Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

The Guerrilla Scholar

Mambo, for Robert Farris Thompson, was everything.

Shadows Across the Decades

Francisco Goldman’s latest novel is a book about and by a writer journeying across space but also back in time, at least in his mind, to the places that made him.

Naming New York City

The words we use to refer to streets, buildings, and public places make maps of meaning across the city.

Pandemic Journal

The latest edition of our brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Coco Fusco in Brooklyn, Lucas Adams in Brooklyn, Sara Nović in Philadelphia, Gavin Francis in Edinburgh, and more.

Aretha’s Grace

As the documentary Amazing Grace shows, what made Aretha a singer for all time was her ability to worry a song’s notes, as they say in church—to hold them, to show us their facets and colors, and open new ways to enter and feel their meaning.

Chris Ofili: Caged in Paradise

I think of something Chris Ofili said once, about cages and songs and liberation and constraint and how they may all relate to what it is to be human. I asked him if he might point me to where in his adopted home of Trinidad he’d taken certain shots of ball courts and palms. His typical reply makes me laugh: “Seeking is better than finding.”

World Cup 2018: Football Sans Frontières

Social democracy isn’t just the way to win at public health outcomes; it’s the way to win at sport, too.

World Cup 2018: Hope Wins

Jules Rimet started the World Cup in 1930. The 1970 tournament in Mexico helped to transform his beloved sporting event into the outsized media spectacle we know today, awash in cash and global, not just in name, but in reach.

Picturing Haiti’s Freemasons

In colonial Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti)—where Freemasonry arrived with French merchants and soldiers—it became one of the few European institutions that admitted black members.

Life on the Verge

A Caribbean Literary Renaissance

In recent years there’s been a renaissance in Caribbean letters. “The Caribbean is really coming into its own, and that’s good for all of us,” says novelist Marlon James.

Dominica: After the Storm

Lennox Honychurch wrote the book on Dominica. Born on this small, mountainous island in the Windward Antilles in 1952, he first published The Dominica Story in 1975. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro spoke to him after Hurricane Maria blasted the island with 160-mile-per-hour winds, leaving it decimated.

A Perfect Storm

Grenada's Revolution

After 1983, Grenada was known for the traumas left by a sad episode of the cold war whose legacy, for our current political era, is the subject of a welcome new documentary film.

Yale vs. History

I couldn’t help feeling ambivalent about the news that Yale had decided to rename John C. Calhoun College. I worry about the dangers of condescending to the past—about the ways that removing history’s visible traces, in a putative effort to fight its legacies, can more harm that cause than help it.

‘The Bob Marley Story’

The Bob Marley Story