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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen on all platforms here.

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

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

The United Arab Emirates has invested a lot of money in its appearance: its skyscrapers, which include the tallest in the world; its luxury hotels; its partnerships with prestigious Western universities, from NYU to the Sorbonne. And yet, as the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed, it has become clear once again that the pulse of the UAE remains underground. In “Bottling the World Economy,” Adam Hanieh’s latest essay for the NYR Online, he describes how, as the UAE accumulated extraordinary wealth selling its fossil fuels, it also diversified what it produced from them, expanding into petrochemicals, oil-based plastics, fertilizers derived from natural gas, and other goods that have become crucial to food and industrial production around the world. The Gulf is connected to global supply chains, he writes, “in far deeper and more complex ways than the familiar stereotype of oil wells and tanker routes might suggest.”

A professor at SOAS, University of London, and the author of books including Crude Capitalism (2024), Hanieh has written extensively on the formation of the Gulf elite and how they have connected their nations’ political systems with global market forces. Hanieh and I spoke over email this week about the region—its present under bombardment and its future as the climate emergency deepens.

Nawal Arjini: What brought you to this field of study? How has it changed since you entered it?

Adam Hanieh: I first came to this field through a long-standing political and intellectual interest in the Middle East that was also deeply shaped by living and working for several years in the West Bank, in Palestine. One of the things that drew me specifically to the Gulf was that it was oddly marginal in how the Middle East was thought about in the 1990s, even though it was plainly central to the politics and economics of the wider region. If you wanted to understand the nature of capitalism in the Middle East—and related questions of war, migration, finance, or energy—the Gulf was impossible to ignore. Yet the Gulf states were often viewed as simply a collection of wealthy sheikhs or giant oil spigots.

The field has changed a great deal since then. There is a lot of rich and thought-provoking work on capitalism in the Gulf, and a wide recognition that these states are central to the making of the contemporary region and, indeed, to the world economy. It’s also extremely important for the Gulf to be taken more seriously when confronting the bigger questions of ecology and the climate emergency.

I think many Westerners think of the UAE as Singapore in the desert—city-states, nodes of the world economy, with an air of being above politics. Your work shows how that is a convenient fiction. Could you talk about the UAE’s place in the region?

This image of the UAE is convenient precisely because it strips away the political and economic relationships that have made the country what it is. The UAE is not a city-state but a federation of seven emirates, and its power is structured above all by the dominance of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Abu Dhabi is the political and strategic center of the federation, and it is also one of the world’s most important energy exporters, with oil and gas wealth channeled through the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Dubai, by contrast, has built its power through its function as a financial, commercial, and logistical hub. Along with the other Gulf monarchies, the UAE served as a crucial ally first of British imperial interests and later of American power in the wider region.

Dubai’s global profile is especially important here. As a hub linking Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, it has given the UAE an outsized place in the world economy. Jebel Ali, the largest man-made harbor in the world, is a critical piece of regional and global infrastructure. It is one of the world’s biggest container ports, a major conduit for trade, and also a strategic port for the US Navy. In that sense, logistics, finance, and military power are closely intertwined. The port gives the UAE leverage, and it ties the country tightly to wider geopolitical struggles, especially the projection of American power abroad. Over the past decade the UAE has become increasingly assertive in the region, intervening directly and indirectly in countries like Yemen, Sudan, and Libya, while expanding its influence across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and throughout the Middle East.

Another thing that is often left out of discussions of the UAE, and of the Gulf more broadly, is the country’s heavy reliance on a highly exploited and precarious migrant working class. In every Gulf state, noncitizen migrant workers make up the majority of the labor force. They typically have no meaningful political rights, face major restrictions on labor organizing, and can be detained or deported for participating in strikes or protests. These workers are fundamental to the Gulf’s economic model. In that sense, there is indeed a comparison to Singapore—but the Gulf version is harsher and more extreme.

You’ve written in the past that the politics of the Gulf were slowly converging around the interests of the Saudi–UAE elite. Has the war in Iran fractured or strengthened this consensus?

For a long time, the politics of the Gulf had been orbiting the interests of the Saudi and Emirati leaderships. This war seems to have further hardened the alignment of these states with American power. You can see that in the renewed strategic importance of Gulf security partnerships with Washington, in the push to deepen military coordination after Iranian strikes on Gulf infrastructure, and in the continued significance of Israel–Gulf normalization as part of a wider US-backed regional architecture.

However, it would be a mistake to treat the Gulf as politically homogeneous. The war has clearly shown the weight of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but it has not eliminated the different calculations of other Gulf states. As we saw on Tuesday, Oman, in particular, has continued to occupy a somewhat distinct position, shaped by its long-standing job of mediating among different interests in the region (including Iran’s). The Gulf governments have not all related to the war in the same way.

To what extent do the countries we call Middle Eastern see themselves as more linked to one another than to countries in North Africa or the rest of Asia?

The term “Middle East” has imperial origins, first coined by the British as part of their colonial empire. In that sense, it does tell us something about how the rest of the world views the region (that is, east of the imperial “center”). But like all ways of naming, the category of the Middle East is one that has been contested and reworked by people within the region itself.

Sometimes I think we can get a bit trapped in these kinds of terminological arguments and lose sight of the connections that actually make regions. Historically, the countries we call Middle Eastern have never been linked only to one another. They have always been globally entangled with not just Europe but also Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Flows of trade, pilgrimage, migration, empire, finance, and political struggle have tied these places together for centuries. That is especially clear today in the Gulf, where the working class is largely South Asian, trade is primarily with China and East Asia, and flows of capital connect financial markets from Dubai to London, Mumbai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Rather than treating “the Middle East” as either a purely Western invention or a self-evident, neatly sealed container, it makes more sense to see it as a political and historical formation whose boundaries are always porous, contested, and remade through movements of capital, labor, and ideas.

In the popular imagination, the “green transition” refers mainly to energy—replacing coal with solar, for example—but in your essay you detail the enormous importance of fossil fuel byproducts to not just the infrastructure of clean energy (electric vehicle batteries, etc.) but the global food supply, via natural gas–derived fertilizers. To what extent have governments been preparing to adapt these supply chains to a greener economy?

Most governments have treated the “green transition” as simply an electricity and transport question that can be solved through greater use of renewables and more EVs. They have been much slower to confront the fact that fossil fuels are also embedded in fertilizers, plastics, chemicals, and all the industrial feedstocks that structure everyday life. Petrochemicals are one of the biggest drivers of oil demand growth, which the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects to account for more than half of oil demand growth in 2026.

This is especially clear with fertilizers. Modern ammonia production remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, above all natural gas, and the IEA’s ammonia roadmap makes clear that right now output keeps growing while emissions fall far too slowly. There might be some pilot projects and industrial decarbonization plans, but there is no systematic remaking of the supply chains that support food production. This is clearly unsustainable.

How would a transition away from oil and gas change the political economy of the Gulf states?

A genuine global transition away from oil and gas would transform the Gulf states at the deepest level of their political economy, because hydrocarbons underpin state revenues, business structures, subsidy regimes, sovereign wealth accumulation, and the Gulf’s place in global capitalism. But I don’t think that transition is anywhere near to taking place. Last year saw the largest consumption of oil, gas, and coal in history. We’re not moving away from hydrocarbons—rather, renewables are expanding while fossil fuel use continues to rise in absolute terms.

The Gulf demonstrates this reality very clearly. All the Gulf national oil companies are planning to expand their extraction and exportation of hydrocarbons in the coming years. As the Saudi oil minister put it a few years ago, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.” At the same time, they are rapidly expanding their domestic renewable sectors so that they can export even more oil and gas, rather than burning it at home for electricity.

In your estimation, how is the war changing the demand for fossil fuels around the world?

Historically, there is a deep connection between militarism and the consumption of fossil fuels—and thus carbon emissions. There was a very alarming study released by the Climate and Community Institute a few weeks into the war that estimated that the first fourteen days of the conflict generated around five million tons of CO2 equivalent, roughly comparable to Iceland’s annual emissions. Yet despite the obvious link between our fossil fuel–centered world and war, governments seem to be drawing exactly the wrong lessons. The immediate policy instinct has been to double down on fossil fuel production by securing and protecting domestic supplies, seeking additional reserves abroad, and accelerating environmental deregulation. So unfortunately I think the war—and the broader drive for militarization and rearmament—is likely to deepen fossil fuel dependence worldwide. There may be a temporary fall in consumption if the war triggers a sharp contraction in the world economy, but that would reflect a temporary crisis, not a real energy transition.

As capitalism in the US becomes increasingly authoritarian, are there lessons to be drawn from authoritarian capitalism in the Middle East? How resilient do you think these regimes are right now, or is that all up in the air as the war continues?

I think one very salient lesson is that authoritarianism should never be treated as a purely political phenomenon, as though it were simply a matter of strong rulers, weak institutions, or some supposed cultural predisposition. The old language of Middle East “exceptionalism” was always misleading for exactly that reason. It ignored the ways that authoritarian rule was bound up with the political economy of capitalism in the Middle East, and the sustained Western support for regimes seen as useful to American and European power.

The current moment—globally, not just in the US—makes clear that authoritarian political rule was never a uniquely Middle Eastern pathology. It can’t be separated from extreme inequality and social polarization, and the deployment of state violence to manage social crises. This is especially significant when there is a widespread erosion of the political legitimacy of rulers and parties, which is again a feature of many states across the world today.

But the Middle East also offers lessons in how authoritarian regimes can quickly become vulnerable. The regional uprisings of 2011 shattered the fantasy that these authoritarian rulers were immovable, and another wave of protests in 2018 and 2019 showed again the possibility of deep social and political mobilization in countries that appeared to be stable. Authoritarian regimes always look immensely powerful up until the point they do not. Their resilience depends on their capacity to manage and contain dissent. When that weakens, openings appear very quickly. That is as true in the United States as it is in the Middle East, even if the institutional forms differ.

In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work.

Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.

Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved(1987), and Tar Baby (1981)—as well as her poetry, criticism, and later books. Earnest also asks Serpell about her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” about the concept of narrative empathy, which was published in the Review’s March 2, 2019, issue.

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020). She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2017, when she wrote “Kenya in Another Tongue,” about a new edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1980 novel Devil on a Cross. Serpell is also a sometime film critic for the Review, contributing considerations of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and a bravura essay about Émile Zola and the movie Zola. Her most recent essay, “Toni Plays the Dozens,” adapted from her book, explores humor and the social practice of “signifying” in Song of Solomon.

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.

“Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire,” writes Aaron Matz, quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, in a review of Dan Sperrin’s State of Ridicule from our March 26, 2026, issue. Unfortunately, literary political satire has been in a long period of decline—and not just because it has been supplanted by faster and more attention-grabbing forms of media in our screen-addled age. Sperrin argues that satire—at least the grand tradition of English political satire, the focus of his book—hasn’t been the same since the late eighteenth century, when state affairs became too complex to effectively mock, and English society, struggling to maintain its cohesion, became less tolerant of withering critique. Matz finds that a more significant factor was the development of mass culture. “There was now simply too much to puncture, the zone of power had far exceeded machinations in government, and a satire on politics could no longer leave out the vast arena of society,” he writes. “The boundary between the two had become too porous.”

Matz, a professor at Scripps College who specializes in the English and French novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has often written about literature’s attempts to grapple with a baffling, decaying world. He is the author of two books, Satire in an Age of Realism (2010), about the collapse of Victorian realism into satire, and The Novel and the Problem of New Life (2021), about the novel’s long history of skepticism toward procreation. For the Review, he has written about Émile Zola and the anxiety, evinced by Amitav Ghosh and other critics, that literature has failed to meet the challenge of accounting for climate change.

I emailed Matz this week to discuss Veep, Flaubert, and a future of all-consuming irony.

Willa Glickman: In your recent essay you argue that now the most effective satire tends to take place on TV or the Internet, in part because “people in government today obviously don’t care about literature, so the effort to ridicule them in literature can seem pointless or (worse) harmless.” Is there any contemporary literary satire that’s caught your eye, nonetheless? Or any great satire in these newer forms?

Aaron Matz: There is plenty of great literary satire; it just tends not to be explicitly political, in the sense of lampooning politicians. But it is almost certain to be political in more indirect ways. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout comes to mind. I’m a fan of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which came out in 2022 and was translated into English last year. It’s a satire in the supplest sense of the term: it looks at the world with a kind of detached pity, and it’s funny.

Clearly TV over the last decade or so has been a natural place for some very good satire. A lot of it has been unambiguously political, as in the work of Armando Ianucci: Veep and his 2017 film The Death of Stalin. As for broader social satire, the characteristic mode in contemporary film and television is the skewering of rich people. Not all of it is great, but the first season of The White Lotus, especially in its last couple of episodes, has a magnificent control of satiric tone. The Captain’s Dinner scene in the 2022 film Triangle of Sadness, with its opera of vomit, is satire in a long-standing tradition, going back to the retching sequence on the boat in Céline’s Mort à crédit, and before that to Rabelais. I suppose it’s political satire in a roundabout kind of way. There’s a debate over the ship’s loudspeakers about capitalism and communism the whole time those rich guests are flooding the dining room and hallways with puke.

Your book The Novel and the Problem of New Life traces the novel’s ambivalence or even hostility to procreation, but also toward artistic reproduction. What do you see as the source of those concerns about the novel form itself?

The book is mostly about novels that depict characters who are ambivalent about having children. This takes me through Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing and into contemporary fiction. The dilemma, in the hands of these novelists, is not only an abstraction but a central element of the plot and structure of their books.

But what you say about the novel form itself is true. There has been an element of austerity, even astringency, in one major strain of the novel since the nineteenth century. It took root as the novel began to coalesce as a serious form. It mostly begins (as so much does!) with Flaubert, who nurtured an immense suspicion toward the efflorescence of his literary gift, and who routinely expressed this feeling as a distrust of artistic reproduction and circulation more generally. We can see similar traces in some later nineteenth-century writers, like Huysmans. The great twentieth-century exemplar of this attitude is Beckett, with his realization that he could only inherit the mantle of Joyce by reversing the inheritance: he had to be a subtractive writer rather than an additive one, abstinent rather than luxuriant. We know well the novels and plays that followed from this.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are some of the same writers who expressed, in both their private writing and their published work, such fierce hostility to actual procreation. In Flaubert and Beckett, for example, we encounter a regular antipathy toward proliferation or excess in the abstract—but also toward the prospect of bringing life into the world in particular. Even a lot of contemporary fiction, where the scenario of characters agonizing over whether to have children has become quite common, defaults to a laconic style (very short paragraphs separated by empty space, for example) that channels the familiar wariness about lushness. Procreative skepticism and stylistic restraint often go hand in hand.

Your question—what is the source?—is a difficult one. Are Flaubert and Beckett writers who felt terror about having children, and then sublimated this frugality into the discipline of their literary work? Or were they, from a young age, naturally averse to fecundity in literary form and style, and then eventually determined that they couldn’t tolerate the biological kind either? It’s probably a little of both.

In your essay on Amitav Ghosh and other literary critics who think about climate change, you write that for many of them, “The question is not just ‘Can literature be redeemed?’ but also ‘What exactly has literature been doing, given the circumstances?’” Are you drawn to either of these two questions, or is there a third question that could be asked?

I think the second question is the better one, but the first presumably follows from it. To ask what literature has been doing all this time, as atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising to ever more alarming levels, is to ask about the basic task facing writers—what they’re spending their time doing when they’re sitting at their desk. It assumes that novelists have been capable of writing about the climate emergency in some satisfactory way. It also assumes that novelists have understood what has been going on in the first place.

Obviously both assumptions are correct now. The more difficult question is when they became so. This gets us into the matter of when the essential problem of greenhouse gases began to be known to a general public and therefore to writers. If one premise of realist fiction is that it takes into account present circumstances, however bluntly or obliquely, then a literature that is unresponsive to this biggest circumstance of all will probably seem defective.

This worry about defectiveness can lead to a panicked call for literature’s redemption. The response has taken different forms. One is climate fiction, or cli-fi. Another is the excesses of some literary criticism, the kind I addressed in that piece, which can be anachronistic or unfair in judging the literary record. To be clear, I don’t think literature needs to be redeemed. There is a risk of arrogance in suggesting so about the literature of the past. Nor do I think that when we appraise the literature of the present for its way of addressing the crisis we are taking part in an effort of redemption to begin with. If the great masterwork about climate does come along, it won’t be because it’s making up for a past deficit.

You ask if there’s a third question we can pose. Here’s one: Is it possible any longer to write novels that are not already suffused with the situation? That is, can a serious contemporary literature not already be absorbed by the crisis, and therefore proceed inherently from it, even if it’s not manifestly about it? This isn’t a new question. Already in 2019 David Wallace-Wells was expecting that climate would become no longer a story but a kind of basis: “We will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.” Surely that moment has arrived.

Your next book will be about how the reality of climate change forces us into a stance of irony toward recent art and literature. Is it a hostile stance, or a rueful one?

The irony I’m writing about is more rueful than hostile. It begins with a recognition of the fundamentally ironic nature of our predicament in the climate emergency. I’m interested in the development of the idea of irony over the past two hundred years, during which time a term having mostly to do with rhetoric expanded into a word for describing a situation. In 1833 the scholar who basically introduced this more capacious understanding into English defined irony in a way that we can recognize easily today: all our wishes shall be granted, but only to verify our worst fears. By the twentieth century the OED was offering this definition: “a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise or fitness of things.” For a long time we have known exactly what we’re doing, but the underlying history bears this ironic trace. The burning of fossil fuels has created the very civilization that it is now in the process of unmaking.

Given this predicament, it is often difficult to look back at the art and literature of recent decades, as parts per million of carbon dioxide were rising, without finding them altered or even warped in various ways. The book or artwork may contain some latent element that only our recognition of the climate reality can now allow us to see. There is an incongruity that may be best understood as an irony. But if that irony is rueful, disenchanted, that does not mean it must be a stance of defeat. Irony doesn’t have to be nihilistic or despairing. On the contrary, it can be a great source of clarity, fortitude, and action.

In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.

Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.

Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday (1997), and a novel, Diary of a Dijinn (2003), and the translator of a number of Italian novels, including I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, and The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg.

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Since Donald Trump’s improbable first win in 2016, pundits have passed countless hours trying to understand how his rise, and the populist movement that powered it, have changed American conservatism. If Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was, famously, a three-legged stool consisting of social traditionalists, free-market champions, and foreign interventionists, Trump’s MAGA coalition has swelled its ranks, at peril of some internal contradiction. In today’s GOP, Middle East hawks sit next to America First isolationists, former Goldman Sachs executives beside tariff truthers, immigration hardliners with H1B exceptionalists, and Christian Zionists with self-professed antisemites. Over the course of a turbulent decade in and out of power, Trump at times seems to have kept the movement together through sheer force of personality.

The offensive against Iran that Trump’s administration launched on February 28 may pose the most significant challenge to the coalition to date. Having campaigned as a “peace president,” Trump now presides over an immediately unpopular war and has angered many in his base who voted to end the foreign entanglements he too claimed to hate. In a move that may presage a larger split, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his post on March 17, citing his belief that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined [Trump’s] America First platform.” (Kent went on to claim that the last two decades of American intervention abroad had been “manufactured by Israel.”)

To understand these developments, we invited Suzanne Schneider, the author of two recent pieces in our pages about MAGA coalitional politics, and Osita Nwanevu, who reviewed Sam Tanenhaus’s door-stopper biography of William F. Buckley this past fall, to discuss the responses to the war in the MAGA movement, the fracturing of conservative media, and what might happen when Trump retires from politics, however that may come to pass. —Dahlia Krutkovich

Dahlia Krutkovich: I’d like to start by asking to what extent we can understand President Trump as truly having broken with twentieth-century conservatism. Earlier this month his administration started what many fear will be another “forever war” in the Middle East, but his posturing around the attack is noticeably different from that of his predecessors. Where do you both see continuity, and where do you see something genuinely new?

Osita Nwanevu: When Donald Trump arrived on the scene, people marked him out as different from the Republican establishment in a few crucial respects. One, of course, was his opposition to American intervention, but there was also his focus on immigration and his rhetoric on trade—that we’d been ripped off with NAFTA, that our approach to trade policy had allowed other countries to take advantage of us. And I’ve been thinking a lot, especially in the last few weeks, about how much of any of that is left.

For the reasons that Suzanne writes about so eloquently in both of her recent pieces, I already believed that Trump’s break from the Republican establishment on immigration was overstated. There has always been a nativist current in conservative politics, and Trump didn’t even initiate this latest turn. In 2007 The New Yorker published what I think is one of the most important pieces of political reporting in the last twenty years, an article by Ryan Lizza about how John McCain and Mike Huckabee were bewildered by Mitt Romney’s hard line on immigration during the 2008 Republican primary—Romney was introducing words like “amnesty” into the mainstream immigration debate. Tom Tancredo, a nativist congressman from Colorado, was also in the field, of course, but Tancredo was a crank. Romney was this respectable, moderate Republican ginning up angst about immigration—which he continued to do in 2012. So to my mind, that aspect of Trumpism was already baked into the future of Republican politics.

The things that you could say were genuinely novel about Trump, from my perspective, were his stance on trade policy and his willingness to critique intervention abroad. But in just the last month alone, both of those positions have been fatally undermined. As far as trade goes, we had a very chaotic and nonsensical year of back-and-forth on tariffs, but nothing in the way of a serious coherent policy. Now the Supreme Court has functionally upended that whole effort. And even in his first term, Trump passed the USMCA, which was not a total rejection or repudiation of NAFTA as much as a revision of it. The biggest legislative accomplishment of that first term was a big package of tax cuts; he’s continuing a deregulatory agenda. In most respects, he’s still recognizably a Republican president as far as economic policy is concerned.

And now of course we have this war with Iran, which was preceded by the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in Trump’s first term, and by last year’s strikes on the country’s nuclear sites, this past Christmas’s strikes in Nigeria, and January’s episode in Venezuela. So at this point, the idea that he was going to represent a turning of the page from the maximalist, interventionist American foreign policy of the last few decades has been totally undone.

In substance, what we’re left with is a Republican president who is maybe 30 percent more openly bigoted than the Republicans who preceded him. He’s also more willing to openly flout the law and the constitutional order. But I don’t know how much else there is.

Suzanne Schneider: There is a somewhat obvious continuity between the MAGA right and certain twentieth-century conservatives like Pat Buchanan, or even William F. Buckley, as Osita’s piece very persuasively argues. Both of those figures were skeptical of immigration and, at least to some extent, foreign intervention. It’s worth recalling that Buckley’s first public speech was to the America First Committee, a forerunner to today’s isolationist right that more than accommodated antisemitism and fascist apologetics. But of course ideological projects are always composite in nature, so the question seems to me less a matter of “continuity or rupture” than of which strand of the conservative movement has the upper hand at any given time.

I also think we miss important continuities if our view of American conservatism is too narrowly defined by the period from the end of the cold war to the election of Donald Trump. Those twenty-five years or so were the apex of Washington Consensus conservatism, of neoconservative interventions abroad and neoliberal economic policy at home. Many of the post-liberal writers I’m interested in, people like Patrick Deneen or Oren Cass or Yoram Hazony, will say that the “conservativism” of these years was just liberalism dressed up in a more traditionalist guise, because its champions never questioned the idea that politics should be organized around the autonomous individual and that liberty is a matter of conveying and protecting individual rights. They had no sense of a collective, social, or common good.

In contrast, post-liberals sharply distinguish the libertarian project (in all its forms) from genuine conservatism, arguing that the latter requires a commitment to social cohesion that is incompatible with unrestrained individualism. Pushing the arc back before 1989 helps us see the currents that flow into today’s new right from a time before libertarianism become an integral part of the Republican coalition. Some thinkers push this narrative arc way back to the aristocratic politics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, according to Patrick Deneen, were built on class-straddling bonds of mutual obligation, noblesse oblige that protected the little guy from the scourges of industrial capitalism. It’s historical bunk, but it is interesting to see people casting about for older models of what it means to be a conservative.

What I find fascinating today is the projection that goes on around Trump. This is ultimately because he is an incoherent and in some ways vacuous figure who lacks firm ideological convictions. As a result, there is so much room for competing factions within the MAGAverse to see him as their guy, or at least to see him as creating openings for them, because he is willing to take on the establishment on various issues—certainly rhetorically, and in some more material ways as well, like imposing tariffs by presidential fiat and reducing pharmaceutical prices by striking deals with drug companies.

In the economic populist arm of the movement, for instance, we have someone like Josh Hawley, who, as Osita has written about, seems to be interested in expanding the social safety net for those he deems real Americans, and who views Trump as heralding a new style of Republican politics that is more kindly disposed to state intervention in the market. So too do Oren Cass and the American Compass set see Trump’s willingness to question economic orthodoxy about globalization and trade as a political opening. They think, “Here’s a president who’s willing to intervene in the economy, who doesn’t think that markets will magically distribute goods in the way that is most beneficial to all.” Because he’s willing to break from the neoliberal premise that markets should operate independently from the state and be insulated from democratic pressures, certain coalitional partners think they can get him on board for this or that issue.

I think the same was true of the noninterventionist America Firsters, from intellectuals—like the right wing of the Quincy Institute and people like Curt Mills at American Conservative—to everyday Americans who were sick of wasting blood and treasure on foreign wars. As many people have noted by now, it was Trump’s willingness to break with the conservative establishment over the Iraq War that helped him win the 2016 Republican primary.

I agree with Osita that even if Trump seems inclined to entertain some of these ideas, we’ve basically gotten standard GOP policies in effect. At the same time it’s important not to underestimate the extent to which groups dissatisfied with the status quo project their fantasies of rupture onto his presidency.

This war with Iran is perhaps the most glaring continuation of the status quo to date—and it’s not one the noninterventionists can ignore, no matter how willful their fantasies. Nick Fuentes recently called for his followers to either sit out or vote Democrat in the 2026 midterms. His influence is contested, but he’s certainly one bellwether for the America First wing of the MAGA movement. How consequential a crack in the coalition might this war create?

Schneider: My reading is that this rift will have real political consequences for Trump. It’s been building for some time: you already saw critiques of Trump-the-interventionist coming out over the summer and into the fall from Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Fuentes. What’s telling is that now someone like Megyn Kelly, a more mainstream figure—despite her earlier clashes with Trump, she endorsed him in 2024 and attended the inauguration—has joined them. And while most elected Republicans are falling in line for now, there are almost daily reports of how much unease the war has caused within the party ranks looking ahead to the midterm elections.

What isn’t clear to me is the extent to which this discontent penetrates the White House, because Trump is just so glued to what’s on Fox News, and a portion of this divide is generational, which also translates into a split between old and new media. I’m sure some people, like JD Vance, do understand the extent of the problem. I’ve been taking note of Vance’s subtle attempts to signal that he’s not completely on board with the war, with Trump acknowledging in recent days that they have “philosophical” differences concerning the strikes. Picking Vance as VP was supposed to institutionalize the isolationist wing of the movement and bring it into the White House. Vance has routinely invoked his experience in Iraq to make the case against foreign wars, nation building, and democracy promotion, and I sense that he realizes this war could go badly very quickly, and that, as Trump’s presumptive heir, he might be the one saddled with having to explain it to the American people.

Nwanevu: I’m less certain that the partisans who say they’re abandoning Trump over Iran will really do so. I think that’s partially because of what Suzanne pointed out earlier, that Trump is very good at being all things to all people, and is really the only major figure in American politics who does promise—as illusory as that promise might be—to go to battle with the political establishment. People want to believe in him, because who else is going to offer them that kind of opportunity?

The people who oppose intervention have these moments of pique, and then they reconcile themselves to Trump anyway. I don’t know what happens to that pattern when Trump is no longer in the picture and isn’t the figure keeping his coalition together—do we have more serious ruptures once he leaves the scene? I’m not sure, but Trump has been able to disappoint his people again and again and again, and it hasn’t meant all that much so far.

Does the beginning of this war tell us anything meaningful about the long-running battle between the interventionist and noninterventionist wings of American conservativism? The noninterventionists seemed to be gaining strength in the last ten or so years, but this war seems to be yet another indication that material power and influence continue to elude them.

Nwanevu: Why exactly the interventionists—the “Blob,” as Ben Rhodes has called the foreign policy establishment—tend to win out across eras is more opaque to me than, say, why the Chamber of Commerce types seem to always win on the economy. Several years ago, I did a piece about this group that met here in Baltimore called the H.L. Mencken Club. I’d call them part of the tweedy section of the alt-right. Paul Gottfried, one of the figures mentioned in Suzanne’s review of Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards, was involved with them. They’re not groypers, but, if I had to put it reductively, frustrated, racist college professors and white-collar types. I talked to multiple people there who said they had actually voted for Obama in 2008, even though they believed in the inferiority of black people and obviously opposed most of his social agenda. They supported him because they were that perturbed by the war in Iraq, not just because of its foreign policy consequences but because it had led to the destabilization of the region and fueled immigration to Europe and the United States.

At the same time, I feel one of the few things I’ve learned in the last few years is just how earnestly and sincerely committed many of the neocons in the Never Trump crowd—the other end of the spectrum from the America Firsters—were to the grand ideological project of spreading Western values. I think there’s a narrative on the left that Iraq was invaded purely for oil, purely to advance the interests of American capital. Aspects of that might be true, but I also think that Bill Kristol really did believe you could bomb Iraq into democracy. I didn’t fully understand his politics until I saw him and many other people in that crowd become militantly anti-Trump largely on the grounds that Trump, here and abroad, had abandoned the liberal democratic crusade as they understood it.

Schneider: To that end, there’s absolutely no emphasis on “the day after” in Iran. It’s tempting to call this the neocons’ revenge as it were, but this episode is quite distinct from previous interventions. If you watch Hegseth’s briefings, the administration has basically framed our action so far as: “We’re just bombing things.” We’re destroying things, we’re using “overwhelming force,” but we’re not doing nation building. The idea that we have some sort of responsibility for putting this region or these countries back together again—which was so crucial to the neocon logic—is completely abandoned here. We can even think about this as a concession Trump is making to the more skeptical portions of his coalition.

It’s striking that democracy promotion is no longer part of the interventionist agenda as we’ve soured on democracy at home and as our system has grown less responsive to people’s needs. One of the mistakes many liberals in the US have made is to continue appealing to democracy in the abstract, absent the system delivering any real material benefits. They ask people to “believe” in democracy even as our government proves useless in the battle against the forces making our lives more insecure, stressful, and unaffordable. What Americans are offered in lieu of policy solutions is violence of a media-friendly, literally spectacular sort, of which ICE raids are only one recent example.

Thinking across the domestic/foreign policy firewall, we can see how democratic decline at home also helps explain the apparent lack of strategic planning in Iran. I mean, it’s astounding how little clue these people seem to have about what they’re doing. They didn’t seem to consider the inevitability of regional escalation and what that would mean for American interests there, or think about economic disruptions, outward migration, or terrorist attacks. There’s not even a pretense of a plan for what might come. They do not understand the situation within Iran, the fractured nature of the resistance, the strength of the regime even without Khamenei. What they’re straining to communicate is that they understand how to drop bombs. What they want from our foreign wars seems to be, mostly, social media fodder—montages of things exploding, without even feigning concern for the worth of human life.

This is borne out even on the level of the two operation names, right? Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Epic Fury perhaps speak for themselves.

Nwanevu: But at the same time Trump has said both that he will have to personally approve the successor government in Iran, and that he’s open to putting troops on the ground. I agree with you, Suzanne—it’s very clear that they don’t know what they’re doing, and that they’ve abandoned the vision of bringing democracy to the places where we intervene. That is a relic of a bygone era. But whether or not they know it right now, and whether or not you call it “nation building,” they’ve functionally committed themselves to some kind of stabilizing process—if only to steady the flow of oil.

The administration wants to shape the futures of Venezuela and Iran in ways that align with American material interests as they understand them. And they think they can take shortcuts around deep political change in both cases—they’re willing to accept a dictatorship or a puppet regime, they’re not interested in the American public seeing photos of ink on the thumbs of new voters at the polls. But I think we’re all going to figure out the extent to which they’ve actually managed to evade the tensions of internal politics there.

A central part of the historical narrative that has formed around the invasion of Iraq is about the buildup: that cable news was besotted with the idea of war, and you couldn’t find a dissenting voice in a national newsroom. Today, while Fox News and the president’s favored One America News Network are certainly excited about this war, there are also figures like Tucker Carlson and the conservative blogger Matt Walsh who are broadcasting their displeasure to millions of viewers. A significant share of the MAGA base, in other words, is consuming what is essentially an oppositional narrative. How do you think a fractured right-wing media landscape might be contributing to a lack of coherence within the administration?

Nwanevu: You’re right that there’s no real consensus about this operation. And really, conservatism has never been a fully unified movement. But I do think that things have changed—people who would have been small players in the movement twenty or thirty years ago can now command their own large audiences. The conservative media scene used to be dominated by Fox News and National Review. It’s not clear that any one outlet has the power to unilaterally influence debate in the same way anymore. Tucker Carlson has an audience as least as big as Fox and Friends, and that matters.

But I do wonder how broadly many of the debates we’re talking about reach Trump’s base of voters, or the lion’s share of voters who constitute the Republican electorate. Despite the angst about Iran among people who you might very generously call conservative intellectuals, or conservative influencers, or whatever, we still see overwhelming support for the war among registered Republicans: opposition is only around 15 percent. Republicans as a whole seem willing to follow the administration’s lead on this, and I honestly think that that’s true on most issues. So, like the dispute between Kevin Roberts and the rest of Heritage over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, or between Nick Fuentes and the Christian Zionists on Israel, these fights seem intellectually meaningful, and they might show the tectonic plates of the Republican Party shifting in certain ways, but you have to wonder about the extent to which any of them durably matter at scale.

I feel like I have to say often that the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump are also the kind of people who, for the most part, voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain. When all is said and done, most of the people who constitute the Republican electorate are animated by things you’re not going to find reading the Claremont Review of Books. Much of what’s driving people is negative partisanship. As in, “We believe the Democratic Party stands for certain things and certain people, and we’re not those people.” So whether the person listed as a Republican on the ballot is some kind of libertarian or some kind of post-neoliberal populist, we’re going to vote for them because they’re not a Democrat. I think that’s what it boils down to for most.

Schneider: I do think it’s worth dwelling on the gap between the 50 percent of Americans who indicated, before the war began, that they opposed intervention in Iran and the 85 percent of Republicans who (as of polling conducted a few days later) supported it. This does suggest some sort of robust ideological media system at work. Nevertheless, I think it’s significant that 15 percent of Republicans were opposed to this war even at the outset. I imagine that latent opposition, harnessed to new media influencers and superstars, will only grow as the war goes badly, which it will.

That said, the Trump White House is trying to create the media landscape it wants, which looks beyond legacy media to appeal to the sort of person who would otherwise be very willing to follow the Fuentes line on the war. The deranged Call of Duty–style montages that the official White House X page puts out are part and parcel of appealing to a younger generation. I just saw one that was a mashup of clips from Braveheart, Top Gun, and Gladiator. This is war not just as video game but as heroic cosplay, where you get to be cast as Mel Gibson. It displays a startling, sickening indifference to the lives of the people actually involved and is deeply antihumanist in the most literal way, because real humans are reduced to media props. But this seems to be part of the strategy. How else to reach young guys sitting in their basements playing video games? This style of content tries to address them directly and appeal to their most vicious, libidinal instincts.

Nwanevu: And to your point, it’s not working. Because young men, like everybody else, pay for groceries and healthcare and so on. And even as far as the extremely online Fuentes crowd is concerned, Fuentes has repudiated Trump on Iran. There was a lot of talk after the 2024 election about how every American man under the age of thirty-five was on the cusp of becoming a Nazi or something. And I think the polls very quickly have shown that whatever drove the young men in question to Trump in that election is already dissipating—they are a constituency that’s still up for grabs, although whether Democrats will actually be able to connect with them is another question.

Going back to the disjuncture between the current administration and the neocons, I was struck by Secretary of State Marco Rubio coming out and saying, essentially, the US took point on the attack because we needed to get out ahead of Israel’s plans to strike. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld would have ever admitted in a room with a camera that American strategic objectives had been preempted by Israeli ones. Tucker Carlson’s assertion that this war is really the work of the Chabad movement was perhaps preliminary evidence of how this will metastasize.

Nwanevu: As long as you have institutions in American life that are intent on insisting that Israeli interests are synonymous with the interests of Jews in America and around the world, antisemites are going to exploit the American relationship with Israel to their own ends. Obviously, there are many Jewish people who have courageously stood against Israeli policy and are pushing against that conflation. But as long as the Republican Party—and much of the Democratic party, even now—continues to insist that there’s no division between Jews and Israelis, the idea of going to war on Israel’s behalf is going to lead people to ugly places.

One of Suzanne’s points in her piece about Heritage is that antisemitism has been part of conservative politics for a long time. But this crop of youthful, intentionally provocative antisemites is novel in some ways. The internet has atomized some of the conservative movement’s culture—support for Israel within the Republican Party has been sustained in large part by voters’ embeddedness in evangelical church life. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing this shift in attitudes among young people as those connections have atrophied.

Schneider: It may be somewhat obvious, but it’s still worth stating explicitly that there are material drivers of antisemitism, of conspiratorial thinking. When the stories elites tell about the world seem not to correspond with lived reality, antisemitism is waiting there. It’s a latent discourse that can be activated as part of a broader skepticism toward elites, toward expertise, toward institutions that are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room. Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right? What’s interesting about Joe Kent’s resignation letter is the way it evades American imperial responsibility for these wars—they’re all the product of Israeli scheming. I think he’s right to oppose this war and others in the region, but he’s a fool to suggest that it is the tricky Jews who are the only drivers of them. At these points of sustained economic and political crisis, it’s not at all surprising that you have people grasping around for all-encompassing frameworks to explain why the world is the way that it is.

So where are the neocons now? Could we take someone like Bill Kristol as representative of how the peer group has evolved?

Nwanevu: Kristol, I think, has long been one of the conservative movement’s most fascinating figures to watch. Again he’s been one of the loudest, most consistently critical voices against Trump. And because Trump represents the antithesis of so many things that he believed in, he now seems, to my eyes, to be negatively polarizing himself toward Democratic positions. And I think a small-l liberal universalism undergirds a lot of that. The same belief system that pushed him to advocate for invading Iraq has driven him to speak out forcefully on immigration, on LGBT rights, and so on. At the same time, he and other conservatives are committed to the idea that being free individuals, in the liberal sense, implies that we ought to have a free-market economy and limited government—though he and the neocons are readier than most on the right to admit that government has a role to play in social provision and making markets work. He’s a centrist.

I do wonder about what will happen when Trump leaves the scene. In the destabilized, upended world of conservative politics that he leaves behind, will we see a resurgence of straight-ahead neoconservatism? Is there a Kristol-like figure who would be able to prevail over the splits in the Republican Party, to eke out a plurality in the Republican primary and then appeal to people who are not Republicans? There are a lot of quote-unquote ordinary voters—suburbanites, people who make a decent amount of money—who have flocked to the Democratic Party over the last ten years because they’re angry about Donald Trump. And I think the idea of a neoconservative appearing before them, jettisoning all the alarming nonsense and talking about keeping taxes low, should scare Democrats. Many polls conducted in the last few years have shown that somebody like a Nikki Haley or a Tim Scott—even though they can’t win a Republican primary—would have done much better in the last couple of elections than Donald Trump did, precisely because among the general public Bill Kristol’s politics are evidently still pretty compelling.

Trump had a very durable, solid minority that turned into a plurality in 2016, even though most people who went to the polls in the Republican presidential primary didn’t vote for him. The establishment was too fractured to successfully oppose him. It’s plausible that amid all of these internal MAGA splits, his leaving the ballot might create an opening for a kind of traditionalist Republican. So I’m not sure we’ve seen the end of Bill Kristol’s kind of politics within the Republican Party, even if Kristol himself is not going to rejoin it anytime soon.

Schneider: I think I’m slightly more skeptical of the prospect that Kristol, or a moderate conservative in general, could return to power, mostly because I think that Kristol’s brand of small-l liberal conservative is a historical anomaly. He and that whole cohort came to power in the post-cold war end-of-history euphoria. The conditions that produced and sustained a Bill Kristol and his mix of democratic individualism, unrestrained markets, and universalism, to my mind, are gone in a fundamental way, wiped away by the 2008 financial crisis and only farther from view after Covid, the ensuing inflationary spell, and the wars in Gaza and Iran.

I take the point that there’s a possibility of splitting the MAGA constituency, but I don’t know if neoliberalism has the base to propel a moderate conservative to an electoral victory. Specifically, I think both the right and the left are trending more market-interventionist; both seek a fusion between economic and political forces that, while not historically unique, is unfamiliar, at least since the end of the cold war period. The classic neoliberal idea of a self-regulating market that operates independently of the state was always a fiction—what’s significant is that fewer people are trying to prop up the lie anymore.

There may be an open question, as well, about whether the institutions that cultivated neoconservatism could still support an entire network of intellectuals around that project.

Nwanevu: I mean, engines of old-guard fiscal and social conservatism like the American Enterprise Institute are still around. They don’t have the same cultural cachet that they once did, but you do also have a few new things emerging—some openly neoliberal communities, the YIMBY crowd, and so on. There’s a lot of money lined up to counter both the leftward shift of the Democratic Party and MAGA populism. And I’m interested in seeing where all of that goes, because if there is going to be a revival of the kinds of currents Kristol came from, it’ll happen there.

Schneider: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s not as though I don’t see a resurgence in this way of thinking per se; it may very well continue to be the Democratic platform. The Democratic establishment is the bulwark trying to keep the walls from falling down at this point, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are speaking to a vanishingly small number of Americans for whom the status quo is working. The irony is that you find New Right figures like Sohrab Ahmari calling for economic policies that are well to the left of what mainstream Democrats are willing to support.

I’m curious about Vance and Rubio as heirs to MAGA. It will be for one of them to fend off—or embrace—Bill Kristol Thought risen from the ashes. Where do these two lead us?

Schneider: Unlike Trump, JD and Marco are charisma black holes—they lack the humor and political skill that has allowed Trump to get away with disappointing his base. You could say they broadly represent the isolationist wing and the neocon wing of the party, but they depend on Trump as the ultimate daddy figure to bind their coalition together and smooth over its contradictions through force of personality. They’re also both sycophants whose convictions appear pretty flimsy; their turnabouts on Trump specifically indicate that the most useful talent they possess is for seeing which way the wind is blowing. Vance’s attempts to hedge in the press, to leak here and there that he thinks war with Iran might not be the best idea, or that we should get it over with quickly, could be a way of circumscribing the damage that it does to the MAGA brand going forward.

But I don’t think either of these men can really hold it together in the way that Trump has—which is not to say the MAGA project crumbles once its figurehead is gone. A lot of my work has looked at the ideological and institutional infrastructure that the right has been building since 2016, which will certainly outlast Trump and potentially, in time, produce a leader who is even more dangerous.

Nwanevu: The other question is, which MAGA will they inherit? Because I think as you demonstrate in your review of Hayek’s Bastards, Suzanne, there’s this bifurcation between Trumpists. There’s the camp of “We believe in free markets, we just think you have to be racist to make them work” on the one hand and of “We’re racist and don’t believe in markets in the first place” on the other. Which of those visions wins out?

As I was suggesting before, I think that there’s a whole host of possibilities about where the Republican Party ends up after this. I suspect Trump is going to be a very damaged figure by 2028, not just as a consequence of whatever is going to happen in Iran but on the economic front as well. He’s already deeply unpopular. The extent to which MAGA will even be a thing you’d want to inherit is, I think, an open question.

In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman behind the “ethereal phantom.” 

Listen on all platforms here.

André Breton was a French poet, writer, and theorist, best known as a pioneering Surrealist and Dadaist. He published Claire de Terre, a collection of poems, in 1923 and the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme)in 1924. Breton also cofounded the literary magazine Littérature in 1919.  

Mark Polizzotti is a writer based in New York. He has translated over seventy books from the French, including Command Performance (NYRB Classics, 2025) by Jean Echenoz and The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets, 2022) by Arthur Rimbaud. Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018), and Why Surrealism Matters (2024). He is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

What do Italian astronomers, cloistered nuns, levitating saints, and the “sexy dreams” of desert church fathers have in common? In the pages of the Review, they’re all the domain of the critic and scholar Erin Maglaque. Maglaque is a student of archival texts, often written by women, that challenge conventional secular and religious interpretations of early modern history and return to it an essential weirdness. In the Review’s March 26, 2025, issue, she turns her attention to the radical Protestant women of seventeenth-century England, whose “sermons and prophecies and pamphlets struck a deep fear in the established church.”

Erin Maglaque teaches history at Durham University in England. Since 2022 she has written for the Review on subjects ranging from Renaissance Italy to early Christianity and the history of miracles. Her criticism has also appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review, and she is the author of two books: Venice’s Intimate Empire (2018), which explores the family lives of Venetian noblemen, and Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which will be published in June.

I wrote to Maglaque this week to ask her about radical Christianity, feminism, secularism, and whether the premodern world has anything to teach us about our uncertain future.

Chandler Fritz: Early in your essay you mention that the writings of radical Protestant women in the seventeenth century are not typically included in modern histories of feminism. Is that simply because these works are so religious?

Erin Maglaque: That’s certainly part of it. Radical women wrote a lot, but as I mention in the essay, most of their published texts were prophecies. Prophecies, spiritual autobiographies, accounts of conversion, and so forth, are not normally understood as feminist. That is, in part, because of our expectation that feminist writing must be substantially political, and we tend to hold the political apart—even inherently opposed to—the spiritual. But that distinction would have made little sense to seventeenth-century women, whose religious radicalism led them to make vehement political critiques of their own society.

The exclusion of radical religious writing from the feminist canon is also an issue of genre. When intellectual historians look for a developing feminist consciousness in premodern writing, they often turn to a genre known as the querelle des femmes: texts by both women and men engaged in a debate about the nature of women, their capabilities, whether it was right to educate them. Writers in this genre (like Christine de Pizan, for example, who is sometimes regarded as one of the first feminist authors) often attacked the misogynistic tropes common in the literature of their own time.

One of my interests is in mapping feminism before the canon existed, in looking outside of the genres, like the querelle des femmes, that have typically been associated with feminist or proto-feminist writing. Does feminism have to cohere into a literary canon or an organized political program to exist? The work of Anne Wentworth, one of these radical women, is an important source for thinking about feminism before modernity. In her autobiographical Vindication (1677), she argued that marriage was blinding; her society valued marriage so highly that her neighbors didn’t bother to try to understand what was happening behind one another’s closed doors. Most afternoons I take my son to the playground after school, and when I talk with other mothers, I sometimes hear an echo of Wentworth’s complaint about the silencing effects of marriage.

In her book The Right to Sex, the feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that feminism asks us: “What would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women?” You do not need the guardrails of genre to ask and answer that question (though it can help, of course). That is the question that Wentworth asked about her own abusive marriage—and marriage as an institution. It is the question I hear asked of marriage in my own conversations with women, and it places us all within a long, genre-defying history of feminist critique.

You’ve previously written about how the Catholic Reformation led to an astonishingly large number of women being locked away in cloisters—as many as one in five at one point in Florence. Yet at roughly the same time, in England, the Protestant Reformation led to women storming churches and dumping blood on altars. Does the oppression of cloistered women in Catholic Europe in any way connect to the liberation of dissenting women in Protestant Europe?

In both Catholic and Protestant Europe, religion could be a source of catastrophic oppression for women as well as offering a way to imagine freedom. When I teach religion and gender in this period, I often encounter my students’ assumption that religion was uniformly bad for women, uniformly disempowering. But when we read the texts of mystics, the trial transcripts of women brought before the Inquisition, accounts of miracle-working women, and lives of female saints, we begin to see the intense imaginative possibilities of belief for early modern Catholic women.

Yes, the religious institutions of Catholic Europe could be oppressive. I think it’s probably still underrecognized just how deeply these institutions—convents, homes for “reformed” sex workers, foundling homes—shaped Catholic society, sometimes (like in Florence in the seventeenth century) effectively disappearing a substantial minority of the city’s women and children behind walls. And yet these same institutions could also be catalysts for energetic feminist analysis. Arcangela Tarabotti, a seventeenth-century Venetian nun who was put into a convent against her will, wrote a critique of coerced enclosure that begins by eviscerating the idea that men are by nature superior to women. “You are formed from earth’s dust,” she spits, “is there anything less solid? On the other hand, consider the strength of a rib—hard bone—from which we women were made.”

I think my students like to believe that religion oppressed women because secularism seems a guarantee of our own freedoms. This makes us feel good about ourselves. It makes us feel modern. But seventeenth-century women like Tarabotti and Wentworth, women both Catholic and Protestant, teach us that religious language and religious imagery can be the sources of powerful feminist writing. And anyway, if secularism were such an ironclad guarantee of equality, how ought we explain the gender-based injustices of our own society? Assumptions about the intrinsically “backward” character of premodern religion not only leave the women of the past opaque to us but make the oppressions of our own time harder to see, too.

In an essay for our April 4, 2024, issue, you wrote about how scholars of the early modern world must contend with deeply strange things, like flying saints and levitating nuns, without getting stuck between “the dogmas of unconditional faith and unconditional secularism.” How can a scholar embrace those strange things without looking silly?

Historians of the premodern world must reckon with strange things all the time; it’s one of the delights of the job. For a long time, influenced by anthropologists, historians of premodern Europe tried to make these strange things make perfect sense. We tried to decipher the early modern past as if it were an alien planet; we tried to piece together the symbolism of early modern religious rituals; we tried to understand the social functions of various odd aspects of early modern popular culture. In short, we tried to smooth early modern belief into something rational. But this is not always satisfying, because people are not always rational—not then, and not now.

Some historians of a more conservative bent have reacted strongly against those earlier, broadly accepted cultural approaches. These scholars have argued that all those odd things—levitation, bilocation, miracles of all kinds, witchcraft—really did happen. To my mind that is bad history, not least because it puts us out of a job. If we accept that saints really did fly in the seventeenth century, what would be left to explain? I suppose the early modern past would become the intellectual terrain of gravitational physicists rather than historians.

Influenced by feminist historians (who were themselves absorbing insights from psychoanalytic theory), I like to emphasize the irrational and the fantastical in early modern culture and religion, without trying to explain everything away as having a functional meaning. We don’t need to believe that early modern people flew. But neither must we rationalize flight, understand flight as fulfilling some social need. The fantasy of flight was important to early modern men and women—holy people flew, as did witches and demons, and even buildings flew, like the Holy House of Loreto—so it might be more useful to think about the texture of that fantasy and what it suggests about the interior lives of the people who believed it.

As the historian Lyndal Roper writes in her book Witchcraze, “The very idea of flight implies a transformation of perspective”; for accused witches, “to imagine oneself flying requires the ability to dissociate oneself, and to see the world from the outside.” That act of imagination—that force of creative will, directed upon one’s own inner vision—is far more interesting to me than either a purely functionalist understanding of flight or a purely credulous one.

Artificial intelligence seems to be reacquainting much of the modern world with a sense of the unknown, perhaps even the unknowable. People’s interactions with these machines can resemble prayers to an omniscient oracle or god, and even computer scientists now talk seriously about things like “hallucinations.” Do you think early modern thinkers have anything to teach us about living in a world where mysticism and science comingle?

I think we ought to guard against an impulse to mystify artificial intelligence. I learned a lot from James Gleick’s piece in this paper (“Bad Readers”), in which he explains how artificial intelligence models “string together words based on comprehensive statistics on how people have previously strung together words”: there is no miracle here, only the “uncanny” appearance of one. AI is not an oracle and not a god, and to describe its effects in terms of either the human or the divine—hallucinations, for example—is imprecise. It is true that the textureless authority of AI-generated writing makes us feel as if we are in the presence of an omniscient being. But we lose something important about being human if AI becomes our primary contact with the unknown, our primary experience of the inexplicable.

And what does that misplaced reverence say about us, about our capacity to contend with real mystery? AI is predictable by its design; that is how large language models work, through probability. Premodern mysticism was not concerned with the predictable or the probable, but with the opposite: with moments of irruption, of disabling wonder. Why do we want our gods to be so bland, our oracles so anemic? Do we get the gods we deserve?

Your next book is largely about premodern European women’s relationships with their bodies. Given the predominance of religious writing among women at that time, was it hard to find women writing about their bodies? Or do these two subjects—the spiritual and the corporeal—often come together?

In early modernity, the spiritual was corporeal, the corporeal sacralized. Think of the central miracle of premodern Catholicism: transubstantiation, the body of Christ consumed in communion. Even Martin Luther rejected the idea that the Eucharist bread was only a symbol, an abstraction of Christ’s body. “Who in the world ever read in the Scriptures that body means sign of the body?” he wrote, in his typically understated style. When women came to write spiritual texts—autobiographies, meditations, letters—their own bodies provided an imagery to describe the contours of their belief. Some of my favorite examples of this kind of writing come from the late-medieval nuns who entered into highly eroticized mystical union with Christ.

Last year I wrote about some of their (quite explicit!) imageries of the body in a piece for the Review on sex and Christianity. Take the writings of the Belgian mystic Ida of Nivelles: Christ came to her with his lips smeared in thick white liquid that he dripped into her open mouth, sharing with her “this tastiest of honeycombs.” There was no contradiction for these women in using sacred imagery to dramatize erotic love, or Scripture to sanctify desire. On the contrary: religious belief provided an incredibly rich, provocative, powerful language to describe the surrender and union common to both faith and sex.

In my book, I’m especially interested in the desires of the more ordinary women of the early modern past who did not write, whose presence comes down to us only in scraps and fragments. These women, too, blended sacred imagery with the erotic. Take Juana Dientes, who came before the Inquisition in Castile in 1499 for conducting love magic. She recited her spell to the inquisitors:

You will go to Mount Sinai
And bring me nine staffs of love.
You will drive them into the head of the Holy Cross,
And from the head to the heart,
And from the heart to the kidney,
And to the spleen,
And all along the spine,
And the three hundred joints
Of his body:
So that he can neither eat nor drink
Until he comes to love me well,
And to take pleasure in me.

Dientes was a peasant, substantially illiterate and uneducated. But she described her love magic vividly: how she undressed, unbound her hair, and, in her incantation, mapped her lover’s body using the imagery of crucifixion. She would drive staffs of love into all of the organs and joints of his body. Magically compelling another, undoing his will, was contrary to the doctrine of free will held by the Church, so Dientes needed to be corrected by the inquisitors. But I think she has her own (sure, a little heretical) theology of the body, of erotic love and desire and surrender. Most of all, I like that she didn’t stop at his heart—she wanted his spleen too.

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Some of his books include The Voidoid (1996), Artifact (1990), Hot and Cold (2001), Go Now (1996), I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and What Just Happened (2023).

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Hell discussing his novels, poetry, and creative process. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books; in addition to twenty print issues a year, a subscription provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

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

Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, which premiered in Copenhagen this past fall, is an interpretation of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a piece the composer left unfinished at the time of his death in 1750. As Marina Harss writes in our March 12, 2026, issue, the ballet shares the composition’s disrupted quality: “In Copenhagen Ratmansky was returning to a project that had been painfully interrupted when Russia invaded Ukraine.” So Harss traveled to Denmark, not only for the performance but also to spend time with Ratmansky and the dancers as they rehearsed before opening night.

Harss has a particular affinity for Ratmansky’s work and for Ratmansky—she is his biographer. The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet was published in 2023. As a critic, she writes on dance regularly and opera occasionally for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Hudson Review, among other publications. She has also translated books from the Italian and French, including The Mirador, Élisabeth Gille’s memoir of her mother, Irène Némirovsky; and Poem Strip, a graphic novel by Dino Buzzati.

I emailed Harss recently to ask her about—what else—the ballet.

Lauren Kane: Do, or did, you ever practice dance? If not, would you ever want to? How did you become interested in dance as a critic?

Marina Harss: Like so many kids I studied ballet, along with various other things, for a brief time. I was all wrong for it: inflexible, not turned out, not particularly coordinated. But I was musical and knew a little bit about music because my parents cared about music, so I liked to pipe up with ideas for pieces to use in our recitals. Then I switched to piano, which I studied pretty seriously through college. My way into dance was through music, particularly the musicality of George Balanchine’s choreography and that of other dance styles like flamenco, where the music and the movement are almost indistinguishable.

I find that the meeting of movement and music stimulates my brain in a way nothing else does. It makes me analyze and think; it fills me with impressions and opinions, which is the starting point for wanting to become a dance critic. Also, reading the criticism of Joan Acocella and Arlene Croce. So much insight, so much intelligence. Dance was a question of life and death for them.

In addition to being a critic, you are also a translator. Are there any similarities in those disciplines? If not, what are the major ways they are different to you as literary arts?

I am more of a former translator—I haven’t really done a translation since Cristina de Stefano’s biography of the journalist Oriana Fallaci. I think my favorite translation project was the stories of Pasolini. But I do think there is a through line, as there is a through line to my musical background. Writing about dance is, for me, a kind of translation, from one language—the language of choreography and of its relation to ideas and to music—to another, the language of words and literature and journalism. I take the job of transmitting dance’s inner story very seriously.

How did you come to Alexei Ratmansky as a subject? What was the most challenging thing about writing his biography?

When Ratmansky was the director of the Bolshoi Ballet in the early 2000s, the company toured to New York with his 2003 ballet The Bright Stream, a comic work set on a collective farm in Russia in the 1930s with a score by Shostakovich. Can you imagine? And it was a total revelation. Funny, vivid, and extraordinarily sophisticated and musical. It changed what I thought ballet could be and could do. Silly and brilliant. I immediately started following Ratmansky’s work very closely.

In 2006 he started making ballets for American companies. The ballets were all very different from one another, but they all had that same power and immediacy, as well as an interesting relation to storytelling and history. Some were sort of abstract, but there was always a hint of character and situation. Then I interviewed him and found that he was both enigmatic and straightforward—a very intriguing combination. At some point I realized he was, to my eye, the most interesting ballet choreographer working today. And, as Joan Acocella has said about the urge to write a book, the desire to understand his work created a feeling of urgency in me—I felt I had to write a book about him in order to get to the bottom of who he is as an artist. The hardest thing about the process, and the most interesting, was how far-flung his career has been, with chapters in Kyiv, Moscow, Winnipeg, Copenhagen, New York City, and elsewhere. There were a lot of strands to follow and tie together.

What is the most difficult thing about being a biographer?

Finding the right kind of relationship with the person you’re writing about. It’s a funny, odd sort of relationship. You are not exactly friends, and yet you know more about the person than you do about most of the people you are close to. There is an artistic sympathy that clearly led you to that subject. You meet the most important people in their life. You ask them thousands of questions, and they open up to you. You spend hundreds of hours talking to that person about the subject that matters most to them—their work. You try to understand whatever they don’t fully understand. You have to pry, and at the same time there is a kind of reticence, a mutual respect that needs to be observed and conserved. Also, you have to accept that no one is truly knowable. You can probe and explore and learn, but every person is a mystery.

Dance criticism, like all criticism today, has lately been mourned for being in a state of decline or crisis. But what about dance itself? What is the future of the form? What is the state of dance today?

I’ve had impeccable timing! I started writing about dance just as professional dance criticism started to disappear. The situation is truly dismal, though there are wonderful publications, like The New York Review, that still care about criticism and the arts. In one sense dance is thriving. Not economically—the economics of dance have always been bad, and dancers are chronically taken advantage of. Even the old model of a company led by a choreographer, like Merce Cunningham or Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, is in peril; it’s too expensive to keep a permanent ensemble going. But there are still incredible dancers out there, and a dizzying variety of styles and techniques and choreographers. In another sense, nothing has changed: truly great and transformative choreographers are vanishingly rare.

Are there any notable performances you’ve seen lately or would recommend? Ballets you’d love to see staged but haven’t had the chance?

Ratmansky’s The Art of the Fugue, the subject of this piece, is one of the most moving and beautiful ballets I’ve ever seen. It is so spartan in a way, devoid of story or melodiousness. It’s uncompromising. That’s what makes it so thrilling. It was remarkable to feel the reaction of the audience in Copenhagen. Rapt attention, followed by a kind of collective gathering of breath, followed by long ovations. I heard people went back to see it multiple times over the course of the next several weeks. They were awestruck.

Besides that, I try not to miss any debut by Mira Nadon, a young principal at New York City Ballet who dances with a freedom and breadth that takes my breath away and makes me think she may be the freest woman alive. It’s deeply exciting. She infuses new life into ballets you’ve seen countless times. Just recently in Serenade, Balanchine’s great masterpiece, which is still in the repertory at New York City Ballet, she made a moment register in a way I had never noticed before. It is a really simple moment, toward the end of the ballet, where she falls to her knees in front of a fellow dancer, looking into her eyes as if imploring her for some comfort and direction. Every dancer in that role does it, but with Nadon the moment became so dramatic, while remaining so natural, so utterly unaffected, that time almost stopped. It lifted the whole ballet.

A ballet I’d really like to see is Ratmansky’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland, premiering in Hamburg this June.

What is your favorite thing about the ballet?

I’m struck by ballet’s ability to create something extraordinarily beautiful out of something so difficult and so taxing on the brain and body. The way dance illuminates musical texture and structure, adding layers of meaning and humanity. The fact that it is an art with a strong history, a history that is constantly present in the steps and technique, but which is also in constant evolution. The universality of ballet technique—these steps that have been around for centuries, repeated again and again by generation upon generation of dancers. And the fact that there are still “schools” of ballet associated with different national companies and the choreographers who have worked there. I love the specificity of that, and the care that is shown in preserving the differences.

The Danish romanticism of August Bournonville, a nineteenth-century choreographer from Denmark, is nothing like the nineteenth-century classicism of Marius Petipa, the Frenchman who worked in St. Petersburg for decades and made canonical works like Swan Lake and La Bayadère. And Frederick Ashton’s approach to ballet in the twentieth century is in many ways the opposite of that of his contemporary George Balanchine. All are great and fascinating in different ways. I love exploring and understanding those differences and trying to trace where they come from. Upbringing? Ashton was a child of the British middle class; Balanchine was practically abandoned at ballet school as a child and had to suffer his way through the Bolshevik Revolution and the years after, half starved. National character, artistic influences, temperament, architecture, culture, history—all this and more leave their marks on choreographic style. Balanchine wouldn’t have made the ballets he made if he hadn’t landed in New York. There is a direct line between the Chrysler Building and a ballet like Agon.

One of the most maddening problems of our era is the glut of information and what to do with it. But while web scraping and data mining have only become big business in the last twenty years—indeed Claude Shannon first theorized the concept of “information theory” only about eighty years ago—biologists and gentlemen scientists have been laboring to organize Earth’s teeming masses of living things for centuries. In the Review’s February 26 issue, Ian Tattersall reviews Jason Roberts’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, a dual biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, two eighteenth-century naturalists who dedicated themselves to the quest to classifying and cataloging the “riotous diversity” of all life. As Tattersall drily observes, “The world clearly contains vastly more species of living organisms than Noah could ever have fit into his ark.”

Tattersall is a paleoanthropologist and a curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History. He has written prolifically on human evolution, the history of cognition, and lemurs for both academic and general audiences, in outlets ranging from Science and the Journal of Anthropological Sciences to Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. For the Review he has written about the development of symbolic thought and humanity’s first linguistic ancestors. (These could be heated topics: “As early as 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris specifically banned discussion of the origin of language as being altogether too disruptive for the contemplative atmosphere of a learned association.”) He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: And Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution (2015) and, most recently, Understanding Human Evolution (2022).

I wrote to Tattersall last week to ask about other lost titans of science, lessons from lemurs, and the future of human history.

Anika Banister: Are there any seemingly lost figures of science whom you would like to champion, as Roberts has rehabilitated the fallow reputation of Buffon? (Or is there anyone you wish would be lost to time?)

Ian Tattersall: Most scientists labor and vanish in obscurity despite making valuable contributions to the scientific enterprise, so there are many figures to choose from here. But in the arena of evolutionary biology there are two in particular who, while reviled or ignored in their own day, laid the basic groundwork for the emergence of the Darwin–Wallace theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century. One is the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), who makes a cameo in Roberts’s book. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Lamarck concluded that some of the lineages of fossil mollusks he identified in the rocks of the Paris Basin had not simply remained as the Creator had made them but instead showed steady change over time. Lamarck was the first Western scientist to seriously question the fixity of species, an essential first step toward the notion of Darwinian evolution. Yet he has by and large failed to receive proper recognition for this fundamental insight. Instead, posterity has pilloried him for his proposed agent of change: the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” whereby parents are supposed to pass along to their offspring physical novelties they have acquired during their lifetimes. The most famous thought experiment in this area envisions successive generations of giraffes elongating their necks through prolonged striving to browse ever higher in the trees. This view was actually uncontroversial in Lamarck’s day, and it has in a sense been resuscitated in highly attenuated form by the rise of epigenetics, which studies how small-scale DNA structural modifications due to environmental influence can turn genes on and off. But it is still no compliment to be called a Lamarckian.

Despite his undeservedly poor reputation, Lamarck’s name remains familiar today. The second figure I’d like to mention, the Italian geologist Giovanni Battista Brocchi (1772–1826), richly deserves to be rescued from almost total obscurity. When Brocchi studied fossil shells from the Apennine Mountains (formerly the floor of a shallow sea) he, too, observed faunal change. But as early as 1814 he recognized that the individual species in his collection had remained more or less stable in form even as the overall fauna changed over time, and he speculated that those species not only had distinct origins and life spans and extinctions, but had been capable of giving rise to distinctive descendants.

It is not clear whether Charles Darwin knew of Brocchi’s work, though he might well have. But, taken together, Lamarck’s ideas of gradual change and Brocchi’s splitting of lineages provided the necessary ingredients for what would much later become the theory of evolution, which has at its center the notion that, however much they may have diversified with the passage of the eons, all living things are united by descent.

As for the rogues one wishes would go away, for a paleoanthropologist there is one outstanding choice. Charles Dawson (1864–1916) was a prolific forger of antiquities who (with or without assistance) was responsible for “Piltdown Man,” a supposedly ancient human fossil from southern England that actually combined parts of a modern human cranium with a broken ape jaw. Some paleoanthropologists immediately denounced this bizarre anomaly, and virtually everyone had fenced it off within two decades of its announcement in 1912. But Piltdown Man nonetheless hung around until it was definitively disproved in 1953; even now it refuses to be forgotten. Most damagingly, this long scientifically dismissed, fraudulent chimera is still regularly pounced on by creationists as “proof” of paleoanthropological disingenuousness.

“Cognitive dissonance is baked into the human condition,” you write, apropos Linnaeus’s belief that epilepsy is caused by washing one’s hair. What do you think is the most pernicious absurdity in science now, and what is the best remediation we can hope for?

As a matter of sheer consequence, the clear winner in the pernicious absurdity stakes is climate-change denial. Several decades have passed since scientists sounded the first warning bells, and the past few years have come with record-breaking droughts, wildfires, extreme weather events, ice-sheet loss, melting permafrost, sea-level rises with coastal flooding, and so much more. We know well which human activities lie behind these predictable and disastrous phenomena that signal a trajectory toward an uninhabitable planet. Yet an alarming number of people appear to believe that if we ignore these signs they will go away or prove to be “normal” climatic fluctuations, or even that they are just illusions. Worryingly, those attitudes also seem to reflect a more general distrust of the science that underpins our modern way of life. As for the future, attitudes toward climate change (and science) seem to be becoming badges of political identity. Witness our government’s recent retraction of the “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases and their consequences put public health and welfare at risk. This supremely irresponsible measure does not give one much hope for remediation in any effective time frame.

In The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, you wrote that “if you want to know how your own ancestors lived and functioned early in the Age of Mammals, it is to lemurs you have to turn.” What lessons from your early field work with lemurs do you most want to impart to the lemur-illiterate?

Lemurs are unique to the island of Madagascar, where I initially went to study fossils of recently extinct species. But once there I took the opportunity to observe the surviving lemurs in their natural habitats—and it was love at first sight. Those primates are incredibly charismatic, and I immediately wanted to know more about them at a time when little was known. I would happily still be a lemurologist today, but for reasons beyond my control this didn’t work out, and I found myself once again studying human evolution.

But I returned to paleoanthropology with an entirely altered perspective. The existence of only one human species in the world today has often tempted paleoanthropologists to think (wrongly) that this is the natural order of things, and that their job is therefore to project that one species back into the past in as straight a line as possible. There is, in contrast, a profusion of lemurs: there are five entire families of them, and by one rather extreme count well north of a hundred species. Studying them made me keenly conscious of just how much variety is out there in the living world; fortunately, this new awareness transferred beautifully to my research on what has turned out to be a notably diverse human fossil record. Far from being a story of continuous directed improvement, human evolution has involved a lot of trial and error as multiple hominin species stepped on and off the evolutionary stage over the past seven million years.

In your book The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human, you write about the inertia of scientific thought: “What one is first taught on a subject tends to have much more influence than whatever one hears subsequently about the same topic.” Are there any ideas from early in your career that proved durable? Or any that you reluctantly had to change?

Teaching students with varied educational backgrounds showed me how difficult it often is to question ideas learned early on. Fortunately, my own quite privileged experience was a little different. As an undergraduate, and then again as a graduate student, I was drilled in the orthodoxies of the New Evolutionary Synthesis, the dominant perspective on evolutionary process during the mid-twentieth century. The Synthesis saw evolution as steady change over time, under the guiding hand of natural selection. Time and change were more or less synonymous, and evolution was slow, gradual, and continuous as, generation by generation, better-adapted individuals out-reproduced the less well endowed. In its reductionist simplicity this idea of natural selection made for a seductive story; a century earlier its “why didn’t I think of that?” appeal had hugely helped Darwin sell his core idea of evolution as “descent with modification.”

But my intellectual environment radically changed when I moved to the American Museum of Natural History, where a revolution in evolutionary biology was underway as my new colleagues Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (the latter of whom had recently departed for Harvard) argued that what was observed in the fossil record didn’t fit the pattern of slow change predicted by the Synthesis. Rather, the fossils seemed to be indicating that species (as Brocchi had realized) tend to linger in the fossil record basically unchanged, until they are abruptly replaced by others. Non-change seemed to be the order of the day, interrupted by short bursts of innovation marked by the appearance of new species.

That was not what I had been primed to perceive, but I was rapidly convinced of the general application of the new model when Niles and I tackled the human fossil record and found that it, too, lacked any strong signal of slow, steady change. What’s more, I eventually came to understand that natural selection, while a mathematical certainty in any population in which more individuals are born than survive to reproduce, most commonly acts as an agent of stability rather than of change. It mainly keeps entire populations fit for their environments by trimming off their most unsuitable variants.

So yes, I have had the experience of doing an intellectual U-turn. But happily that turn was made neither reluctantly nor with particular difficulty, because I made it in a stimulating new intellectual environment and by interacting with some extraordinary people. I was really lucky.

You open your essay with the dictum, “We human beings are brilliant at ignoring uncomfortable truths.” Are there any uncomfortable truths emerging today in the field of paleoanthropology (or anthropology) that are facing or may face resistance?

We Homo sapiens are a pretty egotistical bunch, and accordingly we like to think of ourselves as the end product of a selective process that has exquisitely perfected us over the eons. That’s why we lap up pop-evolutionary explanations of why we cheat on our spouses or crave high-calorie fats. It’s also why many paleoanthropologists believe that such complex human features as our unique cognitive style must have deep roots in time. In the end, though, I have had to conclude that the language and symbolic thought that give us human beings such a sense of superiority over the rest of nature were both recently and adventitiously acquired, in an event that was far too sudden to have been driven by slow natural selection. We are uncomfortably accidental!

Linnaeus and Buffon were working with considerably fewer tools than we have today. How have new approaches changed the work of taxonomists? Is there a future in which morphology becomes obsolete in mapping evolutionary history?

No question, taxonomy today is vastly different from what it was in the eighteenth century. But I fervently hope—and expect—that morphology will always have a place in it. The main problems taxonomists face today are procedural ones, relating to how we can best integrate all the many different kinds of information that we can now collect in addition to morphology. One can see a future (and hopefully disciplined) use for AI in all of this. But we will nonetheless still be asking the same basic question that we have asked from the very beginning: How, exactly, is nature organized?

Vivian Gornick has been writing essays, memoir, and criticism for sixty years, beginning in 1965 when the Village Voice published her response to a controversial speech made by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) at a gathering at the Village Vanguard. The subject of the gathering was “Art and Politics,” and in many ways Gornick has been addressing that same duality in her writing ever since: the art of the novel and the politics of feminism, the art of the self and the politics of the family, the art of love and the politics of hope. She has often returned to the theme of family relationships, including a book of literary criticism, The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and a work of social history, The Romance of American Communism (1977); Fierce Attachments (1987), perhaps her best-known work, is a memoir about being raised in the Bronx by a working-class immigrant mother of Russian Jewish extraction. Her writing for the Review has likewise touched on personal relationships in literature and life, including friends, classmates, husbands, lovers, and fathers in the work of Alfred Hayes, Tess Slesinger, Marina Jarre, Albert Camus, and more.

In the February 26, 2026, issue of the Review, Gornick turns her attention to the relationship between a mother and a daughter in Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, which chronicles Roy’s childhood as the daughter of a well-known political activist in India. I emailed with Gornick to ask her about the challenges of the memoir form, the difficulty of writing about one’s parents, and the relationship between personal and political lives.

Chandler Fritz: You write that “the memoir is rather like a novel in that it depends on dramatized storytelling for its success,” yet you close by noting that even excellent novelists find that “the gift for memoir remains elusive.” What accounts for this discrepancy? Is one’s personal reality somehow resistant to the novelist’s usual tools of dramatization?

Vivian Gornick: Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.

Two of the memoirs you cite as exemplars of the genre—Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself—dramatize the filial relationship. To this list should be added, of course, Fierce Attachments. What risks must a memoirist take to turn a parent into a strong literary character?

Every writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives, so there will be friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are going to feel like they’ve been pushed under the bus. There’s no way out of this one. In my own case, I often trembled at what I was doing, writing Fierce Attachments, but then I’d remind myself that my motives were honest, I wasn’t setting out to trash Mama, I just wanted to tell hard truths. I had to believe that that would carry us through. And it did.

Unlike Mary Roy, your mother was still alive when your memoir about her was published. How do you think that affected your task? How do you imagine that distinguished your work from Arundhati Roy’s?

As you say, I was writing this book while Mama was still alive; that alone means I trusted my motives in taking possession of a piece of material I genuinely considered my own. After all, the book wasn’t about Mama, it was about me coming to maturity. Roy’s book, however, is meant to be about her mother; in fact it is mainly about how mean and self-absorbed that mother was. That alone would have made Roy too anxious to write it while she was alive.

In your review you note that Roy’s home state of Kerala “remains as suffocating for [her] today as it was in her childhood.” When you were writing Fierce Attachments, did you revisit the Bronx tenements where you were raised?

In its own way, the Bronx of my childhood was as oppressive to me as Roy’s Kerala was to her—and has remained so. I actually did make a number of trips back to the old neighborhood while I was writing the book, and though there had been many changes, it mainly felt the same: stifling. In this sense, though, usefully evocative.

But the truth of it is the outer boroughs of New York all feel that way to me. When I leave Manhattan it’s always as though I’m going to some depressing neighborhood in a small town…

You’ve called yourself an “urban provincial” before.

By “urban provincial” I simply mean that I am urban—not urbane. Living in one of the most important cities in the world has not made me worldly. I do not feel at home—that is, possessed of a genuine sense of well-being—anywhere except in New York City. That’s rather provincial, wouldn’t you say?

Throughout your career, you’ve written not just about the ideas of radical groups but about the spaces in which people shared their ideas: on walks, at lunches, in campus alcoves and “consciousness raising” groups. What do we lose when radical thinking becomes disseminated across digital networks as opposed to concentrated in a time and place?

