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.

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

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

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

To find Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Nadja by André Breton and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen on all platforms here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the most difficult thing about being a biographer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your favorite thing about the ballet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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