In 1912 the novelist Thomas Mann visited his wife at a sanatorium in the Swiss town of Davos, where she was taking a rest cure after being misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. Mann himself came down with a cold during the visit, which the facility’s director was eager to believe was also TB, and thus, writes Adam Kirsch in the June 25 issue of the Review, “the seed of [The Magic Mountain] was planted.” As Kirsch elaborates:

“It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity.”

Below, alongside Kirsch’s essay, are five essays from our archives about writing in sickness and in health.

The Siren Song of Illness

Adam Kirsch

In his study of The Magic Mountain, the critic Morten Høi Jensen writes that in 2018 he resolved “to figure out why Mann’s novel is so important to me.” That meant beginning “at the source,” in Davos, the town in the Swiss Alps where the book takes place in the years before World War I.

Today Davos is best known as the site of the World Economic Forum, where the rich and powerful gather every year “to improve the state of the world,” in the words of its mission statement. But Jensen discovered that Davos hasn’t forgotten The Magic Mountain, published in 1924: the town boasts a Thomas Mann Way and a Thomas Mann Place, as well as a series of plaques displaying passages from the novel. At his hotel he even found that the “sanatorium-world” Mann wrote about “is still intact.” His room came with a balcony and a wooden lounge chair for taking a rest cure, just as patients did a century ago.

In 1912 Mann’s wife, Katia, was one of them. Her chest complaint wasn’t severe, but her doctor sent her to Davos because any problem involving the lungs raised the terrifying specter of tuberculosis, at the time an incurable disease responsible for up to a quarter of all deaths in Europe. In the 1880s the pioneering microbiologist Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis, also known as phthisis or consumption, is caused by a bacterium that spreads through coughs and spittle. The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine, but it took a long time to translate into effective treatment: the first vaccine was administered in 1921, and the disease couldn’t be cured until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in the 1940s. Before World War I there wasn’t even an accurate blood test for tuberculosis. Diagnosing it was more an art than a science, based on listening for ragged or hollow sounds in a patient’s chest or scanning an X-ray (a recent invention) for cloudy patches in the lungs.

A sanatorium could keep tubercular patients from infecting their families and neighbors, but it couldn’t really treat the disease. In theory, dry mountain air was good for weakened lungs, and a prolonged break from daily responsibilities, with plenty of food and rest, surely couldn’t hurt. But the establishments that started to spring up in the Swiss Alps in the late nineteenth century, such as the Waldsanatorium, where Katia Mann became a patient, were essentially wellness resorts where affluent guests pampered themselves in the name of health. Some died of tuberculosis, while others seemed to get well or were never sick at all; it wasn’t always possible to tell the difference. In the 1960s Katia Mann—still alive in her eighties—was told by a doctor who examined new images of her lungs that there was no sign she had ever had tuberculosis.

It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity. Jensen shows that the seed of the novel was planted when Mann visited his wife in Davos in May 1912 and came down with a cold. He was examined by the sanatorium’s director, whose thumping revealed a worrisome spot on his lung. He was advised to extend his stay, but his doctor at home forbade it: “You would be the first one to be examined in Davos who did not have some spot or other. Return to Munich immediately. You have no business in Davos.”

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: In Sickness and in Health

• Susan Sontag on metaphors of illness

• John Banville on the Transcendentalists’ grief

• Jane Mayhall on the short life of Stephen Crane

• Fintan O’Toole on the itch, the pox, and the clap

• Arnold Relman on breaking his neck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is precisely what will not happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act.

This conversation originally aired on June 1, 2026.

Think for Yourself

Dan Chiasson

April 22, 2026, 5:35 AM

AI has made contemporaneous self-reflexivity almost a necessary precondition for anyone who tries to write about it, now that, from behind the blinking cursor marking my every pause and hesitation in writing this sentence, a serpent waits to strike. I would prefer not to write sentences that track their own emergence from thought; I don’t like the kind of faddish writing that does this, this very thing that I am doing; but now that I feel I must actively preserve thinking as the medium in which language is generated, against Google’s satanic offer to “Help Me Write,” I also feel I should think about what it is I’m preserving, and who, exactly, the tempter is, and why they are so eager to “help me” surrender the pleasure of making the next associative or logical leap on my own, from hints and insinuations found inside a brain that can never fully know itself, or—sorry if this seems vain—tire of trying.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

‘We Did Our Best!’

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Years ago, in the early days of the deep learning revolution, a friend asked whether the whole field of AI research, which is roughly 70 percent male, existed because men were jealous of women’s ability to create life. It was not the kind of question that required a reply; the answer was obviously yes. My friend had just had her first child and was possessed of that slightly terrifying primal authority I’d noticed in so many devout feminists who’d recently become mothers.

Privately, I was not entirely convinced. I was writing a book that year about AI, and while I’d come across plenty of researchers who appeared confused about the line between product and progeny, this delusion was not by any means limited to men. If anything, it seemed that the women in the field were prone to speaking of their machines as children they were raising, or even to confessing that they experienced maternal impulses toward them. There was Fei-Fei Li, the so-called godmother of AI, who traced her breakthrough in AI vision to an insight about childhood development. “No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years,” she said in her 2015 TED Talk. “They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.” As she paced the stage, a photo of her son, Leo, loomed on the enormous screen behind her.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Labour’s Love Lost

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

On the Fourth of July Americans will celebrate their country’s semiquincentennial, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm as they contrast the founders of the republic with their present-day successors. For Sir Keir Starmer, July 4 will also bring mixed feelings. It will be two years to the day since he led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, winning 411 of 650 parliamentary seats, while the Conservatives, who had been in office for fourteen years, collapsed, winning only 121. As I observed then, the scale of the Labour victory was deceptive: Starmer gained that huge majority with barely 34 percent of the popular vote. Since the turnout was just below 60 percent—a sharp fall from 67 percent at the previous election in December 2019—that meant only about one British elector in five had voted Labour.

Even so, few of us guessed just how tenuous Starmer’s position would prove or how quickly his authority would shrivel. For more than a year now, voting-intention polls have found that support for Labour is below 25 percent, and Starmer’s approval ratings have been at rock bottom. That was confirmed on May 7 when local elections were held in many parts of England, as were elections for the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. In the English elections Labour lost 1,498 council seats and won only 17 percent of the vote, the same as the Conservatives.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Their Own Private Genesis

Erin Maglaque

They were debating the nature of original sin in an apotheca in Naples. “We discussed a lot of things,” Giovanni Casaburo told the inquisitors in 1598 when they asked him what exactly was said in the apothecary’s shop. “Among them that if Adam hadn’t sinned, eating the forbidden fruit, we wouldn’t have sinned as well.” So far, so orthodox. But then the apothecary Marcello Impicciato joined in. “What apple?” he asked. “Adam and Eve fucked in the ass, and that’s why they were rejected from Paradise.”

What apple? In 1588 Violante Scaglione testified: “Adam’s apple was Eve’s butt, not the pit of the fruit that got stuck in his throat when he was called by God.” They debated it in a tobacconist’s shop in Tuscany in 1702. Did Adam eat an apple, or was it a fig, or a pear? Giuseppe Cinatti said it was no fruit at all—Adam’s sin was “sticking it [his penis] into her ass” instead of “putting it into her cunt,” as God had commanded. One French philosopher phrased it more delicately: “The apple which tempted our first father was the symbol of the rear parts of woman, which very well represents an apple split in half.” An anonymous seventeenth-century student’s notebook records his lecturer’s conclusions: “There were two trees in paradise. Eve ate from one, i.e., was fucked by it, i.e., by Adam’s dick, which was the forbidden fruit.” Italian peasants, apothecaries, friars; French libertines, Dutch philosophers—all believed that Adam sodomized Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

More from our June 25 issue…

• Laura Miller on Harriet Clark’s debut novel The Hill

• Michael Gorra on the task of the literary agent

• Andrew Katzenstein on loving the Mets

• Madeleine Schwartz on the purloined papyrus

• Gary Saul Morson on Mikhail Bakhtin

• Andrew Arsan on democracy and the Middle East

• Fintan O’Toole on the president’s empty promise of greatness

• Joe Dunthorne on the New York School poets

• Adam Kirsch on Thomas Mann’s “sympathy for death”

• David S. Reynolds on antebellum America’s rage for pictures

• Arya Roshanian on Vincenzo Bellini’s exacting melodies

• Magda Teter on the missing Jews of Salonica

• At the Galleries with Lovia Gyarkye and Nicole Rudick

• Poems by Sandra Lim and D. Nurkse

Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan

Jonathan Lethem

The problem with sports is that sports either: 1) functions as an allegorical enclosure inside which everything else (world, self) can be glimpsed and potentially even briefly made to reveal itself, or 2) is delightful precisely because it excludes everything else and offers a brief zone of perfect respite from the crushing truths of our petty sufferations.