I understand the stunning achievement of the digital world, I really do. But the domination of “virtual reality,” especially since the Covid crisis, is an unmitigated disaster. Working at home, shopping online, doing therapy online (!!!), for me this is all a cause for despair. The promise that the digital takeover was going to “connect” us all to one another—what a bad joke that has turned out to be. Many more people feel a thousand times more isolated than ever before with only their iPhones for company…. No, no! Bring back life on the ground! Sometimes I’m glad that I’m as old as I am.

Since the Trump administration began its strategy of indefinitely detaining people it has targeted for deportation, federal judges across the country and ideological spectrum have been rejecting their efforts, ordering detainees to be released or given bond hearings in more than 1,600 cases. Yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly defied or ignored the judiciary, and in recent weeks dozens of judges have warned that the government has, in the words of District Judge Mike Davis, “stretch[ed] the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”

This week I wrote to David Cole to ask him what courts, Congress, and the people can do to stop an executive branch meting out violence with impunity. Since Trump’s second election, Cole—a former national legal director of the ACLU who has been writing about the law for the Review since 2004—has written thirteen articles for us about the growing threat the administration presents to democracy, from the Supreme Court’s commitment to overturning precedent in favor of conservative politics to the unlawful killings of sailors alleged to be smuggling drugs.

Daniel Drake: The last time we spoke, in March 2025, you said, apropos the Trump administration’s successful effort to deport dozens of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a restraining order from District Court Judge James Boasberg, “Were they to openly defy a court order and claim the authority to do so, that would cross a constitutional redline. No president has ever crossed that line, including Trump himself in his first term.… That hasn’t happened yet. But the administration’s actions in this case are about as close to defying a court order as you can get short of actually doing so.” In the intervening year, as the crackdown on immigrants and supposed immigrants has accelerated, the executive branch has continued to defy judicial rulings ordering them to release detainees or not move detainees out of state. Would you say that we have crossed that redline? If not, is the distinction here that Trump continues, for now, anyway, to defy the court orders without claiming he has the right to do so? In that case, what kind of remedies exist to compel the executive branch and its shock troops to, for example, obtain judicial warrants before invading peoples’ homes?

David Cole: The sheer number of judges who have called the administration to task for violating their orders is astounding. I have practiced constitutional law for more than forty years, and I have never seen anything even close to the defiance and bad-faith obstruction of court orders this administration has shown. Some of the violations could be the result of miscommunications, short-staffing, and the like, and neither Trump nor his attorneys have, as far as I know, asserted that they have the authority under law to disobey court orders. But they are repeat offenders many times over, and actions speak louder than words.

The overall tenor of the administration’s responses to court orders, especially in immigration cases, appears to reflect a message from the top that outright obstruction of court orders will be not just tolerated but welcomed. That is obviously not how the system is supposed to work. Government officials have a responsibility to do justice, and to understand that with power comes responsibility. That ethic seems in remarkably short supply in this administration.

What options do we have? Judges can hold government officials in contempt for their actions. They can impose fines and even imprisonment to coerce parties to follow court orders. They can hold hearings, compel government officials to attend, and require that they answer direct questions on the record. In extreme cases they can recommend prosecution for defiance of court orders—though the decision to prosecute would be up to United States attorneys, who Trump has ensured are loyalists. So I wouldn’t hold my breath for a prosecution.

That means true accountability lies with the American people. Do we sit by and accept such behavior? Or do we take to the streets (and eventually the polls) to express our disapproval of what the government is doing in our name? If we do the latter, as the brave people of Minneapolis did, it can have tangible results. Trump was forced by the people, the political leaders, and the judges in Minneapolis to retreat. That’s an important form of accountability that we should never underestimate.

On the other hand, while Judge Boasberg’s initial ruling was ignored, the essential principle in that case—that the Alien Enemies Act could not be used to expel foreign nationals without due process—has, since that time, continued to apply. The Trump administration has not attempted to use that rationale again, and their efforts to get Judge Boasberg impeached or cited for misconduct have failed. The courts seem, to some extent, to be holding up against the executive’s assault. Are there other hopeful signs of the judicial branch’s ability to restrain this drive to authoritarianism?

By and large, the federal courts have been the principal institutional check on abuse by this administration. As the Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former high-level Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, has argued, the courts have blocked many of Trump’s initiatives. This includes the Supreme Court, which, in addition to the order you note about the Alien Enemies Act deportations, required Trump to facilitate the return of an El Salvadoran man who had been wrongly deported, blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to states where governors have objected, such as Minnesota, California, and Oregon; and stopped him, for now, from firing a Democratic appointee to the Federal Reserve, Lisa Cook. By the end of the current term it will issue rulings on his imposition of worldwide tariffs and his attempt to deny birthright citizenship to children of certain foreign nationals born here—and may well rule against him on both initiatives.

The Court’s “shadow docket” rulings, on requests for emergency relief while cases are making their way through the courts, have been troubling. And the Court will almost certainly give Trump more unchecked power to fire heads of agencies that Congress sought to make independent. So the jury is out on how the Supreme Court will respond to Trump. But one thing is certain: over the past year, the courts have played an essential part by reining in the executive. Progressives unhappy with the Supreme Court have long castigated the judiciary as ineffectual, political, or worse. But where would we be now without them?

In a recent interview, your Georgetown colleague Steve Vladeck made the point that in the clash between the executive and judicial branches, the crisis is due in large part to the absence of the legislative branch—what Vladeck calls the “indolent Congress.” While Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate and House, this indolence seems likely to continue, but within the bounds of the Constitution, what kind of powers can the minority party exercise in Congress to help put a check on the president?

Sadly, there’s not much that the minority party in Congress can do. In our system of majoritarian rule, at the moment the Republicans exercise the power of initiative in both houses of Congress. Democrats can ask hard questions in hearings called by Republicans, as Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and his colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee did this week in a remarkably combative hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi. But the Republicans control what hearings are held on what subjects, what bills come to a vote, what subpoenas are issued, what investigations are conducted. Democrats’ only power is to withhold votes, as they have done with respect to the budget, where they have sufficient support from a handful of Republicans. But for the Democrats—and Congress—to exercise any meaningful checking function, we’ll have to wait for the midterms.

What do you make of Trump’s suggestions that the midterm elections should be nationalized? How much of a realistic threat does this present?

I don’t think we can discount that threat. Trump has already shown how far he is willing to go in obstructing elections that he loses. At the moment, it seems the Republicans are likely to lose the midterms in a big way. That will be Americans’ first formal opportunity to register their assessment of the job Trump has been doing. His approval ratings are low—currently hovering around 40 percent—and the Republican share of the vote has dropped precipitately in the handful of elections that have occurred since he took office. Those signs suggest that, if the midterms were held today, the Democrats could win in a landslide, even though partisan gerrymandering has rigged many results.

Trump of course knows that. So we cannot ignore the risk that he will try to obstruct the results by asserting baseless claims of election fraud and seeking to take control of the ballot counting. At the same time, that has never happened in this country; the Constitution assigns that work to the states. Such a transparent effort to subvert democracy would not play well. We are, after all, a democracy, not an autocracy. Voting matters; it’s what legitimates government authority. But at that point it will be on all of us as Americans to defend our democracy.

In your most recent essay for the Review, “Trump’s War,” writing about Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, you say that “It was an illegal operation, actually. Illegal on so many fronts that it can be challenging to keep them straight.” Given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States that a president enjoys absolute immunity for any acts conducted in his capacity as president, what kind of justice or recourse can even exist for an executive who seems to violate so many laws? That is, short of an unlikely Supreme Court ruling overturning Trump v. US, what can be done to hold this administration accountable when they’re out of office?

Well, the first thing we need to do is make sure they are sent out of office, both in the midterms and in 2028. A decisive vote to reject the administration’s efforts to destroy the climate, the rule of law, and indeed the livelihoods—and lives—of many people will be the most important form of accountability we can deliver. If the people resoundingly reject Trump 2.0, the question will be less how we hold the bad guys accountable than how we build back the norms and legal limits necessary to stop this from ever happening again.

Criminal accountability for Trump himself remains possible, even under the Supreme Court’s misguided immunity decision. It left open prosecution of the president for nonofficial actions, such as the rampant corruption that Trump has invited into the White House. And even many official acts can still be the subject of prosecution; the only absolute immunity the Court provided was for exercises of unilateral executive authority over which Congress has no say whatsoever. So Trump is not free and clear by any means. Impeachment also remains an option, though it will require at least a significant subset of Republicans Senators to vote their conscience rather than putting fealty to Trump and the MAGA movement over what’s best for the country.

And yet the most important thing to remember is that accountability is in our hands as “we the people.” We can render judgment that this method of governing is an object lesson in how not to run a responsible, caring, and humane democracy—but only if we get engaged now and stay engaged until he leaves office. We can all take a lesson from the people of Minneapolis.

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City.

Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite. For the Review, as well as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Yorker, he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama’s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include “Master Class,” about his experience as her student, and “On Elizabeth Hardwick,” an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010) and The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017), for which he wrote the introduction.

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was a writer and Review contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded The New York Review of Books alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as well as Hardwick’s then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. Essays by Hardwick discussed in this episode include “On Sylvia Plath” (published in the August 12, 1971, issue), and “Working Girls: The Brontës” (May 4, 1972). Her collected criticism, published in, among many other magazines, The New York Review, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, has been collected by the NYRB Classics in several volumes, and she also wrote three novels, including Sleepless Nights (1979), a genre-defying book that blends fiction and memoir that was reissued by NYRB in 2001, as well as a clutch of short stories, collected in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010).

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Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her nearly fifty-year career writing about America—North and South, from New York to Argentina. From her earliest essay in the Review, in 1994, about Mario Vargas Llosa’s election campaign memoir, to her most recent, in our February 12 issue, about the Trump administration’s coup in Venezuela, she has focused in particular on the political upheavals that have convulsed the Americas since World War II. She was one of two reporters to break the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the US-backed Salvadoran army; she has covered the collapse of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Mexican security state in the case of the Ayotzinapa Forty-Three; she has profiled charismatic, shadowy figures from the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos to Pablo Escobar.

And yet reporting was not Guillermoprieto’s first career; for more than a decade she was a dancer in New York City, where she trained with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, before moving to Havana to teach, an experience she wrote about in Dancing with Cuba (2004), one of her five books in English. In her criticism—covering books, films, food, and exercise, in addition to Latin American politics—she often writes as a memoirist, offering, as well as a critical eye on the text at hand, her experience of eating tamales, meeting Vargas Llosa, or doing Pilates. Her most recent collection, The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, came out last year.

I emailed Guillermoprieto at her home in Mexico City last week to ask about longing for the past and her hopes for the future.

Nawal Arjini: You’ve been a reporter for many decades now, but as a young woman you were a dancer working with the emergent avant-garde in New York City. What led to that transition?

Alma Guillermoprieto: I stopped dancing in the 1970s because I was hypnotized by the Cuban Revolution’s rhetoric and its obvious advances back then in the areas of health and education, compared with what I was familiar with in Mexico, where I’m from. I considered myself an artist, and the revolution told me that art was superfluous, decadent, disposable, mischievous, subversive whenever the artist was not singing the revolution’s praises, and untrustworthy, and—this is for you, gentlemen—that a suspicious number of artists were homosexual and homosexuality was all of the above, plus disgusting and contagious. I wanted to be a revolutionary, and so I broke with art, which nearly undid me. How, a few years later, I stumbled into journalism is actually a long and unrelated story, but I do reflect sometimes, now that I am seventy-six, that I can still scrabble my way around a keyboard, whereas my career as a dancer would have ended decades ago. It’s a small consolation.

Which city, among all the many that you’ve lived in and written about, do you miss the most?

I love Mexico City, truly one of the greatest, most complicated, and most seductive cities in the world. But when I am here now, I miss the Mexico City I grew up in, the peaceable, quiet city protected by its two volcanoes, and the cohesive culture of its courteous, serious inhabitants. Climate change, the drug trade, and trash culture demolished much of the landscape and the composure of society. Still, there is nothing quite like the glory of the jacaranda trees in full lilac bloom in March.

Which city has changed the most in the time you’ve known it?

I think probably Bogotá. Years ago it seemed to live somehow beyond the logic of capitalism, and one seemed to breathe a remote air there, nine thousand feet above the rest of the world. The United States felt like it was a galaxy away. Bogotá used to be a small city of houses, many of them in a sort of English style. Now it’s a huge city of brick apartment towers. It’s changed radically in, oh, thirty or so years.

You have written about your youthful optimism about the Sandinistas, and about how you now think of that kind of revolutionary idealism as naive. From the US perspective, the belief in democratic institutions as a check on tyrannical ambition now seems to have been naive—so what’s left?

Clearly, nothing that we know of. The twentieth century’s great utopian experiments, including consumer capitalism, are exhausted, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative vision on the horizon that people might want to sacrifice for and struggle to achieve, and the wreckage all around is great. We live in a dangerous time.

Much of your reporting has been about the unsatisfying aftermath of conflict, whether it’s survivors desperately seeking justice or the inability of the authorities to change anything. What are some of the better and worse ways you’ve seen this handled?

I think it’s rather that some conflicts have achievable solutions and others don’t. The narcotics trade, for example, has scythed through the social structures of much of the world, destroying families and communities and governments and the very possibility of governance. Mostly it has generated enormous violence and endemic corruption, and if there’s a solution to mafia-like institutionalized corruption, no one has yet found it. I feel obligated to say, for perhaps the hundredth time, that the origins of this disaster lie squarely in the United States and its politically motivated and utterly misconceived war on drugs.

On the other hand, one sees tremendous advances in the solutions to urban problems. For example, innovative public transportation, decentralized public services, arborization, all kinds of small and huge innovations are possible in the discrete space of a city.

Resource struggles have of course long been a part of conflicts across the hemisphere, but over the course of your reporting career, climate change has cohered into a tangible threat with more immediately visible consequences. How, in your opinion, has this changed the fights over land or indigenous sovereignty?

One of the regrets of my life is that I didn’t understand in time that the environment was a life-or-death issue, and so I never reported on it. It’s obvious, though, that some high percentage of south-to-north migration is caused by the devastation of the environment. Rural people can no longer survive producing food for the rest of us. The migration of hungry, desperate people isn’t about to stop, and governments in the Northern Hemisphere can either attempt the ICE solution or plan realistically—that is, spend the money—toward a repaired environment and a multilingual, multicultural future everywhere.

You have expressed skepticism about Mexico’s ruling party, Morena, under the country’s last president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as little more than a continuation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century. Does Claudia Sheinbaum’s tenure so far strike you as more of the same?

Absolutely not. She is Obrador’s appointed successor, and she is a committed member of the party he founded, which more or less replicates, or tries to replicate, the early structures and political habits of the populist party that ruled Mexico forever, the PRI. But she’s a different, much less needy person, facing a different world, one with the out-of-control president of a hugely powerful neighboring country studying how he can exercise his will against hers. For all our sakes, I hope she’s lucky.

Are there any young politicians or activists you have your eye on—some cause for cautious optimism, some particular political or charismatic talent?

Nope. But I have to believe they exist. Or let me rephrase that: there is a multitude of young, idealistic, energetic, brilliant young persons out there. I don’t know whether any one of them will be sufficient against the enormous problems we are facing, and the speed of change. In Colombia, for example, community organizers in areas pacified after the signing of a peace accord between the FARC guerrillas and the government in 2016 have been doing remarkable work repairing their societies and the environment. But they are being murdered in horrifying numbers.

