Yuk! Pshaw! Excelsior! Fifty Years of Headlines from The New York Review | Matthew Howard

Throughout its first fifty years, The New York Review of Books has asked many questions: What is Art? How Did it Happen? Where Do We Go From Here? Yonder Shakespeare, Who Is He? Tennis Anyone? How Dead is Arnold Schoenberg? Aimez-Vous Rousseau? Is There a Marxist in the House? How Smelly Was the Palladian Villa? Do Fish Have Nostrils?

It has also addressed many other more serious questions: The Suez Question, The Heidegger Question, Senator Proxmire’s Questions, Questions About Kafka. Sometimes it broached The Unanswered Question, or even Answers Without Questions. But some questions the Review answered forthrightly: Was it Xenophanes? It Was. The Roof? It Was. Knopf? No. Freud? It Wasn’t. And it has tackled many mysteries: Leonardo. Schizophrenia. The Libidinous Molecule. Dutch Painting. Innocence. Consciousness. The Panda.

If God is in the details, the Review has examined many of them: God’s Country, Milton’s God, The Great God Wish, God in the Computer, God in the Hands of Angry Sinners. The devil has also been given his due: his Disciple, his Brew, looking him in the Face, The Devil and Lolita, The Devil and the Flesh, Sex and the Devil.

Speaking of sex, the Review has not been shy about it: Sex in the Head, Sex and Fashion, Sex & Czechs, Sex and the Church, not to mention Sex and Democracy in Taiwan, The Victorian Sex Wars, The Same-Sex Future, Those Sexy Puritans.

In some cases the Review has given stern, if useful, advice: Don’t Sing Your Crap. Don’t Say “Boo” to a Goose. Don’t Tread on Us. Don’t Forget Keynes. Don’t Mind If I Do. Tell, Don’t Show. Don’t Take Our Raphael!

Exclamations! They started in 1963 with Oy! Then Oy, Oy! came the reply, inaugurating an exuberant tradition that, five decades later, numbers well over two hundred examples. Pshaw! Gulp! Excelsior! Ach! (Those were all in the first few years.) Coleridge Lives! Nixon Wins! Kids, Pull Up Your Socks! Screwed! Get a Lawyer! Ah, Wilderness! Yuk! How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Baudelaire! That’s Earl, Folks! O Albany! The Pizza Is Burning! It’s For Your Own Good!

There have been more than a few firsts (The First Laugh, First Love, The First Book, First Trip to China) and quite a lot of lasts: The Last Word, Whig, Intellectual, