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

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Getting to grips with minds is difficult,” writes Clare Bucknell in her review of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry in our May 14 art issue, which is perhaps why historical accusations of pedantry were often based less on the practitioner’s actual erudition than their conduct. As it turns out, humans have long been interested in intellectuals and dilettantes behaving poorly. Drawing on case studies from the Sophists of Ancient Greece to the “unmarriageable” studious women of the early modern period, Bucknell traces the evolution of the word “pedantry.”

Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her most recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, explores how poetry anthologies have shaped British politics and society over centuries. Her writing for the Review has covered a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and artists, including Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, James Gillray, John Soane, and Jane and Maria Porter. She is a contributing writer at the London Review of Books and has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Apollo Magazine.

This month, I wrote to Bucknell to ask her about the history of pedants, politics in literary criticism, and her love for the visual arts.

Julia Shi: In your essay, you observe how the meaning of the word “pedantry” has evolved over the centuries, designating, variously, “sticklerishness,” “the performance of cultivation in front of others,” “incompetence in matters of etiquette,” and a kind of dilettantism. You also show that pedantry was often imagined as a physical condition as much as a mental one. What is your sense of its contemporary valence?

Clare Bucknell: One of the most interesting aspects of the history of pedantry is that evolution of its meaning. Nowadays, “pedant” tends to mean someone committed to the pursuit of accuracy—wrongheaded, maybe, unable to see the wood for the trees, but hell-bent on being right. Whereas, in early modern Italy, where the word comes from, the pedante—a professional teacher of Latin—was a figure associated with folly and intellectual overreach. The court tutor in Pietro Aretino’s comedy Il Marescalco (1533) is a “silly old fathead” who gets his classical references wrong and is outsmarted (painfully) by two boys and a bunch of fireworks.

What our understanding of pedantry does have in common with earlier ones is the association with intellectual littleness. Rarely is there much conceptual overlap between the categories of pedant and genius. Presumably the assumption is that if you’re obsessed with grammar, it’s because you aren’t capable of aiming at anything bigger. It’s difficult to imagine Einstein, say, being called pedantic, though I’m sure he had his moments.

Tarring someone with the pedant brush is polemical, of course. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time-honored way to bring down educated or opinionated women was to label them as pedants. Applied to men, the word meant roughly what it does now. Applied to women, it meant something more: that they were unfeminine, bad wife material, even sexually promiscuous. Pedantry in women, the writers Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier observed in 1754, was roughly equivalent to “want of domestic virtue.” Collier published a satirical advice manual, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, in which intellectual women are figured as easy prey for tormenters: “Omit not any of those trite observations; that all Wits are slatterns; – that no girl ever delighted in reading, that was not a slut.” When I was at school in the 1990s and 2000s, boys called clever girls “frigid,” which I suppose is a version of the same thing, just flipped on its head. It’s as if the perceived wrongness of intellectual ambition in women—a sense of wrongness that endures in various, more or less underground ways—can’t be articulated on its own terms, it has to be yoked to sexuality. One kind of “perversion” gets expressed as another.

After coediting the 2021 essay collection Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy, you published The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture in 2023. Did the work on these two books overlap in some interesting ways?

All roads lead back to Byron, in my world at least. The third chapter of my book on anthologies, The Treasuries, is about literary censorship in the early nineteenth century. Byron features extensively there because he presented publishers with a problem: You wanted him in your poetry collection because the name Byron sold books, but did you want to associate yourself with material that most readers considered immoral and heretical? So you managed by censoring. In The Beauties of Byron, an anthology published in 1829, the famous shipwreck passage in Don Juan appears in a castrated form that makes it sort of like a shipwreck itself – thirty verses shorter and full of holes. It’s fortunate that Byron was dead by this point or he would have been livid.

I’m also interested in the uses to which writers put other writers, especially dead ones. There are almost no limits to what you can do with a voice or a text once it’s no longer around to protest. Byron used and abused all kinds of sources—classical, vernacular English, vernacular Italian—and was in turn recycled by others both during his lifetime and after his death. The Treasuries is partly about what you can diagnose about a culture or historical period from its literary touchstones. Why did W.H. Auden compile anthologies of humble folk songs, nursery rhymes, and sea shanties during the 1930s? Why did a vicar and antiquarian, Thomas Percy, publish a collection of superstitious old ghost stories at the height of the “Age of Enlightenment”? Or Rupert Brooke pretend that he was on a Homeric trireme bound for Ilium rather than a naval ship to Gallipoli? The history of reception is also a history of cherished hopes, beliefs, and misgivings.

In your review “A Brief Literary Emancipation,” you describe how certain scholarly readings might box in their subjects, particularly historical women’s writing, in their desire to support feminist grand narratives. How ought literary criticism engage with politics?

I’ve never liked grand narratives. I’m much more interested in particulars than generalities, especially particulars that don’t add up to generalities. There’s a well-known argument of Isaiah Berlin’s that writers tend to fall into two camps: the hedgehogs, who see the world in terms of a single unifying idea, and the foxes, who don’t (centrifugal vs. centripetal thinkers, Berlin says). Just as hedgehogs deplore foxes for a lack of theoretical ambition, foxes spend their time screaming at hedgehogs for missing this or that eloquent detail. I wouldn’t know how to read like a hedgehog, and I tend to have trouble with works of criticism that exemplify what I see as a bad faith kind of hedgehoggery—distorting material to fit a model or system.

That’s one reason I’m so fond of satire as a mode, early modern satire especially. The best satires lather themselves into a fury by listing every single incidental thing they think is wrong with the world. The Latin word satura comes from lanx satura, meaning a “medley” or “mixed dish.” Who wants a one-note meal? Eccentricities, crotchets, and hobbyhorses are such interesting intellectual drivers.

As much as possible, I like to look at things and people as they are and try to stay out of the way myself. I’m not fond of efforts to see ourselves reflected in places where we aren’t: better, I think, to let the past be the past in all its irreducible bloody-minded weirdness. A few years ago I had an enjoyable time writing about representations of venereal disease in the eighteenth century. The paranoia and the narrative shapes it took fascinated me because they seemed bizarre to the degree of being almost inaccessible to the modern imagination.

Beyond literary criticism, you’ve also written on the visual arts, from Mondrian to Rachel Ruysch to Joseph Wright of Derby. Were you always interested in visual culture? How does writing about art differ from writing about poetry and literature?

I loved art at school, but when I was fourteen I had to switch to a class called Graphics, which was less interesting and involved exclusively straight lines. Without much of an art historical education, I wouldn’t have dared to pitch art pieces, but a few years ago a brave editor at Apollo suggested I try eighteenth-century subjects, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and that felt somehow “allowed” and not beyond the pale. Since then, I’ve gone a long way beyond the pale and written about all sorts of painters and periods, from Maes to Mondrian, Vermeer to Zorn.

The more I read and look, the less the disciplinary divide between literature and visual culture makes sense to me. I think art historians should be let loose on novels and literary critics on paintings, it would do a lot of good. Especially when it comes to the eighteenth century, the great age of ut pictura poesis. Take Hogarth, whose moral series seem to me to be exploring how storytelling works through metaphors of paths and journeys. Or Henry Fuseli’s marvellous reimaginings of scenes from Paradise Lost and Macbeth, which somehow squeeze narrative’s prerogative of temporality—the before, the now, the after—into painting’s single “all at once” moment.

It helps that I was trained to read literary texts, poems in particular, in a way that was formal to the point of being visual. Still now, when I read a poem for the first time, I’ll read it sideways and backwards and across itself as well as forwards—looking for repetitions and mirrorings, line endings that double back on themselves, little moves that are multidirectional and somehow three-dimensional. It’s how I’ve learned to read pictures and understand the way that formal elements interact and passages of paint can rhyme or repeat. And it’s a beginning: I have a lot more learning to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides New York, what are some great moviegoing cities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is precisely what will not happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In March the NYR Online published Amy Littlefield’s sweeping overview of the shifts in abortion access since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization effectively outlawed the procedure in more than a dozen states. Many of these changes have been driven by the expansion of telehealth services that dispense Mifepristone and Misoprostol, the drugs involved in medication abortion, through the mail; as a result some parts of the country have actually seen an increase in abortion access since Dobbs. But by early May this state of affairs was in flux yet again: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on May 1 in favor of a requirement that doctors prescribe Mifepristone only in person, which would starkly curtail its availability. The Supreme Court has since stayed that ruling and sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit, but it is likely that the question will be taken up again soon, both by the Trump administration and by the courts.

I first met Littlefield in 2020, when we lived near each other in a green, outlying part of Boston. We went for walks with Amy’s new baby and both of our dogs and talked about the implosion of the media industry and the disastrous events we were covering, usually having to do with reproductive rights and the rights of women and gender minorities. By then I had already been reading her reporting for many years—first at the indispensable RH Reality Check (today Rewire News Group) and then at The Nation, where she is now the abortion access correspondent.

Even then, Littlefield was a veteran of the abortion beat, a reporter who had covered the intricacies of the state-level legislation and grassroots anti-abortion activism that had already de facto eradicated the right to end a pregnancy in much of the country. After the Dobbs decision, she wrote a definitive postmortem on the death of Roe v. Wade, “Where the Pro-Choice Movement Went Wrong.” This spring, Littlefield published her first book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, a frank and thorough account of where the anti-abortion movement went right, including candid interviews with the kinds of political strategists whose names usually remain unknown even as their ideas shape millions of lives.