The problem with writing about sports, then, is that you either: 1) embrace the first premise and guarantee sounding like some kind of idiot of projection, idealization, and Pathetic Fallacy, or 2) fall silent, as one might while beholding an eclipse or the Rothko Chapel or a livestream of a mother owl caring for its owlets. That’s to say, if sports is one of those transcendent things meant to humble and unite us in breathless regard for what can happen entirely outside ourselves, why deface it with the graffiti of individual response? (The great exception proving this rule is Annie Dillard’s essay about seeing an eclipse, “Total Eclipse.”) For this reason, I think, I’ve (mostly) sworn never to write about sports.

But wait, I’m already committing romantic nonsense to the page. The difference between a championship run and a total eclipse or the Rothko Chapel is that the eclipse and the Chapel aren’t accompanied by twenty-nine embarrassingly failed eclipses or Chapels. (There are thirty teams in the NBA, and for one of them to win the rest all have, eventually, to lose.) Nor are they accompanied by years, even decades, of failed eclipses or Chapels, all of them shrouded in excuses, recriminations, and equivocating statements like “We gave it our best” or “Nobody expected us even to get this far.” Sports is a vast sinkhole of failure, of abjection, of human error and inconstancy, all of which is only survived by those who produce it and those who devote themselves to it through gigantic engines of denial.

What’s more, it isn’t really possible to protect sports from an “outside” world of money, corruption, commercialization, gambling, politics, and celebrity worship; the beauties of sports are hedged at all sides by the sporting world’s propensity to generate these things from within its boundary. The moments we cherish are like splendid flowers sprouting atop a mountain of shit. It’s best not to place one’s nose right up against the flowers. Sometimes they are flecked with the shit, or reek from their symbiotic relationship with the mountain. Your childhood hero may not have been Pete Rose, or Wayne Gretzky, or Tiger Woods. You may have gotten luckier than that. Still, best not press in too closely.

Anyway, sports is constituted not of silence, but of language—of chatter, trash talk, statistics, listicles, broadcasts, post- and pre-game pressers, pleading calls to bookies, fickle avowals and disavowals of loyalty, bogus authoritativeness, fansplaining. The talk vastly outweighs the playing. So why not add a little more? I’ve agreed to blog the NBA Finals—destination, this year, of the possibly transcendent New York Knicks, who’ll face the San Antonio Spurs. A rare destination for the Knicks; they’ve not gone since 1999, and not since 1973 have they gone and won. It is this which has united the city in distraction, adoration, anticipation, and—of course—the unspeakable dread of having to tuck in at the meal of disappointment that is a true sports fan’s regular banquet.

Read the first installment of Lethem’s blog on the Review’s website here.

In the Review’s June 25 issue, Fintan O’Toole celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels (first published on October 28, 1726) by revisiting the novel’s “excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires” in the light of a new age of rapacious and brutal imperialists. In particular, given the deathless contemporary refrain about making things great, O’Toole focuses on Jonathan Swift’s “vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small?”

Swift, writing at a moment when “both European colonialism and the slave trade were expanding rapidly,” used the dizzying shift in perspective from the puny Lilliputians to the giant Brobdingnagians to elucidate how “greatness thus depends on there being a wretched of the earth.” And so it is that Donald Trump—a Yahoo if there ever was one—comes to sow wretchedness. As O’Toole observes, “Greatness promises fulfillment and security, but it is always radically insecure.”

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are six articles from our archives about political satirists.

Gulliver’s Warning

Fintan O’Toole

This essay is adapted from a talk presented as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library earlier this year.

On November 8 it will be three hundred years since a travel book by a previously unknown author appeared in London. It was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Opposite the title page was a portrait of the writer, said to be “first a Surgeon, and then a CAPTAIN of several SHIPS.” Interspersed throughout the text were four maps accurately depicting known places like Sumatra, Japan, and North America, with newly discovered islands and peninsulas etched in. It looked like just another English voyager’s account from the still-unfolding age of European discovery, which was also the emerging age of European colonialism. This explorer is, indeed, a great believer in imperialism, explaining:

If a Prince send Forces into a Nation, where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.

The book is, of course, the great literary hoax written by Jonathan Swift, and we now call it Gulliver’s Travels. Unlike his ventriloquist’s dummy Lemuel Gulliver, Swift had a great hatred of colonialism, a rage that causes him late in the book to break character and assume a high style of savage indignation that is far beyond Gulliver’s own rhetorical powers:

Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.

To prepare the ground for this excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires, Swift draws his readers into a vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small? The first two of the book’s four parts are literature’s most famous game of greatness. Swift had read the work of his friend and fellow Irish Protestant George Berkeley, who pointed out that big and small are not absolute ideas. They depend on perception: “The Judgments we make of Greatness do, in like manner as those of Distance, depend on the Disposition of the Eyes.” Berkeley was concerned with questions of cognition, but Swift politicized those questions: if greatness and smallness are not objective realities, then neither are superiority and inferiority, civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness.

In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny people—according to the disposition of their eyes, he is an immense and thus almighty creature. He experiences greatness in its most literal form. But on his next voyage, to Brobdingnag, he realizes that he is now the tiny person in a land inhabited by giants. His own body has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed. He describes his shock:

In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World; where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my Hand, and perform those other Actions which will be recorded for ever in the Chronicles of that Empire, while Posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by Millions. I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us…. Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison: It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?

What Gulliver experiences at this moment is the dizzying awareness that he can never really be at home again, either in his own body or in his own country. He can never be himself. He can never be normal. He must remember being his Lilliputian self, “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World,” or his Brobdingnagian self, the contemptibly inconsiderable homunculus. Since “nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison,” he is forced to hover neurotically between greatness and littleness. The terms of this comparison are strictly binary—there are only the great and the diminutive. One is either massively aggrandized or utterly mortified.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: Pure Irony

• Fintan O’Toole on Jonathan Swift’s genius

• Derek Jarrett on the gluttonous pleasures of Henry Fielding

• Gabriel Josipovici on Rabelais’s intoxicating humor

• Stephen Spender on how Eric Blair became George Orwell, plus a letter from George Orwell on what George Orwell really meant

• V.S. Pritchett on the education of Alexander Pope

Today is Walt Whitman’s 207th birthday. For many years before the publication of Leaves of Grass he was a freelance journalist, writing for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Broadway Journal, for which, in 1845, he wrote about the Cheney Family Singers, a review that the Review reprinted on May 16, 2015 (making Whitman, quite possibly, our oldest contributor).

Great is the power of Music over a people! As for us of America, we have long enough followed obedient and child-like in the track of the Old World. We have received her tenors and her buffos, her operatic troupes and her vocalists, of all grades and complexions; listened to and applauded the songs made for a different state of society—made, perhaps, by royal genius, but made to please royal ears likewise; and it is time that such listening and receiving should cease. The subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its music—and the music acts reciprocally upon the nation’s very soul. Its effects may not be seen in a day, or a year, and yet these effects are potent invisibly. They enter into religious feelings—they tinge the manners and morals—they are active even in the choice of legislators and high magistrates. Tariffs can be varied to fit circumstances—bad laws obliterated and good ones formed—those enactments which relate to commerce or national policy, built up or taken away, stretched or contracted, to suit the will of the government for the time being. But no human power can thoroughly suppress the spirit which lives in national lyrics, and sounds in the favorite melodies sung by high and low.

