it is a drama, largely comic, in which there are parts for everyone and everything, and all the parts are speaking parts.

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

Some General Instructions

Kenneth Koch

Do not bake bread in an oven that is not 
made of stone
Or you risk having imperfect bread. 
Byron wrote,
“The greatest pleasure in life is drinking 
hock
And soda water the morning after, when one 
has
A hangover,” or words to that effect.…

Read the full poem here.

Last Friday marked the fifth year that Juneteenth has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States. In the summer of 2020, one year before President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Act into law, Darryl Pinckney went looking for mention of the holiday in the historical record and his personal life. His search brought him to a silent film shot in Oklahoma City in 1925; Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; and, finally, the window of his home in Harlem, watching a Juneteenth celebration during the summer that “young America blew the lid off lockdown.”

‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

Darryl Pinckney

I will look for you in the stories of new kings. Juneteenth isn’t mentioned in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois or Carter Woodson, the founder of The Journal of Negro History. I haven’t yet come across a description of the first Juneteenth celebrations equivalent to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s report of the ceremonies for the Emancipation Proclamation as it was read aloud on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day, 1863. Black troops, white commanders, white clergymen, white women schoolteachers, black women schoolteachers, and the formerly enslaved turned resisters gathered at the sober campground to ratify in their hearts the next covenant of the Republic.

Various sources tell us that when news of Lee’s surrender in Virginia reached the West a few weeks later, the Confederate army in Texas began to fall apart. Even so, federal authority depended on the presence of Union troops. In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant remembers that General Gordon Granger charged with “such a roar of musketry” at the Battle of Chattanooga that the rebels heard him from a long way off and had time to get away. When Grant learned that Granger had turned up in New Orleans, the War Department ignored his advice that the general not be given another command. Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to announce and enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas was the last Confederate state to be occupied.

Surprise is an essential element of beauty, the poets say, and several arresting minutes of silent film shot by Reverend S.S. Jones in Oklahoma City in 1925 have been making the Internet rounds of late. His stationary camera captures a Juneteenth parade, a bold march of heartbreakingly well-dressed black people—marching bands, Pullman porters, black women’s clubs under large black umbrellas, and black veterans of both World War I and the Spanish-American War. They are moving through a residential neighborhood where we see scarcely any spectators, as if everyone who lived on that tidy street were in the parade. Juneteenth was a black holiday out West, not down South, I assumed, and therefore not a memory that traveled with black people in their migrations to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Observance of Juneteenth supposedly fell off over time. It was revived nationally in the Black Expo days of the 1970s, when Kwanzaa was first catching on as the Africanist Christmas.

I’d not heard of Juneteenth until Ralph Ellison’s long-awaited second novel was published posthumously in 1999.^* Juneteenth is mostly voice, or voices, “in the beloved idiom,” as Ellison said. It centers on the confrontation between a white senator and the black preacher who taught him when still a boy how to hold a crowd. The Ellisonian twist is that the racist senator may have been a white boy who’d been brought up as a black boy. The novel opens in the 1950s and flashes back to the senator’s childhood with the preacher on the black revival circuit in the South before World War I and his escape across the color line as a roving white filmmaker in the Southwest sometime in the 1920s. Ellison’s rhetorical invention reaches its climax as the senator and preacher remember, separately and together, a Juneteenth celebration on a hot, dusty night in a tent in rural Alabama, not out West.

Old-fashioned Negroes getting Emancipation mixed up with the Resurrection and vaudeville, the senator thinks at first. The preacher remembers the workers in white uniforms, barrels of ice, yellow cases of soda pop, the vast quantities of catfish and ham, coleslaw and chocolate cake. At the sunrise services, they were “playing for keeps.” The preacher is dismayed that his former prodigy could have forgotten how they in their sermon invoked the Middle Passage and its images of tongues cut out and talking drums stolen. One group can’t be given license to kill another in order to prove their superiority, he thinks to himself. He carries scars from the fights he got into trying to go to the polls in Oklahoma armed with ax handles and pistols, and accompanied by some Native American and white sympathizers. Ellison has maybe given his preacher a fighting past he wished he’d had himself. But then his preacher suspects that whites were attempting to destroy the humility of black people because they had sensed its life-preserving power, as if Ellison had to reposition him so that his Juneteenth peroration emphasizes how blacks sang and danced, survived and flourished.

Ellison opposed the notion of black life as a “metaphysical condition” of “irremediable agony” because that made it seem as though it either took place in a vacuum or had only one theme. In his writings about the jazz greats he heard play in his youth in Oklahoma, he gives them credit for expressing something about the optimism of blacks as a group that found no definition elsewhere. Ellison recalled with pride his music teacher, who had her students join the Scottish reel competition on May Day, ignoring people who said black students ought not to learn European folk dances. Black people coming from enslaved circumstances couldn’t cling to their cultural idioms and survive, therefore they sought to extend their range, Ellison claimed. Cultural synthesis was important to “the unnoticed logic of the democratic process.” He insisted that segregation had not cut off black people from various fields of influence and that in turn American culture was marked at every point by black vernacular culture. This mixture was an opportunity, as he saw it, a chance to make a humanly richer society.

Ellison, born in 1913, made much of the pioneer spirit shared between black and white, and it mattered to him that Oklahoma had not been a part of the Confederacy. Though blacks by law had the vote, Oklahoma’s state constitution in 1907 forbade integrated schools and classified as “colored” anyone with any degree of black blood, while Native Americans were classed as “white.” Ellison was only eight years old when in 1921 in Tulsa a black youth, Dick Rowland, was arrested for supposedly assaulting a white woman in a downtown elevator. Armed black men protecting the prisoner in the county jail turned back a white mob, after which white people went on a rampage, destroying Greenwood, the thriving black business section, looting, burning black homes, running black people out of town. Seventy black people were killed and nine white people.

In 1930, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a black youth—Henry Argo—was arrested for the rape of a white girl and the attempted murder of her child. It was rumored that Argo and the girl were lovers. A mob of two thousand white men attacked the jail with battering rams, drove off the National Guard with gunfire, used commandeered National Guard equipment to pull the jail doors off their hinges, smashed a hole through the concrete cell that held Argo, shot him, and stabbed him. He bled to death on his way to a hospital in Oklahoma City.

In her autobiography, A Matter of Black and White (1996), Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher recalls that in her family the story was that the mob came back for Henry Argo only after the sheriff had assured the armed black men guarding the jailhouse that he was no longer in danger. There had been talk of parading his body through the black part of town to teach them a lesson. The town’s one black doctor gathered together bootleggers and gamblers—“this was no job for church folks—and declared that any white man who crossed Minnesota Street with that boy’s body would die in colored town.” Whether the story of black anger was legend or not, Sipuel notes that Argo’s murder was the last recorded lynching in the state.

Sipuel’s parents had moved to Chickasha shortly after the riot in Tulsa, where black men like her father—a Pentecostal minister—who tried to protect black properties got rounded up by white militias. There were no parks or playgrounds for black children in Chickasha when Sipuel was growing up in the 1920s. After she graduated from Langston University in 1945, the only state-supported college open to black students in Oklahoma, Sipuel volunteered to join Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP challenge to the state’s segregation laws by applying to the all-white University of Oklahoma law school—the only public law school in the state. In Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), the Supreme Court agreed with the argument that the state had to provide her with a law education under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sipuel’s case was a precursor of Brown v. Board of Education.

The weirdness was elsewhere, I was telling myself back in February. My aunt in Massachusetts, a long-retired middle school teacher, was perplexed that her favorite Chinese restaurant was completely deserted, except for us. On my first visit to her little town near Fort Devens, where her husband had been reassigned, her history lesson was about the soldiers who came back to Fort Devens in 1918 with Spanish flu, and it spread from there. Fort Devens is long closed, phantoms snuck through my aunt’s window and replaced the thermostat she loved with an inferior one, and it was a further measure of her dementia that sitting there over egg rolls too rubbery to tear, she had never heard of influenza at Devens. It has been a measure of her dementia in the past few months that her understanding of Covid-19 remains on a par with that of seemingly everyone in the White House.

On March 16, New York City woke to learn that schools, restaurants, theaters, and concert venues would be closed. In the unpredicted schedule of gyms shuttered next and speaker-loaded squad cars roaming my neighborhood to warn people to maintain social distance; in the unprecedented drama of self-isolation and quarantine, followed by lockdown, angry noncompliance among black people was a clue as to how vulnerable we are in the pandemic. My trainer, a young black family man who saved himself from the streets, speculated that Covid was a Chinese invention for the trade war, but it backfired. In the face of mounting evidence about how, in lieu of a vaccine, social behavior mattered in dealing with the virus, my trainer, already streaming workout sessions, was adamant that he was more afraid of the police than he was of the pandemic.

The class character of the pandemic was soon very clear anyway—who worked in what were deemed essential services, who had to show up on those front lines, who had to keep packing and delivering, whom they were going home to, who had poor health in the first place and often inadequate health care. By mid-April in some states, black people made up a much higher percentage of confirmed cases than the percentage of black people in the general population. Black people were 40 percent of Covid sufferers in Michigan, while only 14 percent of the population. “Liberate Michigan,” immortal white people in Lansing chanted against strict lockdown. The pandemic was showing us that most of us had never had merely to survive before.

Empty streets as a shared global experience, cleaner air, surveillance anxiety, loss of livelihood, disturbances in overcrowded prisons, hospital staff martyrs, double bunking in the graveyards, and nightly salutes to workers, soldiers, and volunteers in danger also underscored how small is the man trying to hold our national destiny hostage to his sour vanity. Drink bleach, inject bleach, rise by Easter. If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition? My partner said Republican Party policy was simply, “You can go back to work and you can die.”

By May Day, the stay-at-home order in the city was beginning to crumble. Footage would appear on social media of, say, an incident in Brooklyn in which the police had used social distancing guidelines as the reason to get rough with black guys hanging out in groups on sidewalks and between parked cars. They almost followed a script: disperse, why, disperse, no, stand-off, push, push back, take down. Then it happened.

Say his name
George Floyd

The pandemic dramatized what inequality looks like, and the police killing of George Floyd showed everyone what being black in America feels like, over and over again. Young America blew the lid off lockdown, a blast wave of outrage that reached around the world. Jill Nelson told Henry Louis Gates Jr. years ago that she was tired of going to all-black or mostly black demonstrations for social justice, that it was time for white people to show up. They did: their vast numbers are what Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson have led to, in part. Sustained public protest, staying in the streets, those who shall not be moved, taking over the mainstream narrative, if you want to talk that way, the coming together of opposition, if you prefer. Black Lives Matter was ready.

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

In the “At the Galleries” column from our June 25, 2026, issue, Lovia Gyarkye writes about an exhibition of work by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Yiadom-Boakye is most known for painting solitary, serene figures that nonetheless possess, as Gyarkye writes, “a sly, even conspiratorial edge.” The Shainman show, which features new paintings and works on paper, has an “element of mischief,” combining funereal scenes with a series of portraits of people eating cheeky fingerfuls of pie.

Gyarkye is a former staff writer at The Hollywood Reporter; an editor at Hammer and Hope, a magazine of black politics and culture; and a lively critic whose work has appeared in many publications and a broad range of genres, including film, literary, and, of course, art criticism. We corresponded recently over email about the history of black figurative art, her favorite new films, and which Disney Channel Original my children should watch to learn about a particularly brutal chapter of South African apartheid.

Nawal Arjini: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye looms large in the discussion about contemporary figuration, especially black figuration—what do you make of the genre (or to what extent do you even think it is one), and the discussion around it?

Lovia Gyarkye: I was suspicious of how the mainstream art world glommed onto this most recent chapter in black figuration, as if the value of black art depended on its legibility. My skepticism grew in 2020, when institutions scrambled to reckon with their fraught histories as a response to protests against the murder of George Floyd and police brutality more broadly. Suddenly, there was an increased interest in figurative works by black artists, but this hypervisibility didn’t lead to the most sophisticated analysis of the artworks or the lineage in which they existed. At the time I found it all kind of boring but looking back now I realize I wasn’t engaging in the most interesting versions of these conversations to begin with. My aversion was an angsty response to the myopic way that mainstream, often majority-white institutions talked about black art more generally, which tended toward clichés about social justice and the power that lived experiences have to generate empathy and foster tolerance.

