March 21, 2024 Issue

Gary Younge

Small Island

What has happened to Britain?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view.

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by William Egginton

Mosab Abu Toha

The Moon

a poem

J. Hoberman

Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

by John Szwed

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024

Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences

by Bret Lunsford

Sigrid Nunez

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.

The Body of the Soul

by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Richard Sieburth

Time & Task

a poem

Joshua Hammer

Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage

Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion.

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War

by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization

by Leon McCarron

Frances Wilson

‘Diabolical Fame’

Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

by Roger Lewis

David Cole

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

A number of cases before the Supreme Court this term will determine the future of free speech on the Internet.

Social Media, Freedom of Speech and the Future of Our Democracy

edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone

Jessica Riskin

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 30: 1882, Supplement to the Correspondence 1831–1880

edited by Frederick Burkhardt, James A. Secord, and the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project

Peter Brooks

In Search of His Vocation

The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.”

Finding Time Again

by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Ian Patterson

The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts

by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, and with a preface by Jean-Yves Tadié

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Cost of Our Debris

The stated purpose of Jay Owens’s new book is to “think with dust,” specifically “human-made” dust and what it reveals—the forensic fingerprint, so to speak, that our species has left upon this planet.

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles

by Jay Owens

Linda Greenhouse

Social Progress & the Courts

For decades Gerald Rosenberg, author of The Hollow Hope, has argued that courts labor under structural constraints that will almost always deprive them of the ability to bring about significant change. He would be entitled to a triumphant “I told you so” but for one dramatic development: the 2015 Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?

by Gerald N. Rosenberg

Jonathan Steele

The Party Line

A new book about Western journalists’ experience in Moscow during World War II sheds light on the problems of media manipulation and self-censorship in coverage of Russia today.

The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War

by Alan Philps

Lily Meyer

Nefer’s Mission

Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January, about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose.

January

by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy

Catherine Barnett

Letters

Manolis Vasilakis

Finally, No More Fees

Issue Details

Cover art
Nathanaëlle Herbelin: Oiseaux, Version 2, 2022 (HV-studio/Nathanaëlle Herbelin/Xavier Hufkens, Brussels)
Series art
Joana Avillez: Letraset, 2024