There are two kinds of singing—heart-singing and art-singing. That which touches the souls and sympathies of other communities may have no effect here—unless it appeals to the throbbings of the great heart of humanity itself—pictures love, hope, or mirth in their comprehensive aspect. But nearly every nation has its peculiarities and its idioms, which make its best intellectual efforts dearest to itself alone, so that hardly any thing which comes to us in the music and songs of the Old World, is strictly good and fitting to our own nation.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register here.

The great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday at the age of ninety-five. Today we have unlocked an essay on Rollins by Christopher Carroll that was published in the September 27, 2012, issue of The New York Review, shortly after one of Rollins’s final public performances.

The Sound of Sonny Rollins

Christopher Carroll

Though he ranks alongside Charlie Parker and John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists in history, no one knows why exactly Sonny Rollins hasn’t recorded a first-rate studio album since the 1960s. Some say that his style was irreparably damaged by years spent experimenting with funk, disco, and fusion in the Seventies and Eighties. Yet anyone who has seen Rollins perform on a good night knows that, even at eighty-two, he is still capable of playing with the same brilliance that first made giants like Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk take an interest in him in the 1950s. And if there were any lingering doubts, the news that Rollins won three major jazz awards this summer should dispel the notion that his best years are behind him.

In spite of his advanced age, Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers. He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience playing with almost every major figure in jazz. More important still, he has an impish and ironic sense of humor. He also has a keen appreciation of his audience; when performing he often walks into the crowd as he plays, hoping to draw inspiration from them.

In his newest album of live performances, Road Shows Vol. 2, there are moments when all this can be heard firsthand. A compilation of two recent live shows, including his eightieth birthday concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York, the record captures Rollins playing with the energy of someone half his age. Particularly noteworthy is the twenty-minute version of his classic twelve-bar blues, “Sonnymoon for Two,” on which he is joined by the multi- instrumentalist genius Ornette Coleman, whose free jazz heavily influenced Rollins in the 1960s. This is the first time the two have been recorded together, and though they do not connect in the way that one might have hoped, to hear Coleman playing side by side with Rollins is nevertheless a historic occasion. Perhaps more remarkable simply for the quality of playing is his performance of “Rain Check,” an old Billy Strayhorn song. As he and the forty-two-year-old trumpeter Roy Hargrove begin to trade fours—that is, exchange four-bar improvisations—Rollins’s relentless exuberance overtakes the young trumpeter, whose playing improves audibly the more he interacts with Sonny.

These kinds of moments should awaken listeners to a musician who is still, in Stanley Crouch’s words, capable of “summoning the entire history of jazz.” He was born in Harlem in 1930, the heyday of swing bands. Duke Ellington was a neighbor, and Louis Jordan, the father of R&B, inspired Rollins to pick up the alto saxophone as a child (he would later switch to tenor). He grew up within walking distance of the Apollo and Minton’s Playhouse, where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and the guitarist Charlie Christian held the all-night jam sessions—Ralph Ellison called them “a continuing symposium of jazz”—that were so central to the development of bebop.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was playing with Miles Davis. Within the next five years, he achieved the kind of success that most jazz musicians might hope for in a lifetime: he was leading his own groups, making albums that were widely praised. Still in his twenties, he had already developed an unmistakable sound, a caustic, sometimes barking tone that The New Yorker’s jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, aptly described as “bossy” and “demanding” (and, somewhat less charitably, “persistently goatlike”). Here is Balliett on how Rollins melded his chief influences, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone and left the velvet, lopped off Hawkins’ famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by making it parodic. He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of thirty-second notes), and Parker’s trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with tumbling bursts of improvisation. And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

For many, this period was Rollins at his best. He released a number of landmark albums, like Saxophone Colossus, which contains, among others, his famous solo on “Blue 7,” praised by Gunther Schuller in 1958 as the leading example of a new movement toward “thematic and structural unity” in jazz improvisation. On Way Out West, another album released in these years, Rollins plays with a stripped-down, pianoless trio, using hackneyed songs from the cowboy movies he grew up watching at the Apollo as vehicles for wonderfully complex improvisation.

In spite of this success, Rollins quietly withdrew from the jazz world in 1959, citing dissatisfaction with his playing. For two years he did nothing but practice in his apartment. When a neighbor had a new baby, he moved his practice sessions to the Williamsburg Bridge. When he returned to the scene in 1962, he released The Bridge, one of his most beloved albums, which includes a gorgeous rendition of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.” Yet though he had probably reached his technical peak, in the time he had been gone Rollins had nevertheless been overtaken by two towering figures of the avant-garde. The first was John Coltrane, who in 1960 released the revolutionary Giant Steps—which contains one of the most harmonically complex jazz songs ever written—and thereafter began an ascent that would stop only with his untimely death in 1967. Second, and more radical still, was Ornette Coleman, one of the leading figures of free jazz. Suddenly Rollins was regarded—unfairly—as a conservative, a remnant of the old bebop and post-bop tradition.

The irony of this conservative label is that Rollins embraced these new styles, recording innovative albums with both Coleman’s and Coltrane’s band members (Our Man in Jazz and East Broadway Run Down, respectively). But by the end of the Sixties he told Balliett in an interview that he was “disillusioned...with the music scene” and again went on a sabbatical, much of which he spent in India. When he returned to New York in 1972 he began what some have seen as a long, slow decline.

As rock’s influence grew and fusion became popular among jazz musicians, Rollins, just as he had with Coleman’s “new thing,” once again attempted to meld elements of the latest style into his music. Yet in this instance he seems to have gone too far. He led ensembles structured more like rock groups, heavy on electric bass. His albums, incorporating not just rock, but funk and disco, came to sound more commercial, often resembling Gato Barbieri more than Sonny Rollins. He also struggled with advances in recording technology, especially as the old method of recording complete (or near-complete) takes in the studio gave way to the painstaking, piecemeal process of overdubbing. “I’ve always felt a little bit restricted in a studio,” he said in a 2008 interview with the jazz critic Gary Giddins, “at least when the technology came out that you can overdub and...change your original statement. So then I think I got spooked and I began trying to do everything perfectly.”

Of course, these records did not, as some have speculated, somehow impair Rollins’s ability to play thoughtful music. Silver City, Giddins’s carefully selected compilation of some of the best songs Rollins recorded on the Milestone label during this period, proves that he was still capable of playing at the same high level he always had. But his great moments of inspiration are fewer, and seem to come in spite of their surroundings, cropping up unaccountably in the middle of an otherwise insipid funk tune or disco track and just as quickly disappearing.

But in the mid-Seventies and early Eighties—even as he continued to release largely uninspired studio albums—another Sonny Rollins emerged on stage. This was the musician who had learned the art of crowd pleasing from Louis Jordan; who emerged years later from Charlie Parker’s long shadow; and who had devoured and assimilated every avant-garde idiom while still remaining, ultimately, himself. He can be seen in Sonny Rollins, ’74: Rescued, a newly discovered video of a set Rollins played at Ronnie Scott’s in 1974. He can also be seen in footage of a concert from 1986—reproduced in Robert Mugge’s documentary Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus—giving an electrifying performance of the song “G-Man,” a fifteen-minute modal marathon with, in Robert Christgau’s words, “riffs jumping and giving long past their breaking points, notes held so long it’s a wonder Rollins hasn’t passed out.”

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register here.

In our June 11 issue, Martin Filler—who, having published three essays about Wagner in the Review since 2010, is something of a die-hard Wagnerite himself—writes about the Metropolitan Opera’s newest production of “Wagner’s masterpiece,” Tristan und Isolde. The good news is, in spite of some clumsy staging, “trite symbolism,” and one “egregious” liberty on the part of the director, the show’s leads “enjoyed a joint triumph seldom encountered in opera, let alone in Tristan und Isolde, which has always been notoriously difficult to cast with two principals equal to those titanic roles and to each other.” In particular, Filler enthuses, the “rapturous Act Two duet, the Liebesnacht (night of love), was as gorgeously sung as any I’ve heard live.”

Below, alongside Filler’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Wagner.

Tunnel of Love

Martin Filler

No musical phrase affects die-hard Wagnerites as deeply as the Tristan chord, “the password, the cipher for all modern music,” as the German conductor Christian Thielemann has called it. This revolutionary break with harmonic convention—a combination of F, B, D-sharp, and G-sharp played by cellos, clarinets, bassoons, oboes, and an English horn, followed by a sequence whose haunting lack of resolution points the way to the once unimaginable realm of atonalism—appears in the opening measures of Richard Wagner’s music drama Tristan und Isolde. It hovers in the imagination much as it does in the concert hall, with a primal insistence that never diminishes no matter how often one hears it.

The Tristan chord resounded once again at the Metropolitan Opera on March 9, at the premiere of its tenth new mounting of the epic work it first staged in 1886. This was an event eagerly anticipated among opera fanatics for several reasons. It marked the first Met Isolde of the much-admired Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as well as the house debut of Yuval Sharon, the forty-six-year-old opera director known for his radical reimaginings of the genre, as he sets forth in A New Philosophy of Opera. (Every article about Sharon seemingly must mention his La Bohème, performed with Puccini’s four acts in reverse order, and his Götterdämmerung, presented in a Detroit parking garage.)

There was also much speculation as to whether the new production’s Tristan, Michael Spyres—a self-described “baritenor” because his range encompasses that of a baritone and a tenor—would have sufficient vocal stamina to make it through a nearly four-hour work he had not yet performed in public. And the fact that the first night occurred the day after an alarming New York Times article titled “The Met Opera’s Desperate Hunt for Money,” which detailed the organization’s deepening financial woes, only added to the drama.

As it turned out, Davidsen and Spyres enjoyed a joint triumph seldom encountered in opera, let alone in Tristan und Isolde, which has always been notoriously difficult to cast with two principals equal to those titanic roles and to each other. There has never been a surfeit of singers able to meet Wagner’s fiendishly taxing vocal demands, but a well-matched hochdramatische Sopran (high-dramatic soprano) and Heldentenor (heroic tenor) have emerged simultaneously only a handful of times. Most importantly, Davidsen and Spyres have a rare and palpable chemistry that invites comparisons to the two finest Tristan duos of the twentieth century: Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior during the 1930s and 1940s and Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen during the 1950s and 1960s.¹

Although I saw Nilsson’s phenomenal Isolde several times, on only one of those occasions was she paired with a comparably worthy Tristan: the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, in a legendary Met performance in 1974. (The Stuttgart-based Windgassen, who disliked international travel, made very few US appearances and died later that year at age sixty.) Having attended numerous performances of the work worldwide, I can attest that Davidsen and Spyres’s rapturous Act Two duet, the Liebesnacht (night of love), was as gorgeously sung as any I’ve heard live.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: On Wagner

• Martin Filler on Birgit Nilsson’s breakthrough as Isolde

• Larry Wolff on Jonas Kaufmann’s triumph as Tristan

• Daniel Barenboim on Wagner’s antisemitism

• Bernard Williams on whether Wagner is worth the trouble

• Robert Craft on the inescapable presence of the composer at Bayreuth

One hundred and forty-three years ago today, the East River Bridge—later renamed the Brooklyn Bridge—opened in New York City. It was the first bridge to connect Manhattan with Long Island and, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world.

In the Review’s July 15, 1965, issue, Alfred Kazin wrote about the symbolic power of “the biggest and most useful nineteenth-century structure still standing in New York.”

The Bridge

Alfred Kazin

As a people, Americans have been absorbed in “making it,” in their own success story, in the making of Americans. To be an American is itself a career, as so many Americans, old stock as well as new, have testified. We are a legend to ourselves, and though the rest of the world has believed in this legend and has contributed to it, only we have lived it with the absorption that makes it necessary for us constantly to note our progress.

By now there must be a book for every day of American history—and the universities and the mass media are joined in incessantly producing still more documentation of “just what makes us tick” and “our American heritage.” Nothing “American” is alien to our incessant cultural analysts, many of them of recent immigrant stock and endlessly fascinated by the wealth of material to which they feel happily related by their newfound status. This material—often perilously thin—they comb over and over for ideas, perspectives, approaches, that are usually based on facts that genuine historians have dug up for them. Everything in American experience is worthy of study, and every “approach” in this “area” is “unexpected,” “provocative,” “noteworthy.” There is no one to contradict us when the “area of interest” is, simply, our interest in ourselves. Who is to deny us Custer’s Last Stand, the Greek Revival, Concord families, slavery in the cities, Long Island painting, Scott Fitzgerald’s college stories, W.P.A. art, Italians in California, old Charleston literati, pro-Franco sentiment in New England, William Jennings Bryan’s voice, pro-British Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, the agrarian radicalism of Mary Ellen Lease? Who is to say that there is not “something to be learned” from the myth of America as a garden, the pastoral image, the American Adam, Warren Harding’s sex life, Abraham Lincoln’s trouble with his wife, Freud’s theory of the instincts, Geoffrey Gorer’s theory of the American character, David Riesman’s inner-outer character formula? Whom and what dare we reject for our intellectual enlightenment when the object of these studies, called “American civilization,” is really our society as ourselves, our lives, our wish to get hold of every possible problem and do something about it now? Anything goes in this collective autoanalysis, and everything goes into it—any borrowing from sociology and esthetics, and enforced joining of the unjoinable; any political nostalgia or irritable political reflex. There are no intellectual checks on the production of “American studies,” for there can be no genuine demonstrations of causation; the “field” is never social history, economic history, literary history, intellectual history, but the number of relationships that we can make between facts that we have not discovered for ourselves and which therefore are used as symbols.

“America” itself is always the greatest, the inexhaustible, symbol. After all, we are Americans engaged in the adventure of making ourselves Americans or understanding what unmade the Americans we used to be; we have fulfilled desires that 90 per cent of the human race has never heard of; ourselves the products of many genuine revolutions and unending social transformation, we want the best values for ourselves as we want the best kitchens, and where shall we apply them but in the field of “American civilization”? What Socrates attributed to the passions and Montaigne to human vanity, Dostoevsky to spiritual servility and Kirkegaard to the fear of self-contradiction, we attribute to the American character, the American economic system, American nursery schools, American sexuality, American breast-fetishism—and at a pinch, if we are of the right sort. Calvinism along the old Southwest frontier. The cultural synthesizers never feel that any fact is out of place any more than the psychoanalysts do, for we all want to do right by ourselves, to make our lives right, to get on with the improvements.

Behind “American studies” is not so much the intellectually standardless careerism now become a mass phenomenon in the universities, though this certainly explains the junkheaps of unnecessary and even cynical publication, as the common frustration of the utopianism, liberalism, radicalism that are so marked in our intellectual history. No one of any real intelligence goes into the “American field” without some prophetic instinct; after all, that is its greatest interest; we have no Shakespeares. But we do have this need to record our progress and to make it, seemingly, total. We have an insatiable utopian will, which whether based on what once seemed to be limitless land, or on eighteenth-century rational hopes, or nineteenth-century romantic Protestantism, or immigrants passion, has always sought to marry nature to spirit, democracy to individual perfection, God to his “chosen country.” We have achieved more, we expect more, we believe more in the possibilities of joining together individuals, peoples, religions—yes, and races. What if America had no literary tradition in the early period—what if Henry James in his English-European way was right about the “thinness” of Hawthorne’s world? “We“ have a tradition of popular humor, of folklore, of non-literate and brazenly commercial entertainment. Is art so important, or intellectuals, when America itself has been such a “success”? We need to know what the average man thinks, for his life is more real to us than historic Geist. What if beauty, with us, must come out of existing ugliness? This is exactly our opportunity and our mission as Americans—to mate all opposites, to show what can and ought to be, to realize the correspondences that wait in all things between matter and spirit, the real and the ideal, nature and God, America and its cosmic destiny.

Take Brooklyn Bridge and its many myths. Alan Trachtenberg has written a good little book about it, sensitively intelligent, which in the end reflects the anxious and rhetorical will-to-meaning that is its real subject. Brooklyn Bridge is in fact the biggest and most useful nineteenth-century structure still standing in New York. The plan was sketched two years after the Civil War by John Augustus Roebling, a German immigrant who had been a favorite student of Hegel’s, who came to this country as a utopian communist and became an Emersonian. Roebling was a great pioneer of suspension bridges in this country, he invented wire rope, he was a brilliantly thorough engineer and at the same time an indefatigable seeker after the single spiritual truth that must, he thought, explain the physical structure of our universe. He was a passionate American patriot who brusquely sent his son Washington off to fight in the Civil War; this son became a famous bridge-builder in the Union Army, and when the father died from lockjaw after a Brooklyn ferry rammed the pier where old Roebling was calculating the bridge that would replace the ferry, the son, who during the war would not communicate with his father, completed the father’s bridge. He developed caisson disease from working on the foundations of the Brooklyn tower, and at the end sat paralyzed in a wheel chair at his window overlooking Columbia Heights, directing the work through a spyglass.

