January 16, 2025 Issue

James Shapiro

Rebels Without a Cause

In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.

Romeo + Juliet

a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, October 24, 2024–February 16, 2025

Ursula Lindsey

Joy and Apprehension in Syria

There is widespread relief after Assad’s fall, though no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers and challenges that await them.

Adam Hochschild

Evolution in the Dock

In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925.

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

Sarah L. Kaufman

Limitless Space, Endless Motion

When the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky first saw a tape of Balanchine’s Apollo, he watched in disbelief. Here was elegance without exaggeration, tension and beauty without stagy excess.

The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet

by Marina Harss

Elaine Blair

Far from the Seventies

Two memoirs by women remembering their youthful relationships with older men complicate the definition and implications of “consent.”

Consent

by Vanessa Springora, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer

Consent

by Jill Ciment

David Shulman

A Deadly Apathy

A blank indifference to cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war has infected Israel’s collective conscience.

Susan Barba

Player Piano

a poem

Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin’s Spell

In James Baldwin’s writing and public appearances, the social and personal, the spoken and written dissolve into one.

JIMMY! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth

an exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City, August 2, 2024–February 28, 2025

Leo Rubinfien

Chaos and Treasure

No artist has tried harder to get photographs and text to bring each other urgently to life than Jim Goldberg.

Coming and Going

by Jim Goldberg

Candy

by Jim Goldberg

The Last Son

by Jim Goldberg

Open See

by Jim Goldberg

Raised by Wolves

by Jim Goldberg, with Philip Brookman

Rich and Poor

by Jim Goldberg

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Pearl Kan

The Kitchen

a poem

Peter Brooks

Passion’s Countervoices

Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley gives full-throated voice to romantic passion and at the same time contains it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it.

The Lily in the Valley

by Honoré de Balzac, translated from the French by Peter Bush, with an introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien

Trevor Jackson

‘Never Too Much’

If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

by Martin Wolf

Caroline Fraser

Dispirited Away

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

by Eliza Griswold

Rachel Donadio

Unsinkable Paris

The spirit of celebration on the streets of Paris during the Olympics was all the more meaningful to those of us who had lived through so many of the city’s darker recent chapters.

Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century

by Simon Kuper

Paris in Turmoil: A City Between Past and Future

by Éric Hazan, translated from the French by David Fernbach

Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light

by Cole Stangler

V13: Chronicle of a Trial

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by John Lambert, with a postscript by Grégoire Leménager

The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris

by Justinien Tribillon