I’m not a particularly political person—no activist, for sure—but I would love to see, long to see, a new flowering of movements and organizations coupled with innovative analysis, working toward difficult but achievable goals. (And I would be even more excited to hear from dozens of readers lamenting my ignorance and pointing out all the places where this is actually happening.) What I’ve been thrilled by, obviously, are the tens of thousands of people in Minneapolis, confronting danger and fighting for human decency.

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In the Review’s February 12 issue Jenny Uglow enters the “glamorous,” “luminescent,” “spectacular,” “dashing,” “superrich,” “witty and odd,” “high-society pirate’s chest” world of precious gemstones. Starting at a lavish exhibition of some of the treasures of Maison Cartier’s nearly 180-year history of jewelry design, Uglow takes readers from the “many-layered necklace and headpiece of emeralds and diamonds for the maharaja of Patiala” and “a jeweled sarpech…whose feathers of baguette-cut diamonds float up from a great golden-hued ‘tobacco’ stone known as the Tiger’s Eye diamond” to a “scholarly study of gems in the history of European science” by the historian Michael Bycroft, littering the path along the way with emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and pearls.

Since 2010 Uglow has written numerous essays for the Review, often on the history of science—on subjects ranging from “the stout, wheezing, pioneering doctor Thomas Beddoes, founder of the Pneumatic Institution” to weather forecasting to volcanoes—but also on Waterloo, Lucian Freud, Quentin Blake, the invention of manners, Kew gardens, and Hilary Mantel. She is the author of a similarly catholic array of books, including biographies of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, and Thomas Bewick, as well as The Lunar Men, about the eighteenth-century scientists and entrepreneurs of the Lunar Society, and histories of British gardening and life during Napoleon’s wars. Her most recent book, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer, will be published in the United States this September.

I wrote to Uglow last week to ask her about what makes a stone precious, affection for the past, and the eighteenth-century English artist Mary Delany.

Daniel Drake: I wear a small piece of red sea glass around my neck that is probably essentially worthless, but it’s quite beautiful (and apparently somewhat remarkable, because red glass is relatively rare) and it comes from my mother’s sea glass collection, so also has sentimental value. Do you have any treasured pieces of jewelry, and can you tell me what’s beautiful or meaningful about them? Had “precious stones” and gems and baubles been an interest of yours before you went to the Cartier exhibit?

Jenny Uglow: I’ve always been fascinated by jewelry, though very ignorant about it—a childish interest, born from the “treasure box” of my grandmother’s necklaces and brooches. None were precious, but I particularly loved an old gold chain with a heavy cluster of charms—an anchor, a boat, a tiny elephant and others—that had been patiently collected over years. I wore this all the time as a student and, amazingly, still have it. Like your sea-glass, it’s not valuable but it’s precious in the way it makes me feel connected to people I have loved.

Could you explain to me, a complete novice in the world of gemology, your understanding of the aesthetics of gems? Other than purity and carats and markers of monetary value, what are diamond or emerald aficionados looking for?

This is not a technical answer, and experts would put it differently, but basically, I think the attraction is sparkle and status. There’s a breathtaking quality in the way a cut of diamond catches the light, or the intensity of blue in a sapphire. Added value comes from the history of special stones and pieces and from the flair of individual designers.

For me, the most stunning aspect is the astounding skill of the gem cutters and setters. Great jewels are thrilling, but I confess they pose dilemmas. Tiaras, for example, are real works of art but they’re also ridiculous, summing up the stuffiness and snobbery of court life. More widely, the bravura display of wealth in a single necklace or brooch is jolting when you think of the conditions in the diamond mines, and of poverty across the globe. Grand jewels remind us that the top 1 percent own half of the world’s net wealth—marked out less, perhaps, by the length of a necklace than the length of their yacht.

As you write, Bycroft contends that “strictly speaking, gems do not exist.” You elucidate, and correct me if I’m misunderstanding, he means that by modern scientific understanding, a diamond has as much in common with a piece of granite as it does with a ruby. (He’s probably also being a little tongue in cheek.) But that did leave me with a lingering question: What, really, is a gem? Could you hazard an answer?

Yes, that’s a lovely sentence for Bycroft to begin his book. He’s writing about the history of science—before 1800 “gems” were a distinct scientific category, but as experiments by physicists, chemists, and crystallographers examined their structure and composition this simple definition vanished. As Bycroft puts it, “substances as diverse as onyx, flint and amethyst all have the same nature.” Curiously, though, the answer to “what is a gem?” remains the same—they are “precious stones.” One fascinating part of the history is the way that jewelers, gem cutters, and collectors worked so urgently to reconcile the science with the traditional nomenclature—whatever the complexity of their make-up today we still recognize “a garnet,” “a ruby,” “an opal”—and of course a diamond.

Your bibliography skips wonderfully across subjects. My sense is that they are united, if they are at all, by a certain affection you have for the past. I suppose I’m literally saying that you are a historian, but in your writing for us, too, I detect a kind of fondness underlying the dedication to history. How do you find that you end up arriving at your subjects? When you embark on a new project, what is the impetus?

I don’t have a “fondness” for the past—I would have hated to live without antibiotics, for example. But I do have huge admiration, and often affection, for the people I write about, warts and all. Biography is a wonderful way into the past, because it’s life as experienced, day to day, subtly influenced by what is happening in politics or the movement of ideas.

I’m drawn to people first of all by their work, that amazement of “how did they do this?”—groundbreaking writers, scientists, and artists. Most of my subjects have been in some ways radical, regarded as eccentric, or even dangerous—Gaskell for defending the Manchester chartists, William Hogarth for exposing the ills of society, scientists like Joseph Priestly or Erasmus Darwin who were identified with dangerous French philosophes. They’re also very human and flawed and often funny—I don’t think I could write about anyone who didn’t make me laugh. Some may seem quiet, like the naturalist Gilbert White, but his insistence on the way that all nature is linked and on the importance of the most unregarded creatures, like worms, make us see him today as the father of ecology—a different kind of radical.

What do you think your next book project might be?

I’ve become increasingly curious about the history of botany, so I think I will go back to the late eighteenth century and write about Mary Delany, who made extraordinary collages of flowers in her old age, both beautiful and botanically accurate, and her friend the Duchess of Portland, one of the great plant collectors. I’m fascinated by the way that art and science overlap in surprising ways, and I’m also very interested in friendship, and the story of Delany will let me explore all this—and be fun to write too.

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After Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin was ousted from power in 1979, his regime left behind mountains of paperwork generated by the state bureaucracy. Years later, the historian Derek Peterson painstakingly assembled it into an archive. As Helen Epstein writes in our January 15, 2026, issue, “crucial documents were buried under layers of old bicycles, junked photocopiers, and ancient dot matrix printouts. An intern found an unexploded bomb amid files stored at a police station, and valuable court records in another storeroom were being used as toilet paper by prisoners awaiting trial.” From this material, Peterson composed A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda, which, Epstein writes, tries to address the questions “What must it have been like to live under such a regime? And how do societies in general behave under such pressure?”

Epstein has been writing about Uganda for nearly thirty years, after working there in the early 1990s on a project to develop an AIDS vaccine. That involvement broadened into an abiding interest in Africa: for the Review, since 1998 she has written about history and politics in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Niger, as well as about public health, the Arctic, and Florence Nightingale, among other subjects. Epstein’s journalism and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Lancet, and she is the author of the books Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror (2017), The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa (2008), and Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic (2025). She is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard College.

This week I e-mailed Epstein to ask her about Uganda’s past, present, and future.

Lauren Kane: Your essay begins with a reference to moving to Uganda to work as a biochemist in the early 1990s. You were there working on HIV/AIDS research, which you wrote about in The Invisible Cure. What was the country like when you lived there, relative to how it is today?

Helen Epstein: Back then Uganda seemed like a ramshackle paradise, full of kind and interesting people. The humanitarian and development work that I and others were doing was intended to help the country become a modern democratic state with a capitalist economy, strong state-run health and education programs, and so on. At first I was only dimly aware of the problems facing Uganda, but I eventually came to realize that Western aid was emboldening Yoweri Museveni, a brutal dictator who distorted the truth, incited ethnic hatred, treated the legislature and the media with contempt, and appointed partisan judges who ignored the law while his security forces carried out arbitrary arrests, tortured and killed people, and ran amok in neighboring countries. Blatant corruption has meant that public services are now worse, by some measures, than they were under Idi Amin.

You write of Peterson and his historian colleagues: “The details of what they found, and especially what they didn’t find [in the archives], are fascinating.” Were there any documents or ephemera that they were unable to find that you wish they had?

Peterson was studying the Idi Amin period (1971–1979), which we know from contemporary eyewitnesses and the testimony of survivors was extremely violent. That the archives had been virtually cleansed of evidence of state-sponsored atrocities was, for me, his most striking finding, or non-finding. Historians need to ask themselves how common that is. Can we ever really understand the past any more than we can understand ourselves?

An underlying concern of your essay is the tendency of the historical record to downplay violence. You write, “Why do we, individually, and collectively as cultures and societies, repress the horrors we witness? Power creates a black hole for the truth, and our all-too-human impulse to erase and ignore makes it all too easy for evil to keep happening, again and again.” If you had to venture an answer to that question, what might it be? And how do we, both individually and collectively, work against that repression?

I don’t know! You have to ask Dr. Freud. But it’s weird, isn’t it? From time to time, I tried to talk to American and European diplomats about the problems in Uganda. They’d tell me about their programs to teach young people about leadership, to fight malaria, and so on. But when I mentioned the support Western governments had given to Museveni’s brutal security forces, the conversation would come to an abrupt and awkward conclusion. I thought, well, Uganda is a faraway country. This is just one of those things. But what alarmed me back then is now happening in the US: government officials routinely distort the truth, incite ethnic hatred, treat the legislature and the media with contempt, and appoint partisan judges, while security forces carry out arbitrary arrests, torture and kill people, and run amok in other countries. Corruption and deteriorating public services are growing problems here too. So instead of Uganda moving toward some modern ideal, the US and certain other Western countries are regressing to a state of despotism more like Uganda’s under Amin and Museveni. I think we need a psychoanalyst to figure this one out.

What do you see as the future for Uganda?

I worry greatly. Museveni is an old man. He’s expected to hand over power to his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba, a violent goon who currently oversees the military. Not everyone in the military is happy about that, so there could be trouble, just as there was in Ethiopia post–Meles Zenawi, in Sudan post–Omar al-Bashir, and in other countries where long-standing dictators have fallen. If violence breaks out, the diplomats will shake their heads and blame the supposed tribalism of Africans, conveniently forgetting their own responsibility for propping Museveni up for more than forty years, making pandemonium virtually inevitable when he leaves power. It may be too late, but if mankind ever gets the chance for a do-over, it needs to reread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and stick to it, everywhere, this time.

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In her poem “The Swan, No. 20 (Hilma af Klint)” from the Review’s October 23, 2025, issue, Victoria Chang delineates the line of beauty (a word that appears five times in the poem) that she discovers while contemplating the eponymous painting. Chang translates af Klint’s combination of abstraction and representation—a shell, a fractured field of color—into language, wondering alongside the painter how to move from form to feeling, from “the way a snail’s conch just grows, mostly right but sometimes left,” to the way “it hurts” to apprehend “both the source and the disappearance.”

Chang, the author of several poetry collections, including OBIT (2020), which The New York Times named one of the best books of the year, and With My Back to the World (2024), as well as three children’s books and a memoir, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (2021). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and she is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her next poetry collection, Tree of Knowledge, will be published this summer.

In November I wrote to Chang to ask her about navigating personal loss through poetry, striking a balance between creativity and financial security, and ekphrasis.

Velislava Kuzmenko: Grief appears in much of your poetry. How do you write about personal loss while still keeping enough distance to shape it artistically?

Victoria Chang: I don’t think of writing a poem as writing about personal loss, but rather, writing a poem is an act of writing out of personal loss. I never feel like I’m writing something purely personal, if that makes sense. I’m not writing a diary. Even the first person “I” and my personal experiences aren’t at the center of my mind while I’m making art. Sure, these experiences might be a starting point for writing a poem, but I’m not thinking about translating those experiences into language. Instead, poem-making for me is about something much larger—the metaphysical aspects of being human. The way I think about grief poems, at least my grief poems, is that they are an effort to explore the condition of grief, as opposed to, say, my personal grief.

My family are immigrants, and my parents often stressed the pursuit of financially stable work rather than artistic dreams. Have your family and upbringing influenced your perspective on balancing creativity and financial security? What is some advice that you could offer someone who wants to be a professional poet, rather than write poetry on the side?

My parents definitely emphasized the importance of being able to feed and support myself. I never disagreed with them because I feel like I can only write and be an artist if my mind is free of those kinds of financial stressors. Other kinds of stress—grief, sadness, existential crises, for example—might help my art, but financial worries do not.

I am still writing on the side, actually. For my day job I work as a professor at Georgia Tech and am also the director of the university’s poetry center, Poetry@Tech, and I travel to do readings and events; I’ve always had a regular job. Also, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to write poems for eight hours a day, all year long, although in order to write “on the side,” I still spend many days—for months at a time—writing and revising for eight or more hours. I think maintaining that level of intensity all year long would be emotionally difficult. Having a regular job, though, however flexible, requires a keen sense of balance. I’m constantly teetering on the edge of madness because I cannot get back to my art-making when or as much as I’d like to. I will always have a manuscript in my backpack or handbag, grabbing the minutes wherever I can.

I’m not sure what a “professional poet” means because, for me, poetry is the same as breathing or eating or sleeping. It’s just a part of how I live, how I respond to the world. I would write poems whether I had a day job or not. I think of another term instead—“community poet,” or maybe just “community member.” For me being a poet means participating in a vibrant and rich community, reading and sharing other people’s poems and books, talking to other poets about poetics, mentoring emerging and younger poets, and more. I don’t think there’s a static community of poets either; everyone can make their own community.

Being a “professional poet” or “professional” anything means that you are somehow able to feed yourself from the work itself. While I get paid honorariums to do readings, sometimes quite generous ones, it would be hard for me to live off of honorariums and royalties from books alone. By that definition, there are probably only a handful of “professional poets” in this country. Our government doesn’t really support the arts like some other countries do, providing arts stipends, universal health care, and so on. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Then we could all be professional poets.

Hilma af Klint’s painting The Swan, No. 20—depicting a spiral shell against a background of eight multicolored triangles—explores color, visual balance, and, perhaps, their place in the natural world. Your poem in part seems to translate that into language, from “colorful rug” to the abstract connection af Klint makes between the swan of the title and the visual subject. What was it about the painting that impressed or moved you so much that you decided to bring it into your own work? How did the painting shape the poem’s form or emotional direction?

My friend told me about Hilma af Klint a while back. I’ve been thinking about her art for a few years now, especially when I was able to see the “Tree of Knowledge” series of paintings in New York. Af Klint was astoundingly ahead of her time. She knew this too: she wouldn’t allow her work to be shown until twenty years after her death. I love thinking about and studying artists who were visionaries. Af Klint probably found her present world to be stunted and staid, which visionary artists of any kind probably feel often.

My poem is part of a whole series that I wrote in response to all of the paintings in af Klint’s swan series, part of a manuscript of poems I’m working on related to an actual, real-life swan that I witnessed die of avian flu.

