Blowing Out America’s Birthday Candles
Inside our July 23 issue
An Uncertain Triumphalism
Brenda Wineapple
Coming soon, on July 4, 2026—and impossible not to notice—is the United States’ semiquincentennial: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The celebrations began last year, when the Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution aired, and it was followed by a slew of books about the Founding Fathers, female patriots, the Fourth of July, and of course the Declaration itself. That’s not to mention an upcoming summer of local and national festivities that promises fireworks, parades, bands, speeches, prizes, and commemorative everything, from postage stamps and coins to musical compositions.
There’s an inevitable triumphalism in all this rejoicing, and that was certainly also true in 1876 during the nation’s centennial. And yet, then as now, not everyone believed that the US had come close to realizing its glorious ideals.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Space Oddity
Mark O’Connell
Anyone attempting to think seriously about Elon Musk is confronted with a forbidding cognitive dissonance. Musk is the richest person on the planet, and among the most powerful capitalists in history; before a recent slump in SpaceX’s stock price, the company’s IPO briefly made him the world’s first trillionaire. His companies have redrawn the boundaries of multiple economic fields—the automotive industry, the aerospace sector, satellite communications—and his direct influence has helped transform the world’s most powerful government. He is among the most famous people alive, and surely the most prominent entrepreneur. To exist in this time is to be forced to think, whether you like it or not, about Elon Musk.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Hungary: The Flood
Gordon F. Sander
It isn’t every day that one is invited to a regime change party. But there it was on my phone on May 8, while I was traveling in Hungary. “Come along,” Péter Magyar, who was about to become the country’s new prime minister, beckoned on social media. “We will step through the gateway of regime change with a huge party.” The next day in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, opposite the Parliament building, tens of thousands of Hungarians, young and old, stared in jubilation and disbelief at the giant screens streaming the inaugural ceremonies taking place inside. Although myriad supporters of Viktor Orbán, the longtime Hungarian strongman, and his Fidesz party were doubtless looking on in anger at the festivities—the high point of which may have been the wild cheers when the flag of the EU, Orbán’s favorite bogeyman, was raised outside Parliament for the first time since 2014—there appeared to be none in sight.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Climate and Punishment
Gabriel Winslow-Yost
“Even a great and beloved writer,” Saunders wrote in his newsletter, Story Club, earlier this year, “is going to show some range in the quality of his or her works.” Saunders, as he often does in Story Club, was talking about “my beloved Chekhov,” asking what might be learned by looking at a story “at the lower end” of his range, “The House with the Mezzanine”—concerned, as it happens, with “the futility of local action in the face of the larger, systemic, forces.”
It has to be said that Vigil, likewise, is at the lower end of Saunders’s range. It is brisk and charming, with that elegant, seemingly artless Saundersian way of stirring together wild metaphysical invention and slapstick mundanity, profanity and pathos and sudden stabs of horror. But much of it feels oddly out of focus.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Inside our July 23 issue…
Omer Bartov on the Nazi obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism”
Susan Rubin Suleiman on André Breton’s Nadja
Jed Perl on fashion’s takeover of the Met
David Quammen on the “dark mystery” of genetic mutations
Julia Preston on El Paso
Bryce Covert on Joe Manchin
Andrew Raftery on the survival of nineteenth-century Indian print culture
Mark Ford on the epic fragmentation of Rosemary Tonks
Jenny Uglow on George Forster’s journey around the world
Ada Ferrer & Miriam Pensack on Trump’s betrayal of Cuban Americans
Reviews of new exhibits at Hauser and Wirth & Gagosian
poems by Jim Johnstone and Laura Kolbe