The great towers of Brooklyn Bridge are a memory of a Gothic church in Roebling’s native Muhlhausen in Thuringia; they have also represented, to many architects, writers, painters, poets, pedestrians on the great central promenade, a glorious adaptation of form to function, of masonry to steel, of Brooklyn-New York to the great harbor. John Roebling, founder of the Roebling fortune, sometime Hegelian, Swedenborgian, Emersonian, also devised, for safety’s sake, the system of beautiful diagonal stays which extend from the tops of the towers to the main cables. These stays, he said, would be strong enough to support the roadway if the main cables should be removed or damaged. No one walking Brooklyn Bridge needs to know anything about engineering in order to appreciate the solidity and tension of the diagonals that these stays make as they run from the towers through the roadway; he recognizes as beauty what was designed to be further assurance of support to Roebling’s revolutionary suspension bridge.

Brooklyn Bridge has everything for the student of American culture: the memory of Gothic cathedrals, American engineering and American art, the old utopian communist who became an American power by his faith in wire rope and suspension bridges; directly or by implication, Brooklyn Bridge is the history of American transportation, of New York harbor, of old Dutch Brooklyn in the days when the burghers would not live in Manhattan. Sooner or later many an American power gets into the story, from Boss Tweed, who had to be bribed so that a permit could be obtained, to Hart Crane, who in order to write The Bridge lived in Washington Roebling’s old house on Columbia Heights. Whitman described the towers going up in Specimen Days; Henry James was fascinated in The American Scene by the traffic on Brooklyn Bridge; John Marin and Joseph Stella are only the two most famous of the dozens of gifted painters who have been haunted by all possible images to their eyes of Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Bridge still represents, in all its massiveness, the American power that was fully to burst upon the consciousness of Americans only in the years after the Civil War. And because it is so beautiful in its power, complex but unadorned, it has become the symbol of the American longing to wrest beauty out of a purely industrial environment, to find in the skills of our native capitalism and the hardness of our cities some hint of a more humane order, even of the spiritual fruition that the churchless individual might yet find in this country; so dreamed the transcendentalists in the nineteenth century, and many a liberal and utopian mind in the twentieth. “Where but here?” the substance of the Emerson-Thoreau-Whitman faith in the individual and the mission of romantic American nationality, was succeeded by Waldo Frank’s faith in “organic wholeness,” which helped to shape Hart Crane’s frantically apocalyptic attempts to make Brooklyn Bridge a road back to old Virginia, the frontier, Cathay, Atlantis itself. “O harp and altar/Of the fury fused /How could mere toil align thy choir-prophet’s pledge/Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry.”

“And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” It is a wonder that The Bridge is in sections as good as it is, for rarely has a poet, admittedly of great linguistic cunning, had so much abstract matter in his way. What saved The Bridge (nothing could have saved Crane as a man) is the fact that by the outstretched arms of Brooklyn Bridge, he meant his own outstretched arms, his own longing for love, completion, God: in a word, he meant his own ambiguity. He was the taut cables and the lonely man waiting in the shadows of the pier for sailors; he was the drowning from which the bridge both actually and metaphorically saves us who cross over it—pontus, keeper, father…

Beauty in power, beauty through power: the real American faith, for we are entranced by our power, though not many acknowledge it, and seek beauty and salvation through power, “Save me!” said Crane in the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge. “Save us!” say the new Americanists to American power. “Show us the way to beauty, truth, culture, and salvation through the Pepsi-Cola art contest, the White House arts festival, the corporations, the factories, the foundations, the all-day conference on art in our time! Don’t ask us to give up anything—not a vibration in the mixmaster, not a sale at our art merchants—only show us how to bring together the lion and the lamb, war prosperity and a good conscience, money and beauty, ugliness and beauty, sex and God!”

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

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.

Art for Our Sakes

Zadie Smith

This essay was delivered in a slightly different form as a lecture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, in May.

I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets? I’m going to answer the question as best I can, but I’ll say first that when I looked at the list of previous speakers and spotted the name E.M. Forster—and the year 1949—I was curious. I wondered what he could possibly have had to say to a room full of artists in the wreckage of World War II.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Damming the Big Ocean

Quinn Slobodian

For decades the term “chokepoints” has referred to places, usually narrow maritime passages, through which a great deal of traffic needs to move: the Panama Canal, the Bosporus, the Strait of Malacca. In the over-quoted words of Sir Walter Raleigh: “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.” Despite the technological revolutions of the past centuries, this remains true: over 80 percent of world trade by volume travels by sea, and disruptions such as the Ever Given container ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal—or the blockades of the Strait of Hormuz—still send ripples through the global economy. For a century American naval strategy and geopolitical dominance have relied in part on control over important maritime routes.

The central contention of Edward Fishman’s book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is that the era of hyperglobalization has spawned new, more abstract kinds of chokepoints alongside the traditional ones. These bottlenecks appear in the opaque circuitry of finance: the online balance sheets of banks, the transactions of payment systems, and the servers filled with account data. Because a huge share of global finance is either denominated in dollars or runs through US financial institutions, international banks cannot afford to lose access to the American economy. As an extension of its foreign policy, the US can freeze deposits and Treasury bonds held by other nations—as they did to Russia in 2022—or levy penalties on foreign institutions that do business with adversaries.

Building on the influential work of the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Fishman argues that the chokepoints of what they call an “underground empire” are an almost accidental outcome of the process of American-led globalization. As it set out to connect the world in a post–cold war era, the US ended up with new tools at its disposal, from sanctions to investment bans. US policymakers realized that they had their hands on the spigot of a global system of trade and exchange that ran on the dollar; the power to let it flow could also be the power to seal it off.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Navalny’s Unfinished Work

Benjamin Nathans

No matter what form it has taken—land of the tsars, nucleus of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or today’s All-Russian Federation—the place known as Russia has displayed an enduring capacity to spawn dissidents and an equally striking inability to tolerate them. This is not unusual for authoritarian systems, but in Russia’s case what stands out is the persistence of the phenomenon across centuries and widely varying types of rule, as if “loyal opposition” were a foreign substance rejected by generation after generation of the host organism. “We are a nation of optimists,” Zhores Alferov, a 2000 Nobel laureate in physics, once joked, “because the pessimists have all left.”

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, nearly a million people, mostly young and well educated, have fled Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some (men) sought to avoid the military draft, others (men and women) feared arrest for criticizing the war—or for simply calling it a war, as opposed to the farcical official designation of “special military operation.” According to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, over 20,000 Russian citizens have been detained since 2022 for expressing antiwar opinions, including online. Russia currently has an estimated 2,142 political prisoners and an additional 4,710 individuals under criminal prosecution for political activity.

Prominent opponents of the Putin regime have left Russia for Almaty, Berlin, London, Tbilisi, Tel Aviv, and Yerevan. They too belong to a tradition that stretches across Russia’s historic incarnations: an émigré diaspora of unfettered speech, intense infighting, and political impotence.

Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most outspoken antagonist and a relentless optimist until his death at age forty-seven in a Siberian prison on February 16, 2024, refused to become an émigré. The title of his posthumously published memoir, Patriot, positions its author as representative of a loyal opposition—loyal not to Putin but to the patria, Russia. Published simultaneously in over two dozen languages, Navalny’s testament is a postmodern mélange in just about every way imaginable. It combines long-form autobiographical exposition with fragments of Instagram posts and diary entries. Its cultural references ricochet between high and low, East and West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Amazing Spider-Man. Its protagonist’s coming of age is propelled by a ceaseless contest between hope and disenchantment. Patriot leaves one with the impression of a work unfinished—like Navalny himself.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Mighty Real

Clair Wills

The new exhibition devoted to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin, currently at Tate Modern in London, is her biggest yet, with over ninety works on view, and the first since her recovery from major surgery for bladder cancer in 2020. In a series of winning interviews, she has talked openly about the impact of being given six months to live, her life-changing surgery (she now has a stoma and uses a urostomy bag), her recovery, and her entry into what she gladly calls her “second chance,” her “second life.” When she was made a dame commander of the British Empire in 2024 she had just received the four-year all-clear from her oncology team, and she said the news made her feel “like being born again.” Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see, she laughs, just how much she is “thoroughly enjoying the second part.”

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

More from the June 11 issue…

• Suzy Hansen on the kind of society that produces Pete Hegseth

• M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin on the slippery slope of “sociobiology”

• Sanford Schwartz on a revelatory Paul Klee show

• Rumaan Alam on a memoir about a delivery job in Beijing

• Joanna Biggs on Makenna Goodman’s exhilarating and naughty myths

• Jonathan Mingle on the methane miasma

• Martin Filler on Tristan und Isolde

• David W. Blight on reclaiming American history from Trumpist ideologues

• Neal Ascherson on the death of Hitler

• Christopher Byrd on Mathias Énard’s cultural exchange novels

• David Cole on the death of the Voting Rights Act

• Walker Mimms on Emily Kraus at Luhring Augustine in New York

• Carolina A. Miranda on Magdalena Suarez Frimkess at David Zwirner, Los Angeles

• a poem by Marianne Boruch

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.

Trump v. Trump

David Cole

Call it “the art of the self-deal.” You sue yourself, announce a hasty “settlement” when the judge questions whether you are engaged in collusion (with yourself), and direct the creation of a fund consisting of nearly $1.8 billion to be doled out to your allies by a hand-selected commission—all without judicial or congressional approval. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, announcing the creation of President Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” on Monday, billed it as a way to redress “victims of lawfare and weaponization,” presumably at the hands of the Biden administration—even as Trump pushes the Justice Department to prosecute his personal enemies, such as James Comey and Jerome Powell, on bogus criminal charges. Senator Elizabeth Warren was more accurate, calling the pool of money a political “slush fund” for Trump’s friends. Evidently it wasn’t enough to pardon all those who stormed the US Capitol and brutally assaulted law enforcement officers on January 6, 2021. Now Trump is fixing to use our taxpayer dollars to pay them, too.

As if that wasn’t enough, on Tuesday Blanche quietly released another statement adding that, by the way, the Internal Revenue Service had also agreed to provide Trump, his businesses, and his family members complete immunity from investigation, prosecution, or any liability for any claims involving his or their tax returns that are now pending “or that could be pending.” This is nothing less than a thinly disguised advance pardon for any and all tax liabilities the Trump family and his businesses may have incurred at any time. Indeed this relief is even more expansive than a pardon, because it extends to civil liabilities, not subject to the pardon power. And it extends beyond the Trump administration, purporting to “forever” bar even future administrations from holding him and his family accountable for tax violations. In 2024 The New York Times reported that an audit of Trump’s returns could ultimately cost Trump $100 million in back taxes and penalties. That’s now off the table. Most remarkably, that’s relief Trump could never have obtained in the lawsuit whose putative “settlement” led to this personal bonanza.

Trump filed that suit against the IRS this past January, seeking at least $10 billion in damages on the grounds that the agency was responsible for a private contractor’s leaking tax returns filed by Trump, his corporation, and two of his sons. He claimed to be suing in his “personal” capacity, as a private individual. But he was suing the IRS, a federal agency whose head officer he appoints and can replace at will. How the federal government responds to any lawsuit, including this one, is ultimately Trump’s call, as head of the executive branch. The formal title of the suit is Donald J. Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, but it would be more accurately captioned Trump v. Trump.

Trump’s apparent belief that there’s nothing wrong with suing himself in this way is particularly galling in light of the “unitary executive” theory that his administration has propounded. In litigation currently before the Supreme Court involving his firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, Trump argues that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, which means that he must have complete, unchecked authority to remove all executive officers at will to ensure that their decisions are his decisions. The Court’s conservative majority is likely to agree. But that only underscores the blatant legal and ethical impropriety of Trump, the civilian, demanding a $10 billion judgment from Trump, the president—and then effectively “settling” with himself in exchange for immunity from any personal tax liability and a nearly $1.8 billion fund poised to pay his allies.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

One of the more ludicrous obscenities foisted on the world by Donald Trump is Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war.” “With his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair,” writes Suzy Hansen in our June 11 issue, Hegseth “is a parody come to life.”

But this is not parody, just as the ridiculous, brazen horrors of the war Hegseth oversees are not the stuff of movies and TV: “like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.” The assorted cretins who make up the Trump administration did not emerge in a vacuum; as Hansen argues, they are “heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west…the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.”

With democracy shriveling up in the US and a hapless Democratic Party struggling to muster opposition to an unpopular war, Hansen writes that it is imperative for a political party in this country to renounce “the strain in American life that produced a man like Pete Hegseth” and for “Americans to accept that they are not special but, in accordance with the most basic of religious principles, equal with the rest of the world before God.”

Below, alongside Hansen’s essay, are five articles from our archives about some familiar American types.

Made in the USA

Suzy Hansen

I lived in Turkey for many years and watched as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became more repressive. When I asked a Turkish academic why a segment of society had continued, for two decades, to vote for an increasingly authoritarian leader, he told me that for those people, to renounce him would be to renounce their own souls. He said this with some sympathy. Erdoğan’s policies early in his reign had helped religious and poor people to feel proud, to believe they had a place in Turkish society. I returned to the United States six years ago, but the idea of renunciation stuck with me—this notion that to renounce a leader or a movement or an ideology can be to renounce oneself. I’ve been thinking about it lately while watching the illegal American-Israeli war against Iran and the conduct of the American “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth.

It is a condition of the Trump era, and particularly of this war, that we regularly, every day, every hour, see things online so ridiculous or obscene that they merge with images we’ve encountered in novels, Hollywood films, and TV satires. Heightening the disorientation, the Trump administration has spliced together real-life footage of bombings and scenes from action movies to make maniacal snuff films, something even the social critic Christopher Lasch could not have imagined. The videos provoke a cognitive confusion, a reflexive desire to dismiss what must not be real.

Hegseth in particular, with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly as it should be,” he said in his first press briefing about February’s attack on Iran. And on the same occasion: “We have only just begun to hunt.” He loves to use the word “hunt” and to recite weapon names. He also frequently invokes God and Jesus, especially when talking about killing; in a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, he called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.... We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” He compares Trump to Jesus and journalists to the Pharisees. He has fired or forced into retirement subordinates with significant expertise—as many as twenty-four top military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the army. He has openly targeted black officers and women officers. He has also, according to numerous reports, routinely abused alcohol, and in 2020 he paid off a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her. Congress knew that when it confirmed him as secretary of defense.

Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!” He is what the world thinks some Americans are, the bleakest caricature. But like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: Boys Club

• Fintan O’Toole on William Barr

• Robert G. Kaiser on Mitch McConnell

• Garry Wills on Barack Obama

• Joan Didion on Dick Cheney

• Ronald Steel on Henry Kissinger

The first color photograph—as distinct from hand-tinted monochrome photographs—was produced 165 years ago today. The English inventor Thomas Sutton’s image of a tartan ribbon was made using a pioneering three-color process, but due to the expense and difficulty of early technologies, color photography did not become the predominant medium for another hundred years.

On September 5, 2014, Adam Hochschild wrote about the “startling” experience of seeing color photographs of World War I, only a few thousand of which are known to exist: “It feels like looking at a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses, one that allows you to see all sorts of things…that are hard to imagine even now from the many TV documentaries marking the war’s centennial.”

Into the Trenches in Red and Blue

Adam Hochschild

Because of the photography of their day, we tend to think of the world wars in black and white. This is especially true of the first. As a child I pored endlessly through a book of photographs from 1914-1918 on my parents’ bookshelf: grey trenches, blackened ruins of bombed-out buildings, soldiers’ drab uniforms, a corpse on the ground (was that darker spot blood?), with the caption: “Some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.”