I felt such relief when I first came across Yiadom-Boakye’s work, which is so beguiling and mischievous. Along with the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, she advanced my understanding of figuration’s possibilities. Her work reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi’s novels; there is a fondness for myth, for understanding why we’re drawn to stories and for embracing the fun of imagined worlds. Yiadom-Boakye never anchors her characters to a place—they are completely unmoored and yet so often at ease. How freeing is that? It encourages viewers to engage with the work on its own terms and not to lean on sociology, which I think we tend to do when analyzing art by black artists.

Why do you think black figurative painters are so popular right now, especially at big institutions?

I think part of it has to do with the fact that representation is inspiring, even though it seems chic to reject it. Earlier conversations about black artists’ figurative painting always seemed to align with a thesis about the power of seeing black people rendered so elegantly in a medium most popularly associated with the Western (usually presumed as white) art world. For better or worse, that is meaningful.

I also think, on an individual level, the kind of legibility we associate with figuration invites a more direct engagement with the subject. Abstracted works can provoke and challenge in ways that can be frustrating. I find that as a viewer they require you to let go a bit and be OK with misunderstanding. I’m less forgiving of the institutional interest in black figurative painters because of my skepticism of their motives, but I also wonder why they seem to take less interest in black abstraction.

You’re a longtime film critic; what are some films you’ve seen recently that were worth seeing?

I still feel so green compared to some of my peers. Since leaving The Hollywood Reporter, I haven’t been watching films at the same rate as I used to. I’m watching what interests me without having to form an immediate opinion. Working at a trade magazine meant I covered a wide range of movies, even ones I thought no one could pay me to see. (I guess they could.)

Still, I’ve seen and have been thinking about some great films of late. One is Clarissa, a really inspired take on Mrs. Dalloway by the Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri that premiered at Cannes this year. Adapting Woolf’s novel allows the Esiris to reveal the colonial undercurrents within Nigerian society, and also grapple with present-day class tensions in Lagos as well as the Nigerian military’s authority.

Clarissa uses this grammar I’ve noticed in a lot of recent films by young black artists, from Raven Jackson to RaMell Ross, which embraces fragmentation and nonlinearity. This isn’t a new style, per se, because you can find traces of it in the work of Terrence Malick or Julie Dash, but I have been wondering why it seems to fit the moment, and whether it risks becoming a gimmick.

Another great film I saw recently is Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which was started in 1972 by William Greaves and finished by his son David, and will come out in the fall. The documentary is composed entirely of footage from a meeting of the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1970s at Duke Ellington’s apartment. It’s thrilling to hear these luminaries reflect on and relitigate the issues of their times.

Now a question for my own personal benefit: Do you have any children’s movie recommendations?

Enthusiastically yes: I covered a lot of children’s movies when I was reviewing full time, and I take them quite seriously. So many of them are terrible because they treat children like idiots. Recent children’s films I’ve liked include The Wild Robot, which features some incredible voice acting from Lupita Nyong’o, and Claude Barras’s Sauvages, a stop-motion movie about a group of Indigenous people trying to protect their home and way of life from unchecked corporate greed. I’m not sure if that film was ever released in the United States, but I saw it a few years ago at Cannes. It impressed me because it doesn’t try to sugarcoat the realities of environmental catastrophe or corporate greed, in the way a lot of American films do, but it nonetheless maintains the accessible emotional texture of a children’s movie.

I didn’t grow up in a film-watching family; I often joke that I was raised on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Disney Channel Original movies, and whatever African films played at the braiding shop. Brandy as Cinderella remains an inspired choice. If the 2000 Disney Channel movie The Color of Friendship, which tells a surprisingly bracing story about the injustices of South African apartheid, including a third-act development centered on the horrific murder of Steve Biko, were made today, you know Disney would try to kumbaya the whole story.

The films I watched in the hair salon were often about a woman named Beyonce—no relation to the pop star—who falls in love with a man who is engaged to another woman. From my vague memory, the first film is a kind of straightforward narrative drama and the sequel—The Return of Beyonce—involved more magical realism, crime, and revenge. These films were contemporaneous with Nollywood movies, which also got a lot of play at the shop. This mix of early film watching must have contributed to the openness and perhaps contradictions of my taste.

Besides New York, what are some great moviegoing cities?

I do think New York is particularly incredible: there’s so much on offer here. Outside of Cannes and Venice, New York hosts my favorite major film festival, the New York Film Festival. The selection is consistently adventurous. New York is also home to the African Film Festival, which brings an array of works by people from both the continent and its diaspora. There are also hyperlocal ventures like Alfreda’s Cinema, in Brooklyn, which does some incredible programming. I’m sure somewhere in Los Angeles or Paris, someone is cursing me, but I stand by this truth.

Could you tell our readers a bit more about Hammer and Hope, where you’re an editor?

I love when I get to talk about Hammer and Hope, a quarterly digital magazine founded by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Jen Parker. I only started working there last September, but I can say that even in the last year the ambitious, high-quality work we have published makes me really proud. I was brought on to help expand their arts coverage, and it’s been a fun challenge: there’s a dearth of rigorous culture writing in general but especially when it comes to black art, and I hope the magazine’s pages can be a place where writers embrace tension. We’ve done a lot of cool stories since I’ve been there, including a roundtable of critics applying analytical pressure to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners; an essay about the conservative undercurrents of so-called “Blackbusters”—those films from the late 1990s and early 2000s, like Waiting to Exhale and Love and Basketball, that represented a golden age of Black cinema—and profiles of folks like Angela Flournoy and Raoul Peck, the latter of which I wrote. The magazine is free to read, but right now we’re trying to grow our membership program, which helps fund all of these pieces.

In other outlets, your writing ranges across a broad spectrum, from Katie Kitamura’s novels to Stuart Hall. What sorts of writers and topics have you been particularly interested in working on (especially in an editorial capacity) at Hammer and Hope?

I’m focused on work that has real stakes and ideas that might feel scary to articulate. I think there’s freedom in that risk. I feel lucky that a magazine like this exists, and I want to take advantage of that by encouraging my writers to think ambitiously. I’m always saying if there’s an essay you’ve been putting off and you don’t think will work anywhere, let’s talk about it. That’s how Ian F. Blair’s essay about the Blackbuster came to be.

I’m trying to do this in my own work too. I’m excited to have the time to nurture my intellectual life. I’ve been trying to write about the rapper Noname since I started my career because I find her political journey so fascinating. She’s part of a history of artists and activists who have used reading groups, bookstores, and libraries to engage in meaningful political education. I owe the Review an essay on Anna Julia Cooper and the development of a black feminist critical style, which I’ve been thinking about for years. Emily, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. In general, I’m honing my thoughts on black women’s cultural production, especially that of the working class.

For the past decade or more there’s been a growing interest among Americans for translated literature, foreign films, international TV—to what extent is this syncretic with the already extant streams of black internationalism, and especially to black American interest in culture across the black Atlantic? Or are these separate strains?

I do think to some extent these are separate. Black internationalism implies a shared politics grounded in anti-imperial and decolonial movements, whereas the recent black American interest in culture across the black Atlantic doesn’t require that. This is a topic I’ve been discussing a lot with my friend Jazmine Hughes, who has been focusing on this subject for a book project. If we aren’t careful, interest divorced from real solidarity risks reinforcing certain imperial behaviors and attitudes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Pan-Africanism recently. Last summer, I reviewed Howard French’s wonderful book The Second Emancipation, which functions as both a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and a retelling of cold war history that puts Africa’s independence movements at the center. There seems to be a wider interest in trying to understand the cultural thread of Pan-Africanism, as well. I’m thinking specifically of Oluremi C. Onabanjo’s Portraits of Africa exhibition at MoMa and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, which I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago last year, both wonderful shows.

You seem extremely busy, but are there any projects you’re working on that you can share, or any forthcoming books/films/shows you’ve got your eye on?

Ha! I always swear I’m not that busy. My immediate extracurricular focus is a hybrid residency I’m launching for arts writers and editors based in Ghana. The project is inspired by Okyeame, a literary magazine that was published by cultural workers like Kofi Awoonor, Efua Sutherland, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo in the wake of Ghanaian independence. I’m trying to very humbly continue the legacy of the publication, which shuttered in 1972, by gathering some of the writers and editors who are currently shaping Ghana’s arts landscape and offering them financial support, editorial guidance, and connections with venues to publish the work they are already doing. After that, I’m going to take a break from doing one million jobs and start thinking about my book project. I’d love to spend some time thinking deeply on one subject.

Planet UFC

Nic Johnson

This article was originally published on June 13, 2026.

For decades it has been White House tradition to invite Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a ceremonial exchange of a bowl of shamrocks, symbolizing Irish-American friendship. But two months into Donald Trump’s return in 2025, a very different figure was marking the holiday with a very different kind of pageant. “Ireland and America, we are siblings. We consider America our big sibling,” the professional fighter Conor McGregor told the assembled White House reporters. “We wish to be taken care of by the big bro; the United States should look after its little bro.”

Replacing the prime minister—who had visited the previous week—with “The Notorious” McGregor was a curious choice. McGregor has long been one of the public faces of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the promotion company that since the 1990s has been almost synonymous with mixed martial arts (MMA). Since he last fought—in 2021, losing two fights to the lightweight Dustin Poirier—he had drawn public attention mostly for drunken nightclub brawls, an NBA mid-game skit during which he hospitalized a mascot, and, above all, a 2024 civil case in Irish court that found him liable for a brutal sexual assault in 2018. He had come to D.C. seeking approval from Trump and connection with an audience of more than 30 million Irish Americans who might somehow support him in his bid for the Irish presidency, which he planned to contest on a nationalist platform. “Our money is being spent on overseas issues that have nothing to do with the Irish people,” he said. “The illegal immigration racket is running ravage [sic] on the country.”

McGregor’s was only one of the stranger expressions of a convergence between the UFC and MAGA politics that has been building for years. The first major public manifestation was UFC president Dana White’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he praised the party’s nominee for supporting the fledgling UFC back when “it was basically considered a bloodsport” in polite society: “Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump.” In 2020 former two-division champ Henry Cejudo campaigned at Eric Trump’s “Latinos for Trump” events, while Jorge Masvidal—an outspoken member of Miami’s Cuban diaspora—joined Don Jr. to headline the “Fighters Against Socialism” bus tour. The former champ Tito Ortiz acted as a Trump surrogate as early as 2016 before himself winning a 2020 city council race in California with the slogan “Make Huntington Beach Safe Again.” This hardly begins to exhaust the list of fighters who speak or post about their love for Trump in ways big and small—for instance, by organizing a media campaign to promote Kash Patel when it looked like moderate Republicans might not confirm him for FBI director—or the still larger PR and media apparatus of UFC-affiliated podcasts and personalities that have gravitated toward MAGA, from Joe Rogan (a color commentator on UFC broadcasts since 1997) to Andrew Tate.

Trump has reciprocated the attention. Since 2019 he has been a frequent guest at UFC events, where fighters often jump over the cage to kneel before him, bow to him, or shake his hand. “Thank you for doing what you’re doing,” the outspoken Bolsonarist fighter Paulo Costa said as he kneeled and shook hands with Trump this past April at UFC 327. In August 2025 the president assigned his daughter Ivanka the task of coordinating a UFC event on the White House lawn, ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but now scheduled for tomorrow—Trump’s birthday.

Trump isn’t the only nationalist politician who likes to associate with UFC fighters. Vladimir Putin, who holds the rank of black belt in judo (plus two honorary black belts in karate and one in taekwondo), relishes being photographed in his gi and subsidizes fighters from the most dominant region in mixed martial arts today, Dagestan. Neo-Nazis are using fight clubs as recruiting tools across Europe. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator, surrounds himself with MMA fighters—when Khamzat Chimaev won the UFC’s middleweight belt in August, he flew straight to Grozny to hand it over to Kadyrov—and has built MMA training centers for his military and security services, which are frequently visited by UFC champions. Jair Bolsonaro was awarded an honorary black belt from the family that invented the UFC, the Gracie clan. The Gulf monarchies’ strategy of “sportswashing” their international reputations has made them important players in the fight world. All this testifies to how thoroughly the UFC has become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.

