Our Holiday Issue is online now, with on John Edgar Wideman, on Rachel Carson, Anahid Nersessian on Björk, on Roald Dahl, Marilynne Robinson on science and Scripture, on Keynes, and much more.
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“There is, across all the biographies, a strange sense that, for Roald Dahl, life did not grow bigger and richer, but smaller and shallower—that, by the end of it, he had shrunk into himself, rather like Mr. and Mrs. Twit.” —
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“The so-called Talbot’s Rose, an elaborate genealogical emblem created in 1589 to symbolize the Tudor dynasty,” writes Stephen Greenblatt, “is meant to convey a sense of rightful inheritance, but the image resembles a grotesque face covered with pustules.”
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The current World Cup in Qatar has become both a referendum on its host’s human rights record and a space for competing gestures of solidarity.
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What a masterful essay by on the weird, wonderful utopian thinking of the real John Maynard Keynes, not the technocratic dullard of your Econ 101 textbook.
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A 1944 exchange between Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes on the interior lives of women
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“Until you know how African you are, you will never know how American you are.” That’s how Master T broke it down, and it’s a pleasure to write on his mighty legacies, for , with help from the critic—Greg Tate—who loved him best.
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“A writer’s aesthetic choices provide a guide to what they think matters, and style itself can tell us about their sense of truth and beauty.” —an interview with Michael Gorra
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“I believe we should consider a theology of the present moment. Our best hope is that the world will continue to be as it is now. Granting injuries and losses...we could figure out how to live with the world as it is at present.” —Marilynne Robinson
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“There is such a thing as a recognizable Judith Thurman subject,” writes . “These are women who prefer not to be held captive by definitions. Ambition tends with them to win out over propriety.”
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Michael Gorra on Cormac McCarthy’s new novels: “The Passenger and Stella Maris are different, and a lot of the fun in reading them comes from watching McCarthy do something new.”
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“Although early medieval India was divided into many different competing kingdoms...India as a cultural, sacral, and geographical unit was still the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of Asia.” — on the Indian Ocean
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Susan Tallman on Kerry James Marshall's “Exquisite Corpse.”
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"Rumor has it she became an alcoholic, then a Catholic, then she disappeared entirely."
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Picasso’s work with the photographer André Villers, writes Colm Tóibín, “is a sign, if we needed one, of how much visual energy he could still radiate, how much playfulness and innovation.”
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“Homogenic remains astonishing. The theme is heartbreak; the argument is for murder. Björk’s formerly light-footed forest nymph stomps through the songs, alternately baying for her lover’s blood and sneering at his inadequacies.” —Anahid Nersessian
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“What interests me instead is the process of trying to make sense of a given sensibility—capturing the quiddity of Don DeLillo or Dickens, say, defining what makes them them.” —an interview with Michael Gorra
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“How did German democracy emerge out of such a pervasive exculpatory and selective memory of the recent past?” —Christopher Browning on West Germany’s reckoning after the war
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Michael Gorra reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s two new books for , and I asked him a few questions!
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“She admits that she thrills to the perfectly formed sentence but we hardly need her to tell us as much. The voice is so exact it can pinch. Her prose has high cheekbones.” A fine and exacting appraisal of Judith Thurman’s work by for
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“We can remember that within it all floats tiny Earth, gleaming and blooming gaudily in a universe where nothing else blooms.” —Marilynne Robinson on life, the universe, and much else besides
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The recent Supreme Court argument on affirmative action, writes, “highlighted the lengths to which this Court will need to go in order to determine that the policies of Harvard and UNC are discriminatory.”
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The World Cup, writes , has brought Qatar “the global showcase it spent a fortune pursuing—as well as more scrutiny than it may have bargained for.”
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Judith Thurman, writes , “takes it as a central tenet that a good girlhood is a wasted girlhood, an observation she offers wistfully.”
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“I’m interested in the shapes of careers, in the way that one book answers and builds on its predecessors, responds to the shelf that’s stretched out behind it.” —Michael Gorra, interviewed by Sam Needleman
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“Putin has done more to extricate Ukrainians from their long history of entanglements with Russia and the Soviet Union than any one Ukrainian nationalist could ever hope to.”
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This article on Russian #fascism from 5 years ago treats the influence of Ivan Ilyin's fascist theory on Putin. Ilyin's ideas, down to the anti-Satanism that is Russia's current casus belli, are prominent in Russian media. Putin last quoted Ilyin on 9/30
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"It has been a long time since a Black justice on the Court has spoken with such depth and experience about the many ways in which race can be deeply entwined with identity and self-expression." -
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Wow. Just a brilliant - and beautifully written - review by of the new Paul Newman memoir in the current .
Can't recommend this highly enough:
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“Incarceration, in Wideman’s writing, is the crux of modern life: where the shrieks of chattel slavery meet the drone of spinning capital, as the mind chokes, the body breaks, words melt, and force rules.” — on John Edgar Wideman
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Michael Gorra on The Passenger and Stella Maris, which may be Cormac McCarthy’s final novels: “While they are recognizably his, they don’t distill his earlier achievement, as late work so often does. They expand it.”
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