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The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 7
In 1976 John Leonard reviewed Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts for The New York Times : Those rumbles you hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn lining up, the howitzers of Vonnegut and Updike and Cheever and Mailer, the books that will be making…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 6
What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage. It was erected in the early eighteenth…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 5
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in the parliamentary elections of September 2022 through the coalition of her right-wing party, the Brothers of Italy, with Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia. Although the Italian far right has…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 3
“Edward Hopper’s New York,” the sumptuous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives us one more chance to retire—at least for a decent interval—those once glamorous words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings: alienation ,…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 2
One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther , Plutarch’s Lives , and Paradise Lost . Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 1
During the first ten minutes of Tár , it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 11
In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 10
None of this had to happen. In the fall of 2008, amid the great shipwreck of the international financial order, an anonymous person or group of persons writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a new electronic cash system called Bitcoin. In the “white paper” proposing the system, initially…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 9
We can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice; produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke; sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it. What can we not…
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 8
In November 1947 a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya, described variously as Kabyle, Berber, Muslim, and Arab, exhibited her gouaches and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimé Maeght. Yves Chataigneau, the French governor of Algeria, and Si Kaddour…