As it moved from the underground to the relatively legitimate terrain of network TV, MMA became one of the principal vectors through which young men—the nationalist right’s central demographic—interact with politicized culture. Its appeal has multiple sources. The violence is simultaneously authentic and spectacular, so it can hold an audience’s attention while allowing them to connect with a real kind of physical peril that is, in many cases, increasingly absent from their daily lives. Combat in MMA depends as much on grappling—the use of momentum, balance, and leverage to wrestle an opponent to the ground, then force them to surrender via strangulation or joint manipulation—as it does on traditional striking with punches and kicks. This means that even the “little guys” can win fights, indeed dominate, if they master the techniques—a prospect that has special appeal for scrappy outsiders or anyone else with an inferiority complex.

The drama of individual fighters’ stories, enhanced by kayfabe and the reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter, gives men something to gossip about while retaining an aura of toughness. Fighters present themselves as symbols of national virility by physically dominating other men, humiliating “effeminate” ones, and parading wives and girlfriends in conspicuously subordinate roles. Through disciplined and stylized violence, the UFC audience learns to appreciate the emotional grammar of a post-liberal masculinity that is brutal, resentful of helplessness or fragility, and ravenous for recognition within an explicitly established hierarchy of prowess.

Ever since Trump announced his campaign in 2015, cultural commentators have found it useful to compare his political style to professional wrestling, pointing to his appearances on WWE programs and quoting literary authorities like Roland Barthes for analysis. In his famous Mythologies (1957) Barthes drew a philosophical contrast between boxing, which makes each fight into “a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator,” and wrestling, where “it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time,” turning the sport as a whole into a “sum of spectacles.” To some extent this was apt for the first Trump administration, which was more successful at generating displays of cruelty and domination than achieving tangible results on signature issues like trade or immigration. Trump’s second term, however, is perhaps better compared to mixed martial arts: chaotic, unrestrained, effective at inflicting violence on enemies, with a nationalist machismo that circulates internationally. Viewing Trump in the mirror of the UFC, and vice versa, may help clarify why each has such a powerful place in the fantasy lives of millions of young men.

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

In this episode of Private Life, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor and mentor, the poetry critic Helen Vendler.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other streaming platforms here.

The two also talk about “Inside the Music,” Aucoin’s essay from the Review’s November 6, 2025, issue about the decline of music reviews in mainstream media, as well as “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” Vendler’s review, from our May 11, 1995, issue, of o James Merill’s final book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.(1995).

Aucoin is a composer, conductor, and writer. His operatic song cycle Music for New Bodies, inspired by the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in 2024 and was staged at the Lincoln Center in the summer of 2025. He is the author of the book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (2021), and he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2018. Also in 2018 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known most for writing about contemporary poetry. Over a six-decade career she taught English and poetics at Cornell, Boston University, and Harvard, where she retired as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English. Vendler was also a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning in 1975 with an essay on William Carlos Willaims.

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.

By the end of the apartheid era, wrote Sean Jacobs in the NYR Online on June 7, the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim had “established himself as perhaps South Africa’s greatest musical innovator and composer of the twentieth century.” Across his years in Cape Town’s jazz scene and his long periods of exile in New York, Ibrahim developed a distinctive synthesis of musical traditions: “the church music of his grandmother, the film music his mother played, the music he heard in the city’s shebeens, the songs of dance bands and carnival troupes, the pieces he learned from schoolteachers, and the techniques he learned by collaborating with leading American jazz musicians.” What drew all these styles and genres together, Jacobs writes, was “his delicate, lyrical touch at the piano.”

On Monday, eight days after Jacobs’s essay appeared, Ibrahim’s family announced that he had died at his home in Germany, age ninety-one. His work has long stood, Jacobs writes, as “a song of defiance” against oppression in his home country, from his early work in Cape Town with the legendary Jazz Epistles to his anti-apartheid anthem “Mannenberg.” The full story of his life, work, and collaborators—foremost among them the pioneering jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin—is also a story of twentieth-century South Africa itself.

Below, alongside Jacobs’s article, are five essays about the American jazz musicians and South African political upheavals that shaped Ibrahim’s life and work.

Songs of Liberation

Sean Jacobs

In 1960 the writer Bessie Head—yet to publish the novels that would make her a leading figure in South African and Batswana literature—interviewed a young Cape Town pianist named Adolf Johannes Brand, who went by Dollar Brand. In her manuscript, which never appeared in print but resurfaced in 1995, she called him “a most surprising phenomenon of South African life.” The country, she insisted, was little but “a desert of gold mines” and “an advertiser’s paradise” with “no tradition of serious thought or culture.” The few exceptions were “independent spirits” like Brand, “a powerful, vitally alive and creative man” who stood out like “a complete and perfect flower in this desert”: “He hurls a challenge at you; disturbs you; teaches and expects perfection from you.”

Brand was twenty-six. The year before, he had formed the Jazz Epistles, a six-piece band that quickly developed a reputation in and around Cape Town’s vibrant music scene and briefly in Johannesburg, playing American-influenced hard bop to sold-out audiences at hotels and small concert venues. At a time when apartheid was intensifying and South African music mostly imitated American pop, the Epistles were a kind of countercultural force. Two months before Head interviewed him, they became the first all-black group in South Africa to release a jazz album.

One of the Epistles, Hugh Masekela, described their sound in his autobiography as a fusion of “tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid slow ballads, and heart-melting, hymn-like dirges.”

The music itself remained close to American bebop, but some of the song titles hinted that the group was also hoping to develop a distinctly South African jazz idiom: one was in the Zulu language; another made references to slavery (which for at least 170 years had been the country’s dominant economic system) and Islam (which had been brought to South Africa by enslaved believers). Some of the references were more direct: in “Blues for Hughie,” dedicated to Masekela, listeners could detect what the liner notes called the “deep winging rhythm” of the Pedi people, from whom the pianist Kippie Moeketsi, another crucial member, descended.

All the Jazz Epistles would have success to varying degrees, but it was Brand who would become the single most visible representative of black South African jazz cosmopolitanism. The group’s influence stayed with him as he moved on to Europe and then to the US, changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim, and established himself as perhaps South Africa’s greatest musical innovator and composer of the twentieth century, not to mention one of its most successful cultural exports. Nelson Mandela once called him “our Mozart.” When in 2019 the US National Endowment for the Arts named Ibrahim a “Jazz Master,” he became the only such honoree born in Africa.

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

From the Archives: Where It’s Happening

• Nadine Gordimer on the Soweto uprising

• J.M. Coetzee on Nelson Mandela in prison

• Geoffrey O’Brien on the world according to Duke Ellington

• Geoff Dyer on Ornette Coleman’s “gut-bucket” jazz

• Adam Shatz on Don Cherry’s non-Western influences

Well, they did it. After a fifty-three-year drought and a five-game series, the New York Knickerbockers—led by a seemingly unstoppable Jalen Brunson—are the National Basketball Association champions. What else is there to say? As Jonathan Lethem, blogging the NBA finals for the NYR Online, writes in his final post: “Therein lies the difficulty with making this final report: once it was over, all seemed utterly fated.” Or as the Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns, jubilant in Madison Square Garden, put it to the TNT interviewer Ernie Johnson: “It is written. This was written for New York.”

Alone in the Gym

Jonathan Lethem

In order to defy the odds, to prove themselves masters of the impossible, the Knicks very gently rebuked my maxim, by letting the Spurs beat them by two points in the third quarter. Yet the game was somehow already in the bag, in a “we have them right where we want them” sense. Or so it felt, in retrospect. Therein lies the difficulty with making this final report: once it was over, all seemed utterly fated. It was already being processed into a simulacrum on the platform hurriedly erected at center court for the presentation of the championship trophy, and also the most valuable player award—which went, indisputably in the end, to Jalen Brunson.

First the hateful owner, James Dolan, had his turn in the sun. He bellowed promises to New York City. Then Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns and the other jubilant players took their turns gratifying and frustrating the network interviewer Ernie Johnson’s request that they convert their accomplishment into language. Having beckoned Jalen Brunson’s father, the former journeyman Knick and now assistant coach, onto the stage, Johnson led the witnesses atrociously, saying: “For anybody who’s a fan of father-son moments, it doesn’t get much better than this” and “What does it feel like to stand next to him holding that trophy?” I can feel stirred by father and son moments as much as the next guy who has been both of those things, but prefer them a bit less forced. So, it seemed, did Brunson, who withheld any mention of his father in his generic answer: “It’s everything we dreamed of. It’s why I came to New York.”

Speaking with Towns, a few minutes later, Johnson quite literally used the phrase, “Can you put that into words for me?” Towns’s reply included the enigmatic suggestion that it had already been made of words, long beforehand: “It is written. This was written for New York.”

In fact, Game 5 took a shape that had become familiar—dare I say even a little predictable? The Spurs brought a youthful fury to the opening quarter and as always opened up a double-digit lead. The Knicks looked stymied by a smothering defensive, and turned over the ball too much. They appealed bitterly to referees they felt were biased against them. And then they came back, re-seized the lead only in the latter half of the fourth quarter, and won. The fact that this was a sixteen-point comeback got little attention, after last game’s improbabilities. But the dynamic was similar, except that this time Towns and the Knicks’ bench contributed very little in the way of scoring, so that Brunson had to carry them even more. He scored forty-five points, almost half of his team’s ninety-four. His flurry began in the second quarter, really, and never relented, and the Spurs took on the air of a doomed squad. They’d showed their stuff and it was good stuff and then the Knicks’ alchemy was unveiled and the Spurs had their accomplishments stolen from them. They were, for this year, the backdrop. So young, so talented, they’ll likely be considered favorites next year. In the manner of other miracle teams over the years, in New York and elsewhere, this group of Knicks may not be.

Of course, what happened on the court was really just a thing that happened, a game that was played, and thrilling at the finish. Contra Towns, it wasn’t actually “written.” It will be written now, though not much more by me. My own language had already begun to fall away during Wednesday’s game, the comeback too enthralling for me to bother taking notes. Tonight I watched with the offspring again, to let my fair-weather fandom be rewarded, and also to feel it melted into the collective mystery. I shouted along with my kids. Merely because I had promised to do some typing afterward didn’t actually place me in any special relation to the occurrence on the screen. Figuring out what it means to me is either too private or too insignificant to need excavation. Probably it is both. I happened to speak yesterday with a friend who grew up in New England, a friend barely interested in sports, but he offered this observation: “The whole Red Sox thing was never the same once they won. They just went back to being a normal team.” The championship season evaporates and leaves one to wonder why it seemed so essential, so transformative, in the making.

A few moments before he mounted the stage to join his teammates, immediately after clenching his father, mother, and wife in a series of deep hugs, Jalen Brunson was pulled into a one-on-one interview with the reporter Lisa Salters, who caught him in a relatively unguarded moment. “Holy shit,” he began, then stopped. “I got no words.” But then he found a few. “I don’t know what I’m feeling, I’m in awe, I don’t know.” When Salters asked about his willful confidence in carrying his team to the finish line, Brunson stumbled his way to this declaration: “Whenever I had the ball I’m just thinking about me alone in the gym.”

Read blog posts for the rest of the series here.

“What if,” Dennis Lim asks in the May 14 issue of the Review, “a film consists wholly of blurry images?” That is the question presented by Dry Leaf, the newest film by the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, which was shot entirely on a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone—one that “even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use…for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” And yet the result, Lim writes, is strangely beautiful, the footage of smeary, uncertain landscapes “at times evok[ing] Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.” As digital filmmaking becomes ever more accessible, and as our lives become ever more saturated with images, the kinds of images we seek out—the kinds that delight and inspire us—may be changing.