Last week Littlefield and I spoke about the slow erosion of abortion rights, the fight over medication abortion, and the unexpected silver lining to the crises created by Dobbs.

Nora Caplan-Bricker: How did you begin reporting on reproductive rights? What drew you to the beat, and what kept you on it over the years?

Amy Littlefield: I volunteered as an escort at an abortion clinic in college; it was an extension of my interest in feminist politics. I spent one day a week walking with patients past anti-abortion protesters. And then after college, I worked in an abortion clinic. I had a job at a local newspaper in southeastern Massachusetts; I worked at the clinic on Saturday mornings—counseling patients before their procedures—and then I would punch out and go to the newspaper for my shift. At the time, I mostly wrote about city politics, but when I started to write national stories, I brought these two interests together, and now reproductive rights has been my beat for more than a decade.

There was a time when abortion was considered a niche area of coverage, when there were only a few of us doing this work full-time. Then, after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, major news outlets suddenly put staff reporters on the topic. But now they’re shrugging their shoulders again. Even though the same number of people, if not more, are impacted by the issue, abortion seems to have fallen off the media radar.

That’s especially frustrating given that access to abortion had been eroded to a catastrophic extent long before Dobbs.

Those of us who have been covering abortion for a long time saw the incremental creep of restrictions that effectively rendered it off-limits for wide swaths of the population years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Really, it started even before my lifetime, in 1976, when the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortions. As a result, most Medicaid recipients had to raise hundreds if not thousands of dollars to pay for abortions out of pocket. That’s something we take for granted today, but it was first written into public policy during Gerald Ford’s administration and has been renewed by every subsequent Congress. I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the incremental restrictions that have led to the closure of abortion clinics: medically unnecessary laws that instituted seventy-two-hour waiting periods, for example, or required clinic hallways to be a certain width—barriers that made it more difficult to access an abortion or operate a clinic.

It was challenging to get people’s attention, because telling those stories often meant covering legislatures in red states. It meant looking at grainy video of hearings in Oklahoma or North Carolina or Kansas and listening to state lawmakers who were not household names. It’s hard to sound the alarm about an emergency that takes place in such slow stages. That was part of the genius of the anti-abortion movement’s strategy.

Your article for the NYR Online synthesized the changes to abortion access we’ve seen since Dobbs and showed how contradictory and even surprising the effects have been. You focused in particular on expanded telehealth provision of medication abortion. How did you arrive at your understanding of the paradoxical effects of Dobbs?

As long as I’ve been covering abortion access, it has been defined by wealth and geography. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a person’s ability to access an abortion depended on where they lived and how much money they had. People in blue states like New York and Massachusetts—especially in urban areas, where clinics tend to be concentrated—and with health insurance that covered abortion or the resources to pay for it had a relatively easy time getting an abortion. They still had to contend with protesters outside a clinic, they might still have had to contend with stigma, but getting an abortion was at least possible.

Things looked very different if you lived in the rural South, in a state where abortion was regulated with medically unnecessary restrictions that forced you to go back to the clinic multiple times and to wait forty-eight or seventy-two hours between appointments. Maybe you had to have an ultrasound or listen to a misleading script about how abortion supposedly causes breast cancer or mental health problems. A number of states only had one abortion clinic, so people had to travel hours and hours to get care. And, of course, most jurisdictions don’t offer state-funded Medicaid coverage for abortion. So by and large, poor people in red states and rural areas often had to turn to a crowdfunding network of abortion funds to try to raise money to pay for an abortion, or they simply wouldn’t find a way to get one at all.

I think we all expected that after the Dobbs decision those inequalities would be magnified—that abortion access would depend even more on where you lived and how much money you had, because now some states would ban abortion outright, meaning that people would have to travel even further and spend even more money. But what happened instead is that blue states passed the shield laws I write about in the essay, which protect telehealth providers who have figured out a way to provide abortion through the mail very inexpensively. And that led to something unexpected: abortion became available in parts of the country where it hadn’t been before, and for less money.

And yet there is still a major contradiction: people who need care in person are having a harder time getting it. People who do need to travel have to go a lot farther, on average, and pay a lot more money. And people who need emergency care—because they’re suffering a miscarriage, or because they have one of the rare complications that can result from an abortion—in states with abortion bans are getting very sick or even dying because doctors are afraid to intervene in time to save their lives.

How does the case that recently landed before the Supreme Court, Danco Laboratories v. The State of Louisiana, fit into the picture you just laid out?