I love writing ekphrastic poems because there’s always something to say when looking at a piece of visual art, such as af Klint’s painting. Just looking conjures thoughts, images, sounds, stories, memories, and ideas so you don’t have to stare at a blank page when starting a poem. I simply let her painting guide me.

Can you tell me more about the place of the shell in your poem? Does the speaker relate to the snail, like she has a “shell” of her own, and “survives by curving”?

I recall doing some research about how a snail’s shell forms, and I learned a lot of interesting facts that I incorporated into the poem. I think I was mostly just going along with the imagery in the painting, free-associating, and somehow, as I often do in my poems these days, I ended up ruminating on larger abstract ideas related to beauty. I think I was thinking about the swan that died of avian flu versus myself.

In your poem you write, “Beauty just becomes, whether it is/witnessed or not. Because beauty is both the source and the/disappearance, it hurts so much when we get there.” How do you understand the relationship between beauty and disappearance? As a poet, how do you navigate that paradox—making art that may never be “witnessed” yet still carries its own meaning?

Some people, such as William Carlos Williams in a poem called “January Morning,” imply that a poem needs to be seen or read before it finishes itself. I’m not sure if I totally believe that, but I think about it often. Our time on this earth is so short and ephemeral that the idea of others witnessing my poems during my lifetime, after it, or ever, simply isn’t my focus. Maybe beauty is beauty because of its disappearance; I’m not sure that’s a paradox. I’m not so concerned about readership or what others think of my writing, my poems, or my life, especially not at this age. I’m more interested in writing my way through, around, above, and below my life, as a way to navigate life’s joys, beauties, and sadnesses all at once.

I think of my poems and poem-making as a kind of companion to my life, literally as if poems were walking next to me as I go about my day. Just as I might walk around and some people might “see” me, but most of the time no one does or cares. But I care because I am the only one living my life. That’s the most important thing to me, how poem-making enhances or sharpens my ability to perceive or how it might be a manifestation of my increasingly keen and profound sense of perception as I age. Writing poems is one of the great joys of my life. If my poems move people, then that’s a bonus.

Which of your senses guides you most when approaching a poem? Are you drawn to the sounds of the words, the textures of language, the musical tone, or something else that engages you deeply?

All of the above and more. I love the image first and foremost, but at different times in my life and for different kinds of poems, other things like music and sound might have held importance. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of prose poems (OBIT is a collection of prose poems, while this series of af Klint poems are also prose poems because her paintings are squares).

What you lose in prose poems is attention to the line and all the hesitations and velocities of the line break, so everything else must be sharpened, including the image. When I’m writing, I try to let the poems guide me with a soft leash, whispering what to attend to. Poem-making, for me, requires a deep sense of listening to the poem. It feels like an egoless process. I’m not making a poem because I’m special, but I’m trying to make a poem special. The artist Ruth Asawa said something similar: “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

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On November 14 the Guardian reported, on the basis of internal military documents, that the United States was “planning for the long-term division of Gaza.” Reconstruction of the devastated territory, according to the report, would begin in the Israeli-controlled half of the Strip, east of the “yellow line,” which dozens of Palestinians have been killed for crossing since a cease-fire went into effect this past October. Last month CNN reported that on November 29 an Israeli drone had killed two children, eight and ten years old, who had crossed the line to gather firewood for their paralyzed father.

“Quiet is not the absence of conflict,” Sara Roy wrote on October 25 in the NYR Online. “Nor is it peace.” In her essay Roy, an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, surveyed several of the most prominent plans for the “day after” in the Strip, among them Donald Trump’s twenty-point proposal, which was approved by the UN Security Council soon after. All of them, she concluded, “impose forms of governance that exclude Palestinians as political agents, denying them control over decision-making, ensuring that Israel—and by extension the US and EU—retain ultimate power over Palestinian life in Gaza.”

For decades these “forms of governance” have been at the center of Roy’s work. From her influential 1995 study The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development to her books and articles on such subjects as women’s health in the Strip, the failures of the Oslo Accords, and civil society under Hamas, Roy has long been a preeminent expert on the political-economic methods with which—as she put it in her recent essay for the Review—Israel has “thwarted the viable development of the Gaza Strip, with the primary goal of precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the economic foundation on which it could be built.” These policies, as Roy explained in our pages in 2023, in effect “created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem,” turning “ordinary life into war by other means.”

Over the past month Roy and I emailed about her time living in Gaza before the first intifada, the aftermath of Israel’s “disengagement” from the Strip in 2005, and the “polarized and fearful environment” around Palestine studies at universities today.

Max Nelson: When did you first visit Gaza?

Sara Roy: I went to Israel several times during my youth, but the first time I visited the occupied territories was in the summer of 1985, two and a half years before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. I was conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation, which examined a US government program providing economic assistance to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, then a small, NGO-led undertaking of just several million dollars a year. I was studying whether it was possible to promote economic development under conditions of military occupation.

That summer changed my life. It was then that I first experienced—insofar as any foreigner could—the Israeli occupation. I encountered a reality for which I was unprepared and about which I knew too little. I was determined to learn more, and I started immersing myself in the micro- and macro-reality of Palestinian life, in the minutiae of how the occupation worked and the policy imperatives that drove it.

What struck me almost immediately was how thoroughly Israeli policy constrained Palestinian life, determining, for example, where people could work, where they could travel, and which books they were allowed to read. I witnessed firsthand how the occupation (mis)shaped Gaza’s economy and the grinding effects it had on people’s daily routines. I learned what it meant to have little control over one’s life and, more importantly, over the lives of one’s children. I came to understand what it meant for people to live with ambiguity and uncertainty, in the absence of accountability and legal recourse. I have never forgotten how all this affected me.

Something else that I have never forgotten is how, as a Jew, I was treated when I first lived in Gaza, which I’ve written about in these pages. In the days prior to the intifada, one of the first questions I was often asked by Gazans was “Are you a Christian?” I told everyone who asked that I was a Jew. People were surprised, some were shocked, but none were hostile. Most, however, were curious, and I took advantage of their curiosity to explain why I was there—to learn about their lives.

I thought it would take some time to win their trust, but it took no time at all. Within a week of arriving in Gaza I was taken all over the Strip, often to places foreigners seldom if ever saw, helped by people I barely knew. I was invited into homes, both rich and poor, and no request was too excessive. Not only did my being Jewish cease to be a source of concern, it became an advantage. By the end of that summer I knew there was no turning away from Gaza.

You’ve long written about the various policies that Israel has used to, in your phrase, “de-develop” Gaza—to strangle its economy as a way of neutralizing its people’s political demands. You’ve also written about several infrastructure projects that Israel and the US have advocated in the Strip to advance their own policy interests, from the airport in its south to the recurring proposal to build a “floating island” off its coast. How, in the past, have you tended to understand the relationship among these policies, and how do you see this dynamic playing out now, after the cease-fire?

The first thing to note is that actual development—in the sense of sustainable, structural economic change—was never allowed for Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, because Israel’s principal political goal from the outset has been to ensure that no viable political or economic entity would ever be established on land Israel claimed as its own. Decades ago a range of Israeli officials made this clear to me, some of them explicitly: in the mid-1980s, for instance, a highly placed officer in Israel’s Ministry of Defense explained to me candidly that real economic development in the West Bank and Gaza could produce a viable economic infrastructure that in turn could provide the political foundation for the establishment of a Palestinian state—which was precisely why it would never be allowed to happen. What did occur, but only intermittently and transiently, were limited periods of economic growth that were largely fueled by foreign assistance.

A crucial feature of Israel’s strategy, especially during and after the first Palestinian uprising, was to divide and separate Palestinians living under occupation, which meant isolating Gaza—the primary source of nationalist resistance—from the West Bank and Jerusalem. Gaza’s political singularity became its defining feature. Its transformation into something distinct and apart, removed from any meaningful political, economic, and social exchange with the rest of Palestine (and Israel), became a cornerstone of Israeli policy, for without Gaza there could never be any viable form of Palestinian sovereignty.

Economic projects like the airport, seaport, or floating island were, then, in no sense designed to give Palestinians greater autonomy or control over their lives. Instead they were part of an unchanged policy that aimed to pacify and ultimately extinguish Palestinian political demands and aspirations by offering limited—and ultimately temporary—economic gains under a deepening and increasingly repressive occupation that denied Palestinians their rights and ensured Israeli control. Rather than expose or change this fundamental deception, the Oslo peace agreements embraced it in a more sophisticated form. Other projects such as industrial estates, infrastructural improvement, and institution-building promised and periodically delivered limited change and ephemeral periods of growth, but always within a structure committed to preventing real economic development.

Israel’s policies of denial continued with great success in the years after my interview with the Ministry of Defense official, causing ever more damage to Palestine’s society and economy, especially in Gaza, where these policies have, in the last two years, assumed their most extreme and destructive expression. The current cease-fire is nothing more than a temporary pause in the violence—if that. It is not a step toward a sustainable resolution. It does nothing to end the occupation; on the contrary, it provides diplomatic cover for the continued dismemberment of Gaza and the intensification of Israeli military control. The late Palestinian economist Yusif Sayigh argued long ago that economic development is an inherent right of Palestinians, but it can never be a solution to long-term occupation. For that, the only solution is liberation.

Over the years you’ve looked at various inflection points in Israel’s policy toward Gaza. Among them is the “disengagement plan” of 2005, when Israel pulled its settlements out of the Strip, shortly before it imposed a blockade on the territory once Hamas took power. At that moment, as you wrote at the time, there was a lot of talk about how Gaza could become what Thomas Friedman called a “Dubai on the Mediterranean.” Are there any lessons from that period in particular that might hold for today?

Israel’s 2005 disengagement was widely seen as the end of its occupation of Gaza. In fact it was no such thing. The settlements were removed, with many of Gaza’s settlers relocating to the West Bank, and the Israeli army redeployed outside Gaza, but Israel retained total control of the Strip’s airspace, territorial waters, population registry, and land borders—which meant control of its economy and the movement of its population (with Egypt enforcing the control of the southern border). Israeli military attacks against Gaza continued, among them Operation Summer Rains in 2006, Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, to name just a few.

The argument that Gaza could be turned into a “Dubai on the Mediterranean” (or the “Singapore of the Middle East,” as I also heard it referred to years ago) belies either a cynicism or a misunderstanding of history and context—to put it mildly. Palestinian life in the Strip remained wholly defined by the occupation and the policies shaping it, including Gaza’s enforced separation and isolation from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and beyond. Gaza could no more be turned into a Dubai in 2005—when conditions were far better, relatively speaking—than it can be in its devastated, fragmented state today.

In 2004, when Israel’s disengagement plan was formally presented to the US government by then prime minister Ariel Sharon, I was invited to attend a closed seminar in New York to discuss the economic possibilities that the disengagement presented for Gaza. The meeting was attended by Arab American businessmen and Israeli, Palestinian, and American officials, among others. The Arab American investors wanted to explore the possibility of establishing a free trade zone in Gaza. There was considerable support for the project, particularly from the Israeli officials, although I remember a muted response from the Palestinians. As I recall, the discussion, which was friendly and at times animated, avoided most if not all mention of the occupation.

At one point the chair called on me to comment. Although I felt the discussion was problematic, to say the least, I decided to respond by posing a question to the Arab American businessmen that went something like this: “What guarantees or enforcement measures will you have at your disposal should the Israeli government decide to interfere, restrict, or otherwise impede the functioning of the free trade zone—as, if history is any indication, it inevitably will?” The room fell silent. No one answered. A senior Israeli official sitting next to me could barely contain his anger. He turned to the audience and said, “It appears that Sara Roy does not want to see Gaza develop.” The following year the project was shelved.

You’ve been based at Harvard for many years, over the course of which you’ve seen Palestine studies in the US undergo some dramatic changes. How would you characterize some of the overall shifts in that time, and how might that longer-term background help us understand the current crackdowns on Palestine solidarity protests at universities?

Palestine studies at universities in the US has varied historically from campus to campus. I can only comment on my experience, primarily at Harvard, where the field has changed significantly over the past five decades. (I speak here only for myself and not for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where I am based.) When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, it was impossible—unacceptable—to use the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” politically in a Harvard classroom. This injunction was conveyed implicitly. It was a form of silencing that went unquestioned, and it planted deep roots.

And yet over the ensuing decades faculty (many of whom I had the honor of working with), students, administrators, and other community members did much to widen and deepen the space for discussing the Israeli–Palestinian crisis. It became possible to take a more critical view of dominant constructions, adopt a greater openness to alternative points of view, and allow for different ways of understanding the conflict, historically and politically. This process took a long time and a great deal of hard work. It often involved fraught discussions, and dissenting views still came under periodic attack, but overall the university protected free speech.

Many of these gains dissipated after October 7, 2023. A polarized and fearful environment took hold, nourished in some part by the cancel culture that preceded it. Today the campus appears calmer than it has been at most points over the past two years. But that sense of quiet normalcy can be deceiving. Just a few weeks ago, in a shocking development, the dean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health removed Mary Bassett as director of the school’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. It was generally understood as yet another attempt by the university to silence work on Palestine; her dismissal follows the suspension, last March, of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School and the termination, in effect, of my colleagues who directed it, and the forced removal of the director and associate director of my own Center for Middle Eastern Studies within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that same week.

No center or program is without issues, but accusing any of them of promoting antisemitism is as outrageous as it is false. The weaponization of antisemitism in this way is particularly painful and offensive to me as a child of Holocaust survivors. What is the crime for which we are being silenced? Speaking out against the genocide of the Palestinian people (a genocide acknowledged by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the United Nations Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’tselem, and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, among others)? Against carnage? Against racism? As M. Gessen has written, “We are living in an upside-down world.”

The crackdown on legitimate dissent speaks to the denigration of critical thinking. It “empt[ies] words of meaning,” as the scholar Bryan Cheyette has written, which is “the opposite of thought.” This sort of behavior is intolerable, especially in a university setting. It is also dangerous. For if speech discussing or defending Palestinian human rights can be suppressed and vilified, why not speech defending the human rights of others? Where does the silencing and censorship end? As a child of survivors, even asking these questions alarms me more than I can say. Too few people in this country spoke out when six million Jews—among them my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—were being slaughtered in Nazi death camps. I can assure you that my mother and father, both of whom endured Auschwitz, would be horrified by the silencing of dissent and its unrestrained normalization.

Have you heard recently from any of your friends and contacts in Gaza?

I am in regular touch with friends in Gaza. They are relieved that the daily bombing has stopped, at least for now, but when we correspond they emphasize that the killing and deprivation continue. They report that despite some relative improvements, Israel continues to restrict the entry of desperately needed supplies, including adequate amounts of food. A colleague shared a message she received from her friend in Gaza after she asked him whether the heavy rains in the area had flooded his tent. He replied: “We were drowning, and my mother was drowning, too. I was devastated and almost died. The pressures of winter are not like those of summer. Rain and cold, not enough blankets, clothes and mattresses are soaked, and I’m going crazy. I can’t imagine living in this situation for much longer.”

Amid this quagmire, Palestinians in Gaza are also attempting, however they can, to reengage with life and heal their communities, with a strong focus on children, especially on getting them a formal education and rehabilitating their mental health. Yet what I sense most powerfully from my friends is a feeling of abandonment. Almost all have told me that they remain on their own with no one to ensure their protection—and that the so-called cease-fire will give the world yet another reason to ignore them.