It is startling, therefore, to see the some 320 images in Peter Walther’s The First World War in Colour (Taschen), chosen from the few thousand color photographs of the war that exist. It feels like looking at a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses, one that allows you to see all sorts of things that that six-year-old self of mine couldn’t picture, and that are hard to imagine even now from the many TV documentaries marking the war’s centennial. (One reason these images seem not to have been better known is that they have been dispersed in various archives across Europe and are difficult to access. Some of the more remarkable photographs in the book were not available for reproduction in this post.)

The first thing that stuns you is the brilliant colors of the uniforms. Most of the photos in this book are from France, and the French army of 1914 was the most snappily dressed in Europe. French infantrymen wore bright red trousers, bright blue coats, and bright red caps. And these were combat uniforms, not just dress uniforms. When, at a parliamentary hearing two years before the war, a reformer had suggested doing away at least with the red trousers, the minister of war shouted him down: “Jamais! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”

The French were not the only World War I army in love with color. Austro-Hungarian cavalry troopers also went into battle wearing bright red and blue, which they didn’t abandon until 1916, and Scottish infantry had colored tartan bands on their caps. On the uniforms of the colonial troops, too, eye-catching hues abound: red, white, and blue on the Zouaves from French North Africa; gold caps and broad stripes on the red trousers of their French officers; red sashes and high red caps on Moroccan cavalry. Although barely mentioned in most histories of the war, hundreds of thousands of colonial troops were brought to the Western Front by both France and Britain. The great variety of their uniforms constituted a sort of boast about just how much of the world the major colonial powers controlled.

Why such stunning disregard of what would make a soldier so conspicuous a target for an enemy sniper rifle or machine gun? This blitheness about bright colors stemmed from the previous military experience of the Western Front generals—British, French, and German alike—which had been mostly limited to fighting people who lacked sniper rifles or machine guns: poorly-armed rebels against colonial rule in Africa or Asia. The generals knew, of course, that this would no longer hold true for a war in Europe, but there’s always that curious difference between knowing and acting, and never more so than with the military. Huge armies change their ways very slowly. Hundreds of thousands of red-capped French infantry troops and cavalrymen with brilliantly shining breastplates were killed—more than 27,000 died in a single day several weeks after the war began—before new uniforms were distributed to the troops in early 1915.

Color photography in this era was cumbersome: cameras were heavy and film was slow—even in bright sunshine, a subject had to stand still for a full second, and for much longer if it was overcast. Hence there are no color photos of actual combat or of troops under fire. But plenty of civilians were happy to pose for the camera. Particularly haunting are Léon Gimpel’s images of Parisian children in 1915 performing, complete with colored uniforms, their fantasies of combat on the ground and in the air, and even of an execution. German children were surely acting out similar scenes in the streets of Berlin. A quarter-century later, both sets of children would be fully grown and their rifles and airplanes would no longer be toy ones.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Pop & Pleasure & Freedom

Jarrett Earnest

In the prologue to his first collection of essays, The Dyer’s Hand (1962), W.H. Auden explains why criticism is inescapably personal:

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes.

Therefore, Auden insists, as a matter of professional honesty critics should detail their “dream of Eden”—their notion, say, of a perfect day—up front so that readers will be able to judge their judgments. To that end he proposes a short questionnaire that would provide “the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics,” including their preferred “Sources of Public Information” and “Public Entertainments”—in his case, respectively, “Gossip. Technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers” and “Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.” The implication is: Don’t trust critics who judge things that they have no feeling for or that are not important to them. (In Auden’s case this seems to include most forms of popular culture.) The best criticism offers a vision of the world, not only as it is but as it could be, and an invitation to share in it.

For instance, in 1968, when Ned Rorem argued in these pages for the excellence of the Beatles, the provocation was to take them seriously within a rarefied intellectual milieu, as part of the “high/low” collapse that characterized the avant-garde historically and the triumph of Pop Art in that decade:

Since pop tunes, as once performed by such singers as Billie Holiday and the Big Bands...are heard not only in nightclubs and theaters but in recitals and concerts, and since those tunes are as good as—if not better than—most ‘serious’ songs being composed today, the best cover-all term is simply song. The only sub-categories are good and bad.

Rorem marshals his formidable knowledge of music theory (“the minute harmonic shift on the words ‘wave of her hand,’ as surprising, yet as satisfyingly right as that in a Monteverdi madrigal like ‘A un giro sol’”), and yet, as he wryly argues for the technical brilliance undergirding the Fab Four’s unbridled verve, they end up mattering to him in the same way they mattered to millions of people then and ever since: “The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good.... Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.”

It’s no accident that Rorem arrives at this life-affirming principle in writing about pop songs. Pop is our great arena of pleasure; it is all about the swooning intensity of crushes and kisses and lust in every conceivable permutation, along with the tears and broken hearts. Perhaps that is why pop music penetrates our emotional life so thoroughly, giving voice to our collective feelings at birthdays, at weddings, at funerals, and when we dance, communally or at home alone. We play songs of erotic infatuation and fathomless heartache while walking, driving, and riding the subway, but we also hear them in bars, bookstores, and the dentist’s office; they become an ambient score to daily activities, fusing our memories into a seam of public and private experience. As Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, wrote in the liner notes to Lou Reed’s compilation Rock n’ Roll Diary, 1967–1980, “For those of us who are always confronting our own history through rock and roll, this album is more than the summation of one artist’s career; it is the spiritual record of a decade in the life.”

In 1976 Jonathan Sage was twenty-three and living in his hometown of London after graduating from Cambridge. He was studying to become a lawyer but was looking for an escape. Sensing the heat lightning of what would become punk music, he quit the law, started a fanzine called London’s Outrage, and by the next spring was chronicling the scene under the name Jon Savage in the national music newspaper Sounds, beginning with a short write-up on the Sex Pistols, a group of boys slightly younger than him but already legends beginning to implode:

The Pistols have become symbols—us against them—the songs anthems, inviolate from criticism. Just to see them is enough—it’s a bonus that they played a good set.

So ultimately, the environment was totally controlled in favour of the Pistols—no risks. I admire the media manipulation, but feel the sour taste of patronage and the exploitation of base brutality instincts. It’s too easy. The eventual problem may be—who cares?

They’re being overtaken. Fast.

Two months later, on June 7, 1977, he was on the Thames aboard a boat festooned with banners announcing the Sex Pistols’ acidic new single “God Save the Queen,” timed to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee; the band played furiously on deck as police vessels swarmed:

Now all adrenalin is flat out—do it do it do it now now now NOW. Suddenly in “I Wanna Be Me” they get inspired and take off: “No Fun” screamed out as the police boats move in for the kill is one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll moments EVER. I mean EVER. (Think about that.)

Throughout the late 1970s Savage dispatched slangy firsthand accounts of early gigs and releases by some of the legendary bands of the era (the Clash, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division) as well as publishing ideas-driven interviews with everyone from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle to David Thomas of Pere Ubu—a solid path for a young writer accruing credibility while stockpiling invaluable primary sources. This early writing, which was typical of the golden years of rock and pop criticism from Lester Bangs and others, comes off more as the necessity of working within a highly stylized scene than as a natural inclination, and before long that first-person voice slips away. In conducting interviews Savage is sensitive to the point of self-effacement; it’s easy to understand how he moved so seamlessly inside such a volatile milieu. By the time he began publishing in the new hyper-cool monthly The Face in 1980, he was poised to become one of the preeminent music and culture writers of his generation.

Savage’s only collection of criticism, Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96 (1997), spans the twenty years he spent tracking early punk to its avatar in grunge, parallel gangs of disaffected teens empowered by music to tear everything down. His sympathetic profile of Nirvana and his interview with Kurt Cobain—a roving, confessional, late-night talk in a NYC hotel room—became cult texts after Cobain’s death by suicide less than a year later in 1994 at age twenty-seven. Having thought deeply about the contradictions of rebellion and success, anarchy and capitalism, Savage was attuned to the impossibility of the band’s situation:

Nirvana should have been on top of the world but instead they freaked out. Part of the problem had to do with the culture from which they came, which had celebrated the outsider—“Loser,” read an early Sub Pop T-shirt slogan—and which was fiercely anti-major label, pro-independent. One of Nirvana’s first acts on joining Geffen Records was to print a T-shirt which read “Flower-sniffin’ kitty-pettin’ baby-kissin’ corporate rock whores.”