Lim has had a long and varied career as a film critic and curator. From 2000 to 2006 he was the film editor of the Village Voice, from 2013 to 2022 the director of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, and since 2013 he has been the chief curator of the New York Film Festival. His criticism has also appeared in The New York Times, Film Comment, and elsewhere, and he is the author of two books, David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015) and Tale of Cinema (2022), which looks at the career of the Korean director Hong Sangsoo through an analysis of just one of his many films.

Last month, while Lim was at the Cannes film festival, I wrote to him to ask about criticism, curation, “bad” cameras, the resurgence of cinephilia, and the supposed death of cinema.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost: I was struck, reading your essay, by the idea that the blurred, carefully evocative images of Dry Leaf might be “replenishing” for contemporary eyes. Like many filmgoers, I have been struck by the number of young people have started filling up the seats at repertory and experimental screenings in New York in recent years. Is there a replenishment of cinephilia going on right now? And if so, why? What effect is it having?

Dennis Lim: There is undoubtedly a renewed energy in the New York repertory film scene, and I also sense a curiosity and openness in the audience that hasn’t always been there. I’ve heard this resurgent cinephilia characterized as a post-Covid return to real-world sociality. I think it also has to do with the very real fatigue of digital life. The opening of the online floodgates was an important development for cinephilia—it was thrilling to realize just how much could be downloaded, streamed, and shared—but it has become clear that home viewing is not a replacement for the collective experience of moviegoing. I would also credit the growing ambition and range of repertory programming in New York (and elsewhere), where curators and audiences have proved eager to move beyond the enshrined staples of the canon, and to approach the expanse of film history as a multifarious, underexplored terrain. It is striking that the theaters thriving today tend to be arthouses, cinematheques, and microcinemas—as opposed to multiplexes, where the options are more limited than ever.

Early in your essay, you describe the “arms race toward maximum hyperreal clarity” in much of contemporary cinema, in stark contrast to the expressive unclarity of Dry Leaf. Are there any good versions of that “hyperreal clarity” for you? Has there been anything approaching an 8K, high-frame-rate masterpiece yet? Is such a thing possible?

I’m sure it’s possible, although I haven’t encountered any especially interesting instances of high-frame-rate cinematography, which is used primarily for sports videography and for a certain kind of blockbuster movie. I also can’t help viewing with suspicion anything that positions absolute clarity as an ideal. That said, I do think it is possible to use just about any new technology in productive ways—CGI, 3D, VR—even if it is far more common to find these tools used in service of cheap illusion and spectacle. (And any old technology, too, as Alexandre Koberidze and his Sony Ericsson have shown us.) I have fairly limited experience with VR, and for years I was left indifferent or worse by everything I encountered that was made with it until I experienced Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sublime installation A Conversation with the Sun, which deploys the framelessness of VR and the body of the headset-wearing viewer in fascinating ways. I think it’s one of the great artworks of the last few years.

The other recent film to commit to fuzziness as much as Dry Leaf is Hong Sangsoo’s In Water, which was shot almost entirely out of focus. (And, of course, you wrote an excellent book on Hong’s work a few years ago.) Do you think those two films came to fuzziness by similar paths, or different ones? Is there a shared impetus to work with “bad” images in this moment?

I know that Koberidze is a great admirer of Hong’s work. (Hong, for his part, has said he no longer keeps up with new movies—not an uncommon refrain for filmmakers of a certain age and mindset.) Both Dry Leaf and In Water rely for their effect on what the image lacks: the blurriness of Koberidze’s film is an invitation to immersion, asking us to complete the picture as we watch. The blurriness of Hong’s plays as a sort of ambiguous visual gag: It resonates with the hazy, unformed ideas of its callow filmmaker protagonist, and it represents a comic extension of Hong’s long-standing commitment to utilitarian cinematography, which in turn aligns with his interest in everyday experience and his rejection of spectacle.

I would say that Hong and Koberidze are both interested in rethinking from the ground up how films are made—and, by extension, what they should look like. It is at once an economic, ethical, and aesthetic consideration. I’m not sure if their perceptual experiments began from an interest per se in bad images, but given the mind-boggling volume of images in circulation today—images that are recorded, manipulated, generated—it is a good time to think about the potential uses, effects, and meanings of different types of images. I’m reminded here of one of Robert Bresson’s edicts from Notes on the Cinematograph: “Not beautiful images, but necessary images.”

In addition to your writing on film, you are, of course, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival. What is the relation, for you, of the tasks of the curator and the critic? Do you find yourself thinking differently about film while being one or the other?

My first impulse is to say that each requires me to think differently because they involve different modes of address. Criticism is in every sense a more solitary endeavor, rooted always in an individual encounter with an artwork, whereas as a curator I think about potential audiences and potential encounters. I’ve done some combination of both for many years, but I gradually became more of a curator than a critic because I found writing about film to be increasingly thankless. It is hard to be on the new-release and film-festival treadmill and not feel like a tool of the industry, an extension of the publicity apparatus. Film programming does not by any means liberate me from this system—if anything, it implicates me more—but it does offer more ways to exercise one’s agency.

But criticism and curation do have a lot in common. Your question made me realize that there is a thread that runs through almost everything I do, whether it’s writing or programming or teaching: I continue to contend with the overdetermined narrative of cinema’s death—something you address in your recent essay on the Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan. I started writing about film regularly around the time of the notorious Susan Sontag essay with which you opened your piece, and the specter of cinema’s real or imagined deaths has been a constant throughout my career. Anyone working in film today is in some sense confronting this persistent claim of the medium’s demise, which needs to be complicated if not refuted. The reflexive reversion to this extinction panic obscures the underlying stakes and the structural forces at play. When we keep saying cinema is dead or dying, we lose sight of what we have actually lost and what might still be possible, even as so much about the art form continues to change.

Before the NYFF, you edited film criticism for the Village Voice. With the recent publication of J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now and Tricia Romano’s history of the Voice before that, many of us here at the Review’s office have been thinking about that period in criticism—a period that seems to have come to an end, sadly. Do you remember anything especially strongly from your time at the Voice? Is there some part of it you especially find yourself thinking back to these days?

I couldn’t have asked for a better first job than editing and writing for the Voice. It was a privilege—and an aesthetic and political education—to edit Jim Hoberman every week: he opened up for me new ways of watching experimental cinema and thinking about mainstream cinema and suggested pathways for everything in between. My colleagues at the Voice were and still are among the most gifted writer-editors I know: Jessica Winter, now at The New Yorker; Michael Miller, now the editor of Bookforum; and the polymathic Ed Park, as inspired a critic as he is a fiction writer. Looking back on it now, I’d say that the Voice was a great training ground because it allowed us to think both seriously and playfully about what it meant to be an alternative newspaper at a time when such a thing mattered, or could at least be meaningfully realized. The mission of proposing alternatives—of approaching the mainstream differently and pointing to options outside it—was particularly instructive when it came time to write about a popular art form within a vibrant local culture, and this way of thinking about movies has informed much of my work in the years since.

I know you’ve just been at Cannes for the past couple weeks. Anything great? Anything surprising?

At its best, Cannes can reaffirm one’s faith in movies: the festival remains the world’s most powerful and prestigious showcase of auteur cinema and there was certainly great work there this year. The new films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and James Gray are immense achievements, and I was glad to see filmmakers with more radical and idiosyncratic tendencies, like Lisandro Alonso and Radu Jude, in the selection. Surprise, on the other hand, is a scarce commodity at the big festivals nowadays—even the films by younger directors often seem to have gone through a process of homogenization that ensures they adhere narratively and stylistically to a kind of festival-sanctioned lingua franca. That said, there were a couple of striking debuts: La Gradiva, a densely atmospheric drama about a group of French teenagers on a class trip to Naples, by the cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan, and Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven, about the religious and generational divides in a Thai family. It is, formally and tonally, the kind of film you might expect from a former student of James Benning and a longtime assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

At its worst, simply because of its standing in the field, Cannes has a way of crystallizing and amplifying all that is depressing about contemporary film culture, starting with the inanity of the discourse. We are at the point where the perceived response to a given film hinges on the length of a standing ovation or some Oscar pundit’s tweet about its nomination prospects. These may seem like trivial annoyances, but they are emblematic of the skin-deep engagement, herd mentality, and risk aversion that dominate the film world and that have real effects on what gets seen and made. Perhaps these are age-old problems in new guises—André Bazin’s dispatches from Cannes in the 1940s and 1950s were bracingly clear-eyed about how the industry does not always serve the art. These qualms bear restating all the same.

Call My Agent

Michael Gorra

The translucent marble of Yale’s Beinecke Library both holds and hides many curious things, among them a sheaf of almost illegible letters from Henry James to J.B. Pinker, an Englishman who in 1898 had begun acting as his literary agent. It was a new profession, if that’s the right word, and its first member is commonly held to be Pinker’s competitor A.P. Watt, who opened up shop in 1875. Watt had Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, Pinker not only James but also Joseph Conrad. Many of James’s letters to Pinker are still unpublished, including the one he wrote on June 25, 1906—a letter that says a great deal about the way agents worked then, and in many ways now.

The novelist begins with a progress report. He had been busy all spring on what he called the New York Edition of his life’s work, and there’s a package in the mail with three hundred heavily revised pages of The Portrait of a Lady, first published in 1881; the rest will follow. The greater interest of the letter, however, lies in James’s reply to Pinker’s request for a favor. “I will,” he writes,

with pleasure send you an introduction to Mrs. Wharton (I in fact enclose one herein;) & I will also write to her telling her more in the same sense. But I’m sorry the question didn’t come up when she was in England (very briefly) a month ago—it could easily have led, no doubt, to your seeing her then (though I inferred the Macmillans were “after” her.) Also she isn’t an abundant or rapid producer (having £20,000 a year of her own!!) But herein is the letter.

Pinker wants to build what everyone in the trade calls his “list,” his stable of clients, and the surest way to do that is to get a reference. Personal contact matters, always has and always will. He needs James to vouch for him, to let Edith Wharton know that she won’t be sorry to put her business in his hands, even after he’s taken the then-customary 10 percent. But the long-established house of Macmillan was “after” her. The House of Mirth had been a great best seller the year before, and the firm wanted to sign her up, to cut out the interference of people like Pinker and Watt. Most publishers of the day saw agents as by definition disreputable, and in Middlemen the Temple University professor Laura McGrath quotes the self-interested 1897 judgment of William Heinemann, who had brought out several of James’s books. To him the literary agent was a “parasite,” indeed nothing more than “a canker...eating itself into the very heart” of what ought to be the “mutual interests” of two gentlemen, the one who wrote and the one who brought that writing into the world.

James had been stiffed by publishers often enough to know better; Wharton was both luckier and tougher. Macmillan did get her, as Scribner’s had in the United States, yet she negotiated fiercely on her own behalf and even busied herself with the advertising of her books. And of course James was wrong about her. She was already in her forties, but her career was just starting, and despite that enviable private fortune she proved almost as “abundant and rapid” a producer as he was. She published twelve books in the 1920s alone, earning enormous sums from both magazine serials and hardback sales, and spent every penny of it. She would have made Pinker much more than James ever did, and meanwhile the agent’s other star, Conrad, was thousands of pounds in debt to him.

Few agents today would act as their clients’ private bankers, but Pinker’s investment in Conrad did eventually pay off. In his last decade the former sea captain found an unexpected commercial success, and the agent was rewarded for having kept faith with his own sense of literary worth, his own taste in a profession where “taste is everything.” Or almost everything. There’s also what McGrath calls “market savvy,” and a blend of the two is what makes “books, careers, canons.” Pinker had that as well; it’s why he asked James for that introduction. He thought Wharton would make money, and that’s still what agents want, good books that make money, though now the introductions usually go the other way, with young and sometimes desperate writers begging their friends and teachers for a reference. Who is your agent, and can I use your name in writing to her?