The aim of the essay I wrote for the Review was to capture the intricacies of the national legal landscape for abortions at a very particular moment in time. It was an infrastructure that grew out of necessity and responded to a specific set of circumstances—including federal court rulings, conflicting state laws, and, in a broader sense, the racial and economic inequality of our imperfect nation. It’s not like this was anyone’s ideal plan for how to deliver abortion care. When we were working on the piece together, I felt like we were capturing in amber this contingent reality as it exists right now, knowing that it was going to change. The state of abortion access in the United States, which has expanded in ways that nobody anticipated even as it contracted in other ways, wasn’t going to last in exactly this form.

The first major setback came on May 1, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FDA needed to reinstate the requirement that people go in person to get Mifepristone, the first drug in the two-medication abortion regimen that is now the most popular form of abortion nationwide and that has been indispensable to the expansion of abortion access that I describe in the piece. But again, something unexpected happened. Almost as soon as the circuit court had issued its ruling, telehealth providers began offering abortion using only the second drug in the regimen, Misoprostol. That’s not optimal—it’s slightly less effective, and it can cause more side effects than taking the two drugs together. But Misoprostol is used on its own all around the world as part of a World Health Organization recommended protocol.

Since then the Supreme Court has issued two stays on the Fifth Circuit ruling. On May 14 the Court sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit, which means it will likely make its way back to the Supreme Court again. We’re waiting to see what the Supreme Court will ultimately do on the issue of Mifepristone, and also what the Trump administration will do. I saw breaking news just now that Martin Makary, Trump’s FDA chief, is going to resign. Bloomberg News reported that he had instructed his underlings at the FDA to wait to release their purported safety review of Mifepristone until after the midterm elections. With him out, it’s unclear what’s going to happen with a review that’s supposedly about safety but of course has more to do with politics.

All of that means that access remains essentially what it was before the ruling, at least for now. Mifepristone can still be sent through the mail. Telehealth abortions still account for more than a quarter of all abortions nationwide, and they continue to be a lifeline for people in the thirteen states that have banned abortion outright and the four states that ban it after about six weeks.

If you were writing the essay today, would it look any different?

I think the biggest development is that we’ve now had a sort of fire drill. The Fifth Circuit ruling was an all-hands-on-deck moment, a test of the contingency plans that telehealth providers have been developing. It was a chance to see how quickly they could update their protocols, consult with their lawyers, interpret the ruling, update their websites, reassure their clients—and to see how quickly that information could make it to people who need abortions but are, understandably, a bit lost, confused, or anxious in this shifting landscape. I noticed, when I went to the websites for organizations like the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project (MAP), which is one of the telehealth providers we cover in the piece, that they had quickly shifted to a Misoprostol-only protocol, and were already advertising it. That suggests that the abortion rights movement was far more prepared to meet the crisis of an adverse federal court ruling than it had been with the Dobbs ruling four years earlier.

You write about your sense that, no matter what, much of the infrastructure created in the past few years just can’t be undone, even by extraordinarily hostile political forces. How have the last few weeks informed your thinking on that?

I absolutely still have that sense. A court decision or a rule change from the executive branch could disrupt the work of shield law providers like the MAP and Aid Access, but it would not reverse the increase in medication abortions altogether. We would still have international providers. We would still have community activists handing out pills.

I’ve thought a lot about the fact that, in addition to abortion rights activists and clinicians learning how to pivot in response to a hostile court decision, there’s been a growing public awareness of the options that exist for accessing an abortion. Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice activist, has a saying: “Everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion.” Two thirds of abortions in the United States now are happening with medication, and so a lot of us now love someone who has had a medication abortion. That will undermine efforts by the anti-abortion movement to argue that these drugs are ineffective or dangerous. Meanwhile, a website like Plan C Pills, where people can find information about medication abortion, is becoming a kind of household name. One of my favorite stats in the piece we published is that Plan C Pills has circulated close to five million stickers. Someone who uses a restroom at a bar in, you know, Tuscaloosa might look up and see a sticker on the wall. That kind of cultural change and awareness is really hard to reverse no matter what the courts do.

In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Yuskavage has shown her paintings in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. Through June 26, her show “Lisa Yuskavage: Checklist” will be on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Rowland in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest.

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.

In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives and work of some of the Italian Renaissance’s most significant figures: Raphael; Caravaggio; Giorgi Vasari, a sixteenth-century artist and writer from Florence; and Agostini Chigi, a banker and art patron.

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

Rowland is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750 (2024). In 2017, she cowrote the biography The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1994, writing extensively on art, art history, architecture, and theater. Her debut in our pages was “Character Witnesses,” an essay about Renaissance portrait medals. Other articles have included “Caravaggio Lost and Found,” about two rediscovered Caravaggio paintings, “Roman Rivalries,” about Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and “The Virtuoso,” a rapturous review of a 2020 Raphael exhibition in Rome.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen on Spotify below and on all other platforms here.

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

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

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

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.