He saw that there was no way out but still hoped they’d find one.

The fascination of reading a critic’s work over time and then again in a collection is seeing the ideas gather steam in accumulated observations until they burst forth in new arguments, sometimes much later. Critics learn by working out their thoughts in dialogue with a public, testing the balance between their natural gifts and limitations, which eventually results in a unique voice with its own delights, preoccupations, and worldview. Often that work involves defining what the object of criticism is: a song, an album, an artist’s life, an image, a persona, a book, a jacket, a film, a political protest, a social moment. In Savage’s writing there is surprisingly little actual description of music; instead he is increasingly concerned with the complex relations within a band and between the band and its audience. By the time he set out to write his authoritative England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (1991), the book must have appeared to him as his own personal Excalibur waiting in the stone of the recent past, all his aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical questions, not to mention his life experiences, lodged there for him alone.

Focusing on the Sex Pistols’ explosive rise and fall, he picks up the story in 1971 but narrates most closely, almost month by month, the period from 1975 to 1979, as they became the figureheads of a youth insurgency against postwar British life:

The inevitable condemnations of Punk reflected its contradictory desires and its stupidities, but they were couched in terms so biased and based on an implicit definition of social acceptability that was so restrictive, that it was easy to reject them. If you did so, the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards. If you were a Punk, you suddenly found yourself a scapegoat, an outsider. This realization—part delicious, part terrifying—radicalized a small but significant part of a generation.

It is precisely because of this embattled euphoria, at the intersection of alienation and belonging, that punk has proliferated in various forms around the world—improbably? paradoxically?—for the past half-century.

Central to the Sex Pistols’ story was their mesmeric, impressive, yet strangely unappealing manager, Malcolm McLaren, who was routinely described in the press as the Faginesque (with all the antisemitism that implies) mastermind of that gang of street boys ten years his junior. He and his then romantic and creative partner, Vivienne Westwood, were a visionary couple who seemed preternaturally attuned to the workings of the expanding media industry. There was also the charismatic front man, John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, at personal and artistic cross-purposes with the rest of the band. Even as the Sex Pistols turned against one another, they sporadically united against McLaren’s machinations as he leveraged multiple contracts and major labels to a fevered pitch of publicity, committing the group to appearances, tours, and movie projects with little regard for their mental or financial—not to mention artistic—well-being. In Savage’s hands the tale becomes Shakespearean, a cut-up history, comedy, and—with the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of the Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious, and then the overdose of Vicious himself in 1979—utter tragedy.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

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.

After working at Time magazine for five years, John Gregory Dunne quit and married Joan Didion, “which was,” writes Charlie Lee in our May 28 issue, “possibly the best decision an ambitious young writer and high-society aspirant could have made in the year 1964.” But by the early 1970s, “overtaken by a creeping, directionless despair” and feuding with his wife, Dunne “traveled to Las Vegas with a plan to spend the summer slumming among its seedier denizens and writing a portrait of the city.”

The resulting book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season—which was reprinted last year with a new introduction—was a fitting assignment. Dunne “was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack.” And in Vegas he found the perfect material:

Dice salesmen, exterminators, contraceptive wholesalers, bail bondsmen, toupee stylists, bookies, bellhops, pimps: they all want to talk about money, who has it and who doesn’t, and what you can buy with it, and how to get more of it right now. Dunne haunts the city’s health clubs and steam rooms, eavesdropping on “the dialogue of the used-car tycoon and the parking-lot mogul.”

Below, alongside Lee’s essay, are five of Dunne’s articles about the distasteful and the gutter-bound from our archives.

What Happened in Vegas

Charlie Lee

I defy you to find a writer, a good writer, living or dead, who has talked about money as incessantly and with as much impenitent relish as John Gregory Dunne. He lived, it seems, for the grubby little details: flip through his interviews and you’ll discover a recitation of dollar figures, buyout clauses, basis points. The man rattles off contract terms as a priest recalls the catechism. Here are some snippets from a 1996 interview ostensibly on the “art of screenwriting”:

He paid off our contract at forty cents on the dollar.... To our amazement it sold to some studio, I think it was CBS, which paid us fifty thousand dollars.... We’ve written twenty-three books between us and movies financed nineteen out of the twenty-three.... Six figures a week if you’re any good, hundred grand at the minimum.... Look. It pays a lot and it’s fun.

It does sound like fun.

In Dunne’s actual work—that is, the novels, memoirs, and reported yarns he “financed” by writing movies with his wife, Joan Didion—a great deal of the fun has to do with his exquisite sensitivity to such base particulars. He was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack. Reading him is a bit like walking into a mahogany-paneled library only to find smut on the shelves and shag carpet under your feet. Like any worthy gossip he was known to launch into conversations with the phrase “This you will not believe.” And it wasn’t just about money: as a reporter, his other most abiding subjects were the murky, byzantine maneuvers by which people go about getting famous, getting laid, and getting arrested. “I am drawn to the Santa Monica Courthouse,” he confessed, “the way some people are drawn to church.”

Sometimes, if the fates and the whims of magazine editors aligned, he got to cover all those subjects at once—as when, in 1994, he wrote in these pages about the case of O.J. Simpson. He seems to have been less interested in the murders themselves than in what people said about them, in “the facts, the factoids, the allegations, the half-truths, the untruths, the leaks, the smears.” He wanted the jokes, especially the bad ones: “Did you hear that O.J.’s signed a new contract with Hertz... he’s going to be making license plates for them.... The bad news is O.J.’s going to prison, the good news is that Michael Jackson’s taking the kids.” Most of all, he wanted to know who was getting in on the action, and how. Whatever happened inside the courtroom was less revealing, and less delicious, than the fact that a recent girlfriend of O.J.’s had “parlayed her affair with Simpson into a photo feature in the October Playboy,” or that executives at Universal Pictures had plastered an eighteen-wheeler truck with an ad for their latest superhero flick, The Shadow, and parked it outside the courthouse, where it would be sure to appear in the background of all the news coverage. As one executive put it, “What’s a studio to do when they’ve got close to 100 million viewers watching?”

It’s an odd, at times disturbing piece of writing. Dunne has little sympathy for the victims; his fascination with all manner of sleaziness was so totalizing that it could come at the expense of simple decency. But the essay’s failings are revealing in their own way: in Dunne’s telling, the O.J. story was less a tragedy than a farce, and its central, bumbling villains were not the murderer and his entourage but the reporters—himself included—who descended to get it all in print. He found their instincts dubious, to say nothing of their intentions. Before the night of June 12, 1994, he observed, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown had been “characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity.” That is, they had not spent their painful, messy lives trying to make their deaths an intelligible event. But when one of the most famous men in America was arrested in connection with their murders, “all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime,” Dunne wrote. “The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card,” and this the reporters were happy to provide. The story and its moral came together not in the courtroom but in the conversations they had with one another, or with their editors, in bars or restaurants or on the phone after the workday was over, when they could spend their time “refining and polishing a story by accretion, a narrative that may or may not tell the story of what actually happened.”

It’s an idea that shows up often in Dunne’s work and that, in previous decades, had animated some of the best of it: the suspicion that, if you were to examine the soul of a reporter—even one less partial to prurient fare than Dunne—you would find that telling “the story of what actually happened” did not quite number among his highest priorities. The trueborn reporter will keep a little side action going. His darker purpose could be financial, as in most professions; it could be aesthetic; it could be ideological, as Dunne discovered during the five years he spent in the early 1960s working at Time, a magazine he later described as lacking any “pretense to objectivity,” particularly on the subject of Vietnam. Or it could be personal—as I suspect it was for Dunne in the early 1970s, when he traveled to Las Vegas with a plan to spend the summer slumming among its seedier denizens and writing a portrait of the city. He came back instead with Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which in his typical furtive fashion reads more like a portrait of himself.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

From the Archives: John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003)

• On the O.J. Simpson trial

• On Natalie Wood’s gilt-edged Hollywood

• On the Billionaire Boys Club’s murderous moneymaking

• On the dissolute life of Sam Spiegel

• On working for Time