These days the middleman is almost always female, as McGrath writes in her ironically titled first book, though that’s not the only irony here. No contemporary publisher would refuse to deal with an agent, and yet in general parlance middlemen still don’t have a good reputation. They may not be cankers, but they remain people one speaks of wanting to cut out, proverbially sharp and cynical dealers who bollix up the food chains of commerce and culture alike and get in the way of any direct relation between producer and consumer. McGrath sees it very differently: this particular kind of middleman is necessary, and there are a lot of great books we wouldn’t have without them. “No figure,” she writes, “has been more significant, and yet more invisible” in the “ecosystem” of contemporary American fiction, and her shrewd, scholarly, and generous work shows why.

The first American literary agent was Paul Revere Reynolds, a descendant of the silversmith. In McGrath’s words Reynolds “inaugurated a grand tradition: he became an agent accidentally,” stumbling into the field because “he wanted to be around books.” He began as a publisher’s representative in the 1890s, selling the American rights to British books, and then slid over into hawking a few writers on his own, “placing their work in the mass circulation magazines for a small fee.” His most important clients were probably Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he earned the bulk of his living from the stories and serials by other writers that he sold to those magazines, and Middlemen’s first chapter begins by quoting a 1927 letter to George Lorimer, the editor of The Saturday Evening Post. Here it is in its entirety:

I am enclosing a novel by Henry Kitchell Webster entitled The Man With the Scarred Hand. I will sell you the serial rights for $30,000.

That’s it. Author, title, price. But then Reynolds knew the market and the market knew him. His word was trusted, and while Webster is now entirely forgotten, he was a recognized figure of the day, even if the Post does not, in this case, appear to have bitten. McGrath begins here because Reynolds’s letter stands as the most naked form of what, in the title to that first chapter, she calls “The Pitch”; her later chapters all use a similar form—“The Debut,” “The Export,” and of course “The Lunch.” The price wouldn’t be stated today, not at first; still, those essentials remain at the heart of any transaction between agent and publisher, and so does that market knowledge in the form of individual editors’ tastes and preferences. What the rest of “The Pitch” shows, however, is just how much the agent’s work has changed.

For one thing, agents now edit. Reynolds probably never touched a line of Cather’s, and not because she was a great writer already; it simply wasn’t his job. Today a lucky young novelist may secure representation on the basis of a draft or a few stories in a quarterly. But even after that agreement is struck the writer typically needs to do one version after another of a novel before the agent feels ready to send it out. The middle sags, this character’s motivation is unclear, and have you thought about the first person? That can happen at any stage of a career, but many debut novels in particular undergo a process of development akin to that of a play or a TV show, and the bulk of that work happens not in the offices of Knopf or Doubleday but in a series of drafts produced for the agent’s eyes alone. Reports of the death of in-house editing have been greatly exaggerated, but as one unnamed agent told McGrath, there’s now an expectation that anything a publisher sees “will be closer to finished than not.”

In part that comes from the peculiar pressures the publishing industry puts on first novels. The “debut” is a particular category that McGrath traces back to the agent Sterling Lord, who along with the editor Malcolm Cowley so successfully talked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) that they created what we now call “buzz,” a sense of excitement that started years before the novel’s actual sale. Debuts are bright shiny objects, they introduce the writer to literary society, and editors chase them because, well, you never know. That book set in brownstone Brooklyn could be this year’s The Secret History. So they overpay for them, which makes respectable sales seem flat, and in consequence, McGrath writes, 60 percent of first-time novelists never publish a second. That says as much about American publishing in general as it does about the work of agents in particular, and Middlemen provides a superb introduction to the industry. But for the agent the chance of a big initial payment seems to warrant all that pre-submission work.

A second way that the agent’s work has changed is the kind of letter she writes once a book seems ready to go. McGrath quotes from one, a redacted eight-paragraph email—name, title, and plot summary removed—whose length and detail would have baffled Reynolds, and then she performs a skilled close reading of what this particular and anonymous agent has said without saying. The letter convinces. It avoids superlatives while conveying the agent’s sense of the book’s potential, detailing the author’s previous record in order to suggest that this one could be both a best seller and a prizewinner. It was a letter written by “this agent” for this book, and it turned out to be right. Her taste synced with her market savvy, and though the novel was bought at auction for a “modest sum,” it then sold over a million copies, won awards, and was translated into over thirty languages. McGrath knows its name but isn’t saying; readers will want to guess, as I did.

Middlemen is studded with such moments. Some are bits of fact: the first book auction was run by Scott Meredith in 1952, though not even he could later remember just what book he sold that way. Others take the form of narrative, a series of interviews or scenes: the Frankfurt Book Fair, tea in a Harlem brownstone, or a Zoom meeting at which McGrath listened to the agents at a firm she calls “Opus” discuss what they’ve found in the slush pile, winnowing over nine hundred unsolicited submissions down to half a handful of new clients. Those are enormous odds, but McGrath is impressed by the seriousness with which the Opus agents have done their job, by the confidence of their judgments, and by their continued passion for literature itself. This, she admits, surprised her, for she began her project

steeped in the tired academic generalization—that those who work in publishing are the English majors who couldn’t hack it in academia or those who cared more about money.... These stereotypes could not have been farther from the truth.

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

In 1912 the novelist Thomas Mann visited his wife at a sanatorium in the Swiss town of Davos, where she was taking a rest cure after being misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. Mann himself came down with a cold during the visit, which the facility’s director was eager to believe was also TB, and thus, writes Adam Kirsch in the June 25 issue of the Review, “the seed of [The Magic Mountain] was planted.” As Kirsch elaborates:

“It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity.”

Below, alongside Kirsch’s essay, are five essays from our archives about writing in sickness and in health.

The Siren Song of Illness

Adam Kirsch

In his study of The Magic Mountain, the critic Morten Høi Jensen writes that in 2018 he resolved “to figure out why Mann’s novel is so important to me.” That meant beginning “at the source,” in Davos, the town in the Swiss Alps where the book takes place in the years before World War I.

Today Davos is best known as the site of the World Economic Forum, where the rich and powerful gather every year “to improve the state of the world,” in the words of its mission statement. But Jensen discovered that Davos hasn’t forgotten The Magic Mountain, published in 1924: the town boasts a Thomas Mann Way and a Thomas Mann Place, as well as a series of plaques displaying passages from the novel. At his hotel he even found that the “sanatorium-world” Mann wrote about “is still intact.” His room came with a balcony and a wooden lounge chair for taking a rest cure, just as patients did a century ago.

In 1912 Mann’s wife, Katia, was one of them. Her chest complaint wasn’t severe, but her doctor sent her to Davos because any problem involving the lungs raised the terrifying specter of tuberculosis, at the time an incurable disease responsible for up to a quarter of all deaths in Europe. In the 1880s the pioneering microbiologist Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis, also known as phthisis or consumption, is caused by a bacterium that spreads through coughs and spittle. The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine, but it took a long time to translate into effective treatment: the first vaccine was administered in 1921, and the disease couldn’t be cured until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in the 1940s. Before World War I there wasn’t even an accurate blood test for tuberculosis. Diagnosing it was more an art than a science, based on listening for ragged or hollow sounds in a patient’s chest or scanning an X-ray (a recent invention) for cloudy patches in the lungs.

A sanatorium could keep tubercular patients from infecting their families and neighbors, but it couldn’t really treat the disease. In theory, dry mountain air was good for weakened lungs, and a prolonged break from daily responsibilities, with plenty of food and rest, surely couldn’t hurt. But the establishments that started to spring up in the Swiss Alps in the late nineteenth century, such as the Waldsanatorium, where Katia Mann became a patient, were essentially wellness resorts where affluent guests pampered themselves in the name of health. Some died of tuberculosis, while others seemed to get well or were never sick at all; it wasn’t always possible to tell the difference. In the 1960s Katia Mann—still alive in her eighties—was told by a doctor who examined new images of her lungs that there was no sign she had ever had tuberculosis.

It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity. Jensen shows that the seed of the novel was planted when Mann visited his wife in Davos in May 1912 and came down with a cold. He was examined by the sanatorium’s director, whose thumping revealed a worrisome spot on his lung. He was advised to extend his stay, but his doctor at home forbade it: “You would be the first one to be examined in Davos who did not have some spot or other. Return to Munich immediately. You have no business in Davos.”

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

From the Archives: In Sickness and in Health

• Susan Sontag on metaphors of illness

• John Banville on the Transcendentalists’ grief

• Jane Mayhall on the short life of Stephen Crane

• Fintan O’Toole on the itch, the pox, and the clap

• Arnold Relman on breaking his neck

With about four months still to go until the midterm elections, the Trump administration remains largely unchecked by Congress in its exercises and abuses of power—recently, the president has attempted to deal himself and his cronies billions in taxpayer dollars in a “settlement” with the IRS, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is floating a plan to remove customs officers from airports in “sanctuary” cities, effectively ending international flights to Democratic cities. The Democratic party, however, is bogged down in a debate over its long-delayed draft report analyzing the 2024 election losses.

This month I wrote to Joseph O’Neill—for the fourth entry of an ongoing conversation about what can be done to stop the devastations wrought by the president—to ask about the threats to the midterm elections and what he would do if he were Chuck Schumer.

In our last conversation, you articulated a distinction between two kind of politics (or, more broadly, two kinds of power): “technical politics,” which you defined as “electoral politics centered on the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, crime, and ‘affordability,’” and “the politics of raw power,” which is the effort to tactically advance your party’s political power and agenda at the expense of the other party’s. In the intervening four months, we have seen extraordinary gambits of “raw power” from the Republican Party and its deranged executive: starting a war without Congressional authorization or even consultation, gerrymandering the electoral system to shreds, pursuing aggressive ICE and deportation operations despite majority opposition, gutting the US Forest Service, etc. These are, broadly, unpopular actions that weaken the public sector and help concentrate power under the president. What methods of raw power are available to the Democrats or to Americans, regardless of party, who want to stop the Republicans’ relentless drive toward domination and violence?

We’re in a deep political hole. The Republican Party is attacking and injuring the United States with malevolent kleptocratic determination. Technically, the courts have the power to stop or slow this down. Their technical power, however, is hardly designed to withstand the blitzkrieg you’ve described, which is supercharged by a corrupt Supreme Court exerting its own raw power to a historic degree. Deploying its self-created political tool, the shadow docket, and inventing facts and judicial principles, it has done its utmost to nullify the Voting Rights Act and to empower the Republican Party’s attempt to achieve something akin to one-party, one-race rule in red states. There is no recourse to the Department of Justice, itself transformed into an instrument of executive criminality in the realm of “homeland security,” certainly, but also in matters of antitrust, abuse of power, and profiteering from office. To take an absurdly brazen example, the Republican president has laid claim to $1.776 billion in a sham settlement with the IRS for nonexistent losses caused by a nonexistent tort.

So raw power has become very important. Raw power is somewhat indefinite, and it’s not only political parties who possess it. The putative fourth estate, wealthy autonomous institutions (corporations, universities, etc.), oligarchs, the citizenry—all can influence the distribution and effect of power in the US between elections. In very difficult circumstances, ordinary Americans have played their part admirably. The anti-ICE/CBP protests in Minnesota were extraordinarily brave and in many ways successful. The ActBlue coalition, with very little help from the national Democratic Party, has continued to organize, agitate, protest, and fundraise—and vote in great numbers in special elections. AIPAC’s decline as a corrupting influence on D.C. Democrats is largely down to pressure from the grassroots, as was the government shutdown over funding of the Department of Homeland Security (which, when it ended after more than ten weeks, was the longest shutdown in US history).

But it is in the nature of deep holes that they’re hard to dig out of, and for now there’s not much more that citizens can do about it except to keep pressuring Democrats to do the right thing. Things should improve in November, after the midterm elections, when Democrats will almost certainly capture the House (even allowing for the current spasm of gerrymandering) and quite possibly the Senate. We have a battle-hardened party base that knows how to donate and knows how to vote. The big question is whether the elections will go ahead normally.

That does seem to be the most important question: What is the nature of the threat facing free elections in this country? Now that the US Supreme Court has effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act, how might Republicans attempt to obstruct the election, which by all accounts at this point will be a disaster for their party? What can be done to stop them beforehand?

There is a real risk—in my view, a probability—that the Republicans will try to undermine the midterm elections to prevent Democrats from taking control of Congress. It’s impossible to predict the exact form of the coup, but one can foresee a presidential declaration of a national emergency (based on bogus claims of election fraud or foreign interference); an illegal executive order commanding state authorities to suspend elections; and compliance with the illegal order by corrupt red-state authorities. All of this against the possible background of riots in the summer provoked by ICE and pro-GOP propaganda obscuring and normalizing the end of US democracy. In that kind of scenario, most judges would most likely order state authorities to proceed with the elections and/or to respect their results, but there are no guarantees. You’d be left with a showdown—a decisive contest between Republican and Democratic raw power. How that would turn out is anyone’s guess. On the one hand, coups are hard to pull off. On the other hand, we saw what happened in Bush v. Gore. In the end, a lot will depend on Democratic Party leaders being willing and able to act with adversarial intent and imagination.

What is to be done with these feckless Democrats? Rather than organizing a coherent opposition to the Republicans’ depredations, they spent the weeks after his illegal declaration of war issuing timorous statements that criticized Trump for not doing a good enough job weakening the Iranians, rather than opposing the war outright, then pivoted to fretting about the influence of Hasan Piker, a popular podcaster, on their party. There are any number of issues—the war, the genocide in Gaza, AI data centers, inflation, unemployment—that the Republicans are very unpopular on, but somehow the Democrats haven’t been able to build a coherent opposition (and are instead floating Kamala Harris as a possible presidential nominee). If you were Chuck Schumer, what would you do?

If I were Senator Schumer, I would take stock of the polls, which reveal an amazingly unpopular Democratic Party that is despised by its own base. I would take stock of the collapse of DNC and DSCC fundraising. I would ask myself if I was responsible for this disastrous state of affairs. I would answer this question in the affirmative. Because I, Chuck Schumer, and my network of politicians, consultants, and donors, have for decades controlled the Democratic Party—its policy platform, its brand management, its finances, its political strategy. I’d reflect that that I am indeed unequipped—temperamentally, ideologically, and (at seventy-five) physically—to engage in the politics that this moment calls for. And I’d finally accept that my loyalty to the interests of the Democratic Party conflicts with my loyalty to Israeli interests and, by extension, to the interests of Likud’s sister party in the US, the Republican Party. Then I’d resign as Senate minority leader.

This is precisely what will not happen.

Your question about feckless Democrats has never been more urgent or exhausting. About a week ago, 144 House Democrats voted to give ICE, supposedly the government agency they’re very concerned about, new surveillance powers in the name of combating—wait for it—retail theft. Then Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, succumbed to pressure from Trump to commute the prison sentence of the corrupt elections clerk and would-be election saboteur Tina Peters. The structural challenge is that enormous investments have been made in the status quo. You and I might think that we need a principled, vigorously forward-looking, worker-aligned, and adversarial Democratic Party that’s free from the corrupting influence of foreign and corporate donors. But powerful factions—the Congressional Black Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the AIPAC brigade, etc.—are intensely suspicious of any change that might disturb the current distribution of machine power, especially if the change comes from the left. It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.

In short: defeating Republicans at the polls is not sustainable without fundamental changes to Democratic personnel and political strategy. There is some good news here. We’ve seen, in the party establishment’s rapid if pro forma adoption of Zohran Mamdami’s brand of politics (pro-worker, pro-affordability, antiwar, anti–AIPAC), that Democratic politicians can be responsive to intense pressure from the party base. And we should note a previously unthinkable good thing that’s happening: blue-state governments are retaliating against Republican maneuvers to further gerrymander the House in their favor. There’s good reason to hope that, by the time the 2028 elections come around, states such as New York, Colorado, New Jersey, and yes, Virginia will have eliminated the 2026 Republican gerrymandering advantage. But only if ordinary people insist on it. This is the great civic burden of our time. We wouldn’t be in a deep hole if we had a normal, healthy party of opposition. As I’ve said, we have no option but to keep pushing Democratic leaders to act effectively and proactively.

If, somehow, the Democrats are successfully induced to act, what options are available to them while they remain the minority party?

While their technical power (on things like committees and votes) may be formally limited, there’s a lot that Democrats can and must do now to penalize, exploit, and disincentivize Republican misdeeds and the people who enable them. By adopting an agenda of principled opposition to the forces of the far right—forces that are as corporate and oligarchical and technological as they are political—Democrats would perhaps start gain the trust of younger voters. This sort of prescription only works if Democrats finally treat the Republican Party as the Republicans treat the Democratic Party: not as a partner in “bipartisanship” but as an adversary—an adversary, in the case of the GOP, that will not respect the rules of democracy unless it is forced to by political defeat. Incredible as it may seem, it remains a huge problem that many senior Democrats are intensely reluctant to face this truth.

But in any case: what follows a noncomprehensive list I’ve devised of some concrete actions Democrats could take immediately. No doubt others will have further, better ideas.

1. Set up and empower a national political operations unit, nominally under the remit of the DNC, to coordinate and build on the counter-authoritarian efforts happening organically in discrete, disconnected parts of the country. It could be headed by Ben Wikler, the former DNC chair, and staffed by people from outside the network of consultants, donors, and politicians who’ve led the Democrats into their current predicament. The new unit would, first, transform the party’s messaging, branding, political tactics, and strategy; and second, push the Democrats’ DC cadre into political and cultural alignment with state parties and grassroots groups, with a special emphasis on the young.

2. To deter further collaboration with the GOP’s authoritarian project, make it very clear that Democrats, once returned to power, will apply the full measure of the criminal law to anyone (law firms, security contractors, oligarchs, corporations, government agents) who has collaborated with the Republicans’ abuses of power. Currently, there is nowhere near enough jeopardy on the horizon for the opportunists who have accepted Republican inducements to act unlawfully or corruptly. In the meantime, set up a national network of lawyers to issue professional misconduct complaints to state bar authorities against attorneys who have been involved in transparently oppressive or corrupt or meritless cases on behalf of the Trump administration.

3. Be much, much, much more litigious. The political strategy of the US right is founded to a unique degree on bad-faith lies and dishonest personal attacks. The current liberal posture—accepting right-wing aggression as a kind of immovable feature of the political landscape—has played into the Republicans’ hands. A counteroffensive is needed, using one of the last democratic organs that is more or less intact: the civil courts, and the remedies provided by the law of torts against GOP officials and media entities who threaten or harm blameless persons. Bad actors must be made to think twice about their personal legal exposure if they are tempted to wrong people for profit or political advantage. When Trump libels Barack Obama by asserting that he “cooked up the Russia hoax to steal the 2016 election,” Obama should sue Trump personally. When the Southern Poverty Law Center succeeds in defeating the bogus money laundering prosecution it now faces, it should sue FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally for malicious prosecution. If powerful liberals don’t hold Republicans accountable, what chance do ordinary citizens and officials have if they are maliciously accused of being Chinese agents or election fraudsters or domestic terrorists?

4. Start articulating, in clear terms, the threat that the Supreme Court’s corrupt Republican supermajority poses to the US constitutional order, and prepare the country for the expansion of the Court that now seems unavoidable.

5. Go after the dangerous and deeply unpopular oligarchy. It is not democratically tenable to allow a handful of businessmen to amass personal fortunes in the tens or even hundreds of billions, particularly when they actively align themselves with the forces of authoritarianism. Democrats must adopt aggressive antitrust policies and national security priorities that will have the effect of reducing the power of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Jeff Bezos et al. These extremists control corporations (among them Palantir, Starlink, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anduril Industries, Blue Origin) with previously unthinkable power in the technological-military realm. Fiscal measures—wealth taxes—are necessary but insufficient.

6. Develop nonfinancial alliances with liberal allies abroad. There is no good reason the EU and the Democrats should not make common cause in response to the Trump–Putin axis.

Republicans are not going to stop this administration. We’re going to have to do this ourselves, with whatever power we can muster. Then we’re going to have to hold the Republican Party accountable, politically and legally.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life,” writes Suzy Hansen in our June 11 issue. He is a parody of a certain type of American swashbuckler: brash, aggressive, god-fearing, contemptuous of the wretched refuse beyond our shores. Though a caricature of American chauvinism he may be, the tradition of raining “death and destruction from the sky,” as he described the Trump administration’s bombing of Iran, did not start with Hegseth. Generations of American foreign policy wonks, Hansen notes, have also trafficked in the bloodshed he so enjoys: “With the invasion of Iran, the Trump administration picked up where the Biden administration and the Democrats left off; the Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony.…Whether the perpetrators are Democrats evading responsibility through feigned haplessness or Republicans claiming the power of a wrathful God, the violence is the same.”

For twelve years Hansen was based out of Istanbul, where she had a front-row seat to much of this violence. Before moving back to the US in 2019 she reported widely around the Middle East and west Asia, writing about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, to name a few. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country (2018), seeks to take stock of, and renounce, American solipsism abroad. Her new book, From Life Itself, narrates the turbulent decade between 2015 and 2025 as it was seen and heard on the streets of Karagümrük, a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul and a stronghold of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. Since 2013 she has written for the Review about Turkey, the war on terror, and American foreign policy.

Last week I wrote to Hansen to ask her about our self-styled secretary of war, learning to hold power to account, and the challenges of living and working abroad as a journalist.

Dahlia Krutkovich: This essay seems to have been written against the grain of your first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, which is partially about turning away from the blinkered gaze Americans cast abroad. What about the last few years of American foreign policy made you want to root around in the world as seen by Pete Hegseth?

Suzy Hansen: I first became interested in Hegseth—interested in or horrified by him—because of how shocking his behavior has been, his cartoonish demeanor, his nastiness. People of all backgrounds seem genuinely bewildered by him. But I actually came to this article by way of my interest in the Biden administration’s foreign policy, its tolerance of mass death and destruction in Gaza, and the shocking callousness of spokespeople like John Kirby. This interest does actually follow from my first book, which takes aim at how liberals and the institutions that produce them cultivate the assumption that Americans have good intentions no matter what havoc they wreak. I spent less time thinking about red state or conservative types during that project, because my worldview and temperament were, as an adult, shaped more by liberal institutions (the Ivy League, New York media, Democratic Party politics, etc.) than conservative ones, and I wanted to implicate myself.

Often, when it comes to their foreign policy, “conservative” and “liberal” are really two superficial camps of Americans, but as Biden’s administration gave way to Trump’s, I found myself wanting to think about the Hegseth worldview in particular. What about his instincts for foreign policy and his lust for violence diverges from that of liberals or Democrats, if it does at all? The mass bombing reflex is at the very least bipartisan and has been since September 11.

You write, “Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon.” One of these places is a little more specific than the others. How did growing up on the Jersey Shore, with the men you may have known there, influence your feel for Hegseth?

One of my guiding principles as a white American writing about the US is that it’s important to include yourself in your analysis, to acknowledge your own complicity or at least involvement in the country’s history or power, because you are a beneficiary of it. According to that rule, I felt I had to gesture to my own origins in this slightly more specific way. I also couldn’t help but notice certain resemblances in his and my biographies: we both grew up in white, middle-class small-town America, came of age during the post-1989 years of US triumph, and won entry to two of the more conservative Ivy League universities in part because we were good at sports. I went a different way in life after college than Hegseth did, but I know what kind of worldview, and what kind of inferiority complex, that upbringing can produce.

To that end, even though I knew men in my childhood who vaguely resembled Pete Hegseth, especially in regard to their class resentment, I also know misogynists and racists as an adult in New York City, and I feel comfortable assuming everyone reading the piece knows men like this, too. I wanted to urge liberals away from the tendency to exoticize him (although I understand the temptation, considering the absurdity of Trump’s second term) and instead consider that this imperial impulse has existed throughout all of American history and society. I wanted to make the case for our collective responsibility to respond to people who prey on the vulnerable, people like him—and maybe people like us.

How did your time at The New York Observer influence your eye for personalities? Your new book also has a few very artful character studies.

You learn different things at different stages of life, but the Observer, the onetime house paper of New York City’s power elite, is where I learned to develop a voice. The Observer’s voice was Peter Kaplan’s—the beloved editor who ran the magazine for years before I started in 2004 and after I left in 2006—and it was his completely original style that we young writers tried our best to emulate. I usually failed, and it was up to the more senior editors to heavily edit those pieces and pull them in line with the paper’s sensibility. It’s through that back-and-forth that you learn how to write for yourself. I worry all the time that as journalism declines, and there are fewer places committed to that kind of editorial exchange, young writers aren’t getting to figure that out for themselves.

It was also helpful that the Observer had a reputation for being snarky, and even mean, to its subjects. I don’t like being mean, but writing with that sharpness taught me how to be critical and how to be tough—particularly when writing about the powerful. Unlike most mainstream publications, we could say almost anything we wanted, which is a very unusual experience for a young person to have. I learned how to be brave and recognized, eventually, that it was actually my job to take risks, to tell the darkest truths, and also to try—always, and all credit to Kaplan for this one—to say something new. It helped me immeasurably when I left to write about foreign affairs, which can tend toward the dull and stuffy. I spent the first years of my time in Istanbul trying to figure out how to write about Erdoğan like I would have for The New York Observer and still get published.

What was it like learning Turkish upon your arrival in Istanbul? What were your early reporting experiences like in the language?

I arrived speaking no Turkish at all, and actually no other languages at all, so I was bad at even knowing how to learn it. But I moved there on a fellowship that paid for six months of language instruction as part of a two-and-a-half-year term in Turkey, and I continued to take grammar classes and study one-on-one with teachers for years after. It’s a very hard language. The lucky part of that fellowship, though, was that I was discouraged from getting published during the term. And even though I kept living in Istanbul once the program was over, magazines weren’t very interested in Turkish politics, so I mostly reported from elsewhere. That’s why so much of my first book takes place in Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Greece, and other countries I visited in the region. American magazines really only wanted deeply reported pieces from Turkey once Erdoğan began cracking down in 2013, and by that time I had already spent six years living with the language.

In retrospect, the difficulty of Turkish, and knowing how hard it was for outsiders to learn, might have inspired me to report my second book the way I did. I wanted everyday conversation to be the mode through which I narrated how public life changed on one street in one neighborhood of Istanbul over ten years. I tried to capture the conversations unfolding in markets and barbershops and teahouses as local and international crises erupted around us and affected—or didn’t affect—everyday life. I ran the tape for hours, hired heroic transcriptionists, and then I translated what was on the page. Much of the dialogue in the book is simply lifted straight from those documents. That listening and translation process made me want to incorporate the rhythm of the language directly into the text, even when I wasn’t reproducing dialogue, while also somehow making it an enjoyable reading experience. I thought it captured the vibe of the place more. I hope it worked.

We’ve talked a bit offline about how going abroad is both a way to live within the humble means to be made by working in media and a way to hone your skillset as a journalist. Do you have any advice for young correspondents trying to find their way overseas?

I moved abroad midcareer, or as some would put it, “late”—I was six months from turning thirty—so I arrived with contacts and editors’ email addresses and a knowledge of the business. It was an extreme advantage, but freelancing was still very hard. The global financial crisis struck just as my fellowship ended, and while that made me (a cheap foreign correspondent living four hours from many international destinations) an appealing hire for magazines, it also meant that rates started shrinking. I always had three or four side hustles and still do to this day. In the beginning it was fact-checking, and then it was book editing, and then teaching. But all of it was to salvage and preserve the gift of living abroad and being able to write, a life of freedom and discovery that I still think I was so privileged to have.

Now it’s a different time in journalism, and if I had to do it again, I would think about it differently, as I have seen my former students do. They get jobs in various professions and write on the side. Or they go for staff positions because freelancing is too brutal and decide that health care and job security are too important to sacrifice. Or they apprentice themselves to writers with popular Substacks or authors working on books (“always find mentors” is my mantra). Or they are being wise about studying, say, data journalism and acquire technical skills. The main thing is to gain life experience—and linguistic and cultural and lived experience—so that you have something to offer as a thinker, while still feeling comfortable enough to stay sane and be kind to yourself. That, by the way, also includes remembering that what has happened to journalism in the twenty-first century is structural and due to enormous, predatory technological forces that we older people failed to protect you from. This was not in your control. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s not your fault.

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act.

This conversation originally aired on June 1, 2026.

Think for Yourself

Dan Chiasson

April 22, 2026, 5:35 AM

AI has made contemporaneous self-reflexivity almost a necessary precondition for anyone who tries to write about it, now that, from behind the blinking cursor marking my every pause and hesitation in writing this sentence, a serpent waits to strike. I would prefer not to write sentences that track their own emergence from thought; I don’t like the kind of faddish writing that does this, this very thing that I am doing; but now that I feel I must actively preserve thinking as the medium in which language is generated, against Google’s satanic offer to “Help Me Write,” I also feel I should think about what it is I’m preserving, and who, exactly, the tempter is, and why they are so eager to “help me” surrender the pleasure of making the next associative or logical leap on my own, from hints and insinuations found inside a brain that can never fully know itself, or—sorry if this seems vain—tire of trying.

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

‘We Did Our Best!’

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Years ago, in the early days of the deep learning revolution, a friend asked whether the whole field of AI research, which is roughly 70 percent male, existed because men were jealous of women’s ability to create life. It was not the kind of question that required a reply; the answer was obviously yes. My friend had just had her first child and was possessed of that slightly terrifying primal authority I’d noticed in so many devout feminists who’d recently become mothers.

Privately, I was not entirely convinced. I was writing a book that year about AI, and while I’d come across plenty of researchers who appeared confused about the line between product and progeny, this delusion was not by any means limited to men. If anything, it seemed that the women in the field were prone to speaking of their machines as children they were raising, or even to confessing that they experienced maternal impulses toward them. There was Fei-Fei Li, the so-called godmother of AI, who traced her breakthrough in AI vision to an insight about childhood development. “No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years,” she said in her 2015 TED Talk. “They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.” As she paced the stage, a photo of her son, Leo, loomed on the enormous screen behind her.

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

Labour’s Love Lost

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

On the Fourth of July Americans will celebrate their country’s semiquincentennial, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm as they contrast the founders of the republic with their present-day successors. For Sir Keir Starmer, July 4 will also bring mixed feelings. It will be two years to the day since he led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, winning 411 of 650 parliamentary seats, while the Conservatives, who had been in office for fourteen years, collapsed, winning only 121. As I observed then, the scale of the Labour victory was deceptive: Starmer gained that huge majority with barely 34 percent of the popular vote. Since the turnout was just below 60 percent—a sharp fall from 67 percent at the previous election in December 2019—that meant only about one British elector in five had voted Labour.

Even so, few of us guessed just how tenuous Starmer’s position would prove or how quickly his authority would shrivel. For more than a year now, voting-intention polls have found that support for Labour is below 25 percent, and Starmer’s approval ratings have been at rock bottom. That was confirmed on May 7 when local elections were held in many parts of England, as were elections for the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. In the English elections Labour lost 1,498 council seats and won only 17 percent of the vote, the same as the Conservatives.

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

Their Own Private Genesis

Erin Maglaque

They were debating the nature of original sin in an apotheca in Naples. “We discussed a lot of things,” Giovanni Casaburo told the inquisitors in 1598 when they asked him what exactly was said in the apothecary’s shop. “Among them that if Adam hadn’t sinned, eating the forbidden fruit, we wouldn’t have sinned as well.” So far, so orthodox. But then the apothecary Marcello Impicciato joined in. “What apple?” he asked. “Adam and Eve fucked in the ass, and that’s why they were rejected from Paradise.”

What apple? In 1588 Violante Scaglione testified: “Adam’s apple was Eve’s butt, not the pit of the fruit that got stuck in his throat when he was called by God.” They debated it in a tobacconist’s shop in Tuscany in 1702. Did Adam eat an apple, or was it a fig, or a pear? Giuseppe Cinatti said it was no fruit at all—Adam’s sin was “sticking it [his penis] into her ass” instead of “putting it into her cunt,” as God had commanded. One French philosopher phrased it more delicately: “The apple which tempted our first father was the symbol of the rear parts of woman, which very well represents an apple split in half.” An anonymous seventeenth-century student’s notebook records his lecturer’s conclusions: “There were two trees in paradise. Eve ate from one, i.e., was fucked by it, i.e., by Adam’s dick, which was the forbidden fruit.” Italian peasants, apothecaries, friars; French libertines, Dutch philosophers—all believed that Adam sodomized Eve in the Garden of Eden.

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

More from our June 25 issue…

• Laura Miller on Harriet Clark’s debut novel The Hill

• Michael Gorra on the task of the literary agent

• Andrew Katzenstein on loving the Mets

• Madeleine Schwartz on the purloined papyrus

• Gary Saul Morson on Mikhail Bakhtin

• Andrew Arsan on democracy and the Middle East

• Fintan O’Toole on the president’s empty promise of greatness

• Joe Dunthorne on the New York School poets

• Adam Kirsch on Thomas Mann’s “sympathy for death”

• David S. Reynolds on antebellum America’s rage for pictures

• Arya Roshanian on Vincenzo Bellini’s exacting melodies

• Magda Teter on the missing Jews of Salonica

• At the Galleries with Lovia Gyarkye and Nicole Rudick

• Poems by Sandra Lim and D. Nurkse

Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan

Jonathan Lethem

The problem with sports is that sports either: 1) functions as an allegorical enclosure inside which everything else (world, self) can be glimpsed and potentially even briefly made to reveal itself, or 2) is delightful precisely because it excludes everything else and offers a brief zone of perfect respite from the crushing truths of our petty sufferations.

The problem with writing about sports, then, is that you either: 1) embrace the first premise and guarantee sounding like some kind of idiot of projection, idealization, and Pathetic Fallacy, or 2) fall silent, as one might while beholding an eclipse or the Rothko Chapel or a livestream of a mother owl caring for its owlets. That’s to say, if sports is one of those transcendent things meant to humble and unite us in breathless regard for what can happen entirely outside ourselves, why deface it with the graffiti of individual response? (The great exception proving this rule is Annie Dillard’s essay about seeing an eclipse, “Total Eclipse.”) For this reason, I think, I’ve (mostly) sworn never to write about sports.

But wait, I’m already committing romantic nonsense to the page. The difference between a championship run and a total eclipse or the Rothko Chapel is that the eclipse and the Chapel aren’t accompanied by twenty-nine embarrassingly failed eclipses or Chapels. (There are thirty teams in the NBA, and for one of them to win the rest all have, eventually, to lose.) Nor are they accompanied by years, even decades, of failed eclipses or Chapels, all of them shrouded in excuses, recriminations, and equivocating statements like “We gave it our best” or “Nobody expected us even to get this far.” Sports is a vast sinkhole of failure, of abjection, of human error and inconstancy, all of which is only survived by those who produce it and those who devote themselves to it through gigantic engines of denial.

What’s more, it isn’t really possible to protect sports from an “outside” world of money, corruption, commercialization, gambling, politics, and celebrity worship; the beauties of sports are hedged at all sides by the sporting world’s propensity to generate these things from within its boundary. The moments we cherish are like splendid flowers sprouting atop a mountain of shit. It’s best not to place one’s nose right up against the flowers. Sometimes they are flecked with the shit, or reek from their symbiotic relationship with the mountain. Your childhood hero may not have been Pete Rose, or Wayne Gretzky, or Tiger Woods. You may have gotten luckier than that. Still, best not press in too closely.

Anyway, sports is constituted not of silence, but of language—of chatter, trash talk, statistics, listicles, broadcasts, post- and pre-game pressers, pleading calls to bookies, fickle avowals and disavowals of loyalty, bogus authoritativeness, fansplaining. The talk vastly outweighs the playing. So why not add a little more? I’ve agreed to blog the NBA Finals—destination, this year, of the possibly transcendent New York Knicks, who’ll face the San Antonio Spurs. A rare destination for the Knicks; they’ve not gone since 1999, and not since 1973 have they gone and won. It is this which has united the city in distraction, adoration, anticipation, and—of course—the unspeakable dread of having to tuck in at the meal of disappointment that is a true sports fan’s regular banquet.

Read the first installment of Lethem’s blog on the Review’s website here.

In the Review’s June 25 issue, Fintan O’Toole celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels (first published on October 28, 1726) by revisiting the novel’s “excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires” in the light of a new age of rapacious and brutal imperialists. In particular, given the deathless contemporary refrain about making things great, O’Toole focuses on Jonathan Swift’s “vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small?”

Swift, writing at a moment when “both European colonialism and the slave trade were expanding rapidly,” used the dizzying shift in perspective from the puny Lilliputians to the giant Brobdingnagians to elucidate how “greatness thus depends on there being a wretched of the earth.” And so it is that Donald Trump—a Yahoo if there ever was one—comes to sow wretchedness. As O’Toole observes, “Greatness promises fulfillment and security, but it is always radically insecure.”

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are six articles from our archives about political satirists.

Gulliver’s Warning

Fintan O’Toole

This essay is adapted from a talk presented as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library earlier this year.

On November 8 it will be three hundred years since a travel book by a previously unknown author appeared in London. It was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Opposite the title page was a portrait of the writer, said to be “first a Surgeon, and then a CAPTAIN of several SHIPS.” Interspersed throughout the text were four maps accurately depicting known places like Sumatra, Japan, and North America, with newly discovered islands and peninsulas etched in. It looked like just another English voyager’s account from the still-unfolding age of European discovery, which was also the emerging age of European colonialism. This explorer is, indeed, a great believer in imperialism, explaining:

If a Prince send Forces into a Nation, where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.

The book is, of course, the great literary hoax written by Jonathan Swift, and we now call it Gulliver’s Travels. Unlike his ventriloquist’s dummy Lemuel Gulliver, Swift had a great hatred of colonialism, a rage that causes him late in the book to break character and assume a high style of savage indignation that is far beyond Gulliver’s own rhetorical powers:

Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.

To prepare the ground for this excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires, Swift draws his readers into a vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small? The first two of the book’s four parts are literature’s most famous game of greatness. Swift had read the work of his friend and fellow Irish Protestant George Berkeley, who pointed out that big and small are not absolute ideas. They depend on perception: “The Judgments we make of Greatness do, in like manner as those of Distance, depend on the Disposition of the Eyes.” Berkeley was concerned with questions of cognition, but Swift politicized those questions: if greatness and smallness are not objective realities, then neither are superiority and inferiority, civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness.

In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny people—according to the disposition of their eyes, he is an immense and thus almighty creature. He experiences greatness in its most literal form. But on his next voyage, to Brobdingnag, he realizes that he is now the tiny person in a land inhabited by giants. His own body has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed. He describes his shock:

In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World; where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my Hand, and perform those other Actions which will be recorded for ever in the Chronicles of that Empire, while Posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by Millions. I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us…. Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison: It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?

What Gulliver experiences at this moment is the dizzying awareness that he can never really be at home again, either in his own body or in his own country. He can never be himself. He can never be normal. He must remember being his Lilliputian self, “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World,” or his Brobdingnagian self, the contemptibly inconsiderable homunculus. Since “nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison,” he is forced to hover neurotically between greatness and littleness. The terms of this comparison are strictly binary—there are only the great and the diminutive. One is either massively aggrandized or utterly mortified.

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

From the Archives: Pure Irony

• Fintan O’Toole on Jonathan Swift’s genius

• Derek Jarrett on the gluttonous pleasures of Henry Fielding

• Gabriel Josipovici on Rabelais’s intoxicating humor

• Stephen Spender on how Eric Blair became George Orwell, plus a letter from George Orwell on what George Orwell really meant

• V.S. Pritchett on the education of Alexander Pope

Today is Walt Whitman’s 207th birthday. For many years before the publication of Leaves of Grass he was a freelance journalist, writing for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Broadway Journal, for which, in 1845, he wrote about the Cheney Family Singers, a review that the Review reprinted on May 16, 2015 (making Whitman, quite possibly, our oldest contributor).

Great is the power of Music over a people! As for us of America, we have long enough followed obedient and child-like in the track of the Old World. We have received her tenors and her buffos, her operatic troupes and her vocalists, of all grades and complexions; listened to and applauded the songs made for a different state of society—made, perhaps, by royal genius, but made to please royal ears likewise; and it is time that such listening and receiving should cease. The subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its music—and the music acts reciprocally upon the nation’s very soul. Its effects may not be seen in a day, or a year, and yet these effects are potent invisibly. They enter into religious feelings—they tinge the manners and morals—they are active even in the choice of legislators and high magistrates. Tariffs can be varied to fit circumstances—bad laws obliterated and good ones formed—those enactments which relate to commerce or national policy, built up or taken away, stretched or contracted, to suit the will of the government for the time being. But no human power can thoroughly suppress the spirit which lives in national lyrics, and sounds in the favorite melodies sung by high and low.

There are two kinds of singing—heart-singing and art-singing. That which touches the souls and sympathies of other communities may have no effect here—unless it appeals to the throbbings of the great heart of humanity itself—pictures love, hope, or mirth in their comprehensive aspect. But nearly every nation has its peculiarities and its idioms, which make its best intellectual efforts dearest to itself alone, so that hardly any thing which comes to us in the music and songs of the Old World, is strictly good and fitting to our own nation.

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

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, 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.

Register here.

The great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday at the age of ninety-five. Today we have unlocked an essay on Rollins by Christopher Carroll that was published in the September 27, 2012, issue of The New York Review, shortly after one of Rollins’s final public performances.

The Sound of Sonny Rollins

Christopher Carroll

Though he ranks alongside Charlie Parker and John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists in history, no one knows why exactly Sonny Rollins hasn’t recorded a first-rate studio album since the 1960s. Some say that his style was irreparably damaged by years spent experimenting with funk, disco, and fusion in the Seventies and Eighties. Yet anyone who has seen Rollins perform on a good night knows that, even at eighty-two, he is still capable of playing with the same brilliance that first made giants like Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk take an interest in him in the 1950s. And if there were any lingering doubts, the news that Rollins won three major jazz awards this summer should dispel the notion that his best years are behind him.

In spite of his advanced age, Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers. He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience playing with almost every major figure in jazz. More important still, he has an impish and ironic sense of humor. He also has a keen appreciation of his audience; when performing he often walks into the crowd as he plays, hoping to draw inspiration from them.

In his newest album of live performances, Road Shows Vol. 2, there are moments when all this can be heard firsthand. A compilation of two recent live shows, including his eightieth birthday concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York, the record captures Rollins playing with the energy of someone half his age. Particularly noteworthy is the twenty-minute version of his classic twelve-bar blues, “Sonnymoon for Two,” on which he is joined by the multi- instrumentalist genius Ornette Coleman, whose free jazz heavily influenced Rollins in the 1960s. This is the first time the two have been recorded together, and though they do not connect in the way that one might have hoped, to hear Coleman playing side by side with Rollins is nevertheless a historic occasion. Perhaps more remarkable simply for the quality of playing is his performance of “Rain Check,” an old Billy Strayhorn song. As he and the forty-two-year-old trumpeter Roy Hargrove begin to trade fours—that is, exchange four-bar improvisations—Rollins’s relentless exuberance overtakes the young trumpeter, whose playing improves audibly the more he interacts with Sonny.

These kinds of moments should awaken listeners to a musician who is still, in Stanley Crouch’s words, capable of “summoning the entire history of jazz.” He was born in Harlem in 1930, the heyday of swing bands. Duke Ellington was a neighbor, and Louis Jordan, the father of R&B, inspired Rollins to pick up the alto saxophone as a child (he would later switch to tenor). He grew up within walking distance of the Apollo and Minton’s Playhouse, where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and the guitarist Charlie Christian held the all-night jam sessions—Ralph Ellison called them “a continuing symposium of jazz”—that were so central to the development of bebop.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was playing with Miles Davis. Within the next five years, he achieved the kind of success that most jazz musicians might hope for in a lifetime: he was leading his own groups, making albums that were widely praised. Still in his twenties, he had already developed an unmistakable sound, a caustic, sometimes barking tone that The New Yorker’s jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, aptly described as “bossy” and “demanding” (and, somewhat less charitably, “persistently goatlike”). Here is Balliett on how Rollins melded his chief influences, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone and left the velvet, lopped off Hawkins’ famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by making it parodic. He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of thirty-second notes), and Parker’s trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with tumbling bursts of improvisation. And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

For many, this period was Rollins at his best. He released a number of landmark albums, like Saxophone Colossus, which contains, among others, his famous solo on “Blue 7,” praised by Gunther Schuller in 1958 as the leading example of a new movement toward “thematic and structural unity” in jazz improvisation. On Way Out West, another album released in these years, Rollins plays with a stripped-down, pianoless trio, using hackneyed songs from the cowboy movies he grew up watching at the Apollo as vehicles for wonderfully complex improvisation.

In spite of this success, Rollins quietly withdrew from the jazz world in 1959, citing dissatisfaction with his playing. For two years he did nothing but practice in his apartment. When a neighbor had a new baby, he moved his practice sessions to the Williamsburg Bridge. When he returned to the scene in 1962, he released The Bridge, one of his most beloved albums, which includes a gorgeous rendition of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.” Yet though he had probably reached his technical peak, in the time he had been gone Rollins had nevertheless been overtaken by two towering figures of the avant-garde. The first was John Coltrane, who in 1960 released the revolutionary Giant Steps—which contains one of the most harmonically complex jazz songs ever written—and thereafter began an ascent that would stop only with his untimely death in 1967. Second, and more radical still, was Ornette Coleman, one of the leading figures of free jazz. Suddenly Rollins was regarded—unfairly—as a conservative, a remnant of the old bebop and post-bop tradition.

The irony of this conservative label is that Rollins embraced these new styles, recording innovative albums with both Coleman’s and Coltrane’s band members (Our Man in Jazz and East Broadway Run Down, respectively). But by the end of the Sixties he told Balliett in an interview that he was “disillusioned...with the music scene” and again went on a sabbatical, much of which he spent in India. When he returned to New York in 1972 he began what some have seen as a long, slow decline.

As rock’s influence grew and fusion became popular among jazz musicians, Rollins, just as he had with Coleman’s “new thing,” once again attempted to meld elements of the latest style into his music. Yet in this instance he seems to have gone too far. He led ensembles structured more like rock groups, heavy on electric bass. His albums, incorporating not just rock, but funk and disco, came to sound more commercial, often resembling Gato Barbieri more than Sonny Rollins. He also struggled with advances in recording technology, especially as the old method of recording complete (or near-complete) takes in the studio gave way to the painstaking, piecemeal process of overdubbing. “I’ve always felt a little bit restricted in a studio,” he said in a 2008 interview with the jazz critic Gary Giddins, “at least when the technology came out that you can overdub and...change your original statement. So then I think I got spooked and I began trying to do everything perfectly.”

Of course, these records did not, as some have speculated, somehow impair Rollins’s ability to play thoughtful music. Silver City, Giddins’s carefully selected compilation of some of the best songs Rollins recorded on the Milestone label during this period, proves that he was still capable of playing at the same high level he always had. But his great moments of inspiration are fewer, and seem to come in spite of their surroundings, cropping up unaccountably in the middle of an otherwise insipid funk tune or disco track and just as quickly disappearing.

But in the mid-Seventies and early Eighties—even as he continued to release largely uninspired studio albums—another Sonny Rollins emerged on stage. This was the musician who had learned the art of crowd pleasing from Louis Jordan; who emerged years later from Charlie Parker’s long shadow; and who had devoured and assimilated every avant-garde idiom while still remaining, ultimately, himself. He can be seen in Sonny Rollins, ’74: Rescued, a newly discovered video of a set Rollins played at Ronnie Scott’s in 1974. He can also be seen in footage of a concert from 1986—reproduced in Robert Mugge’s documentary Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus—giving an electrifying performance of the song “G-Man,” a fifteen-minute modal marathon with, in Robert Christgau’s words, “riffs jumping and giving long past their breaking points, notes held so long it’s a wonder Rollins hasn’t passed out.”

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

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, 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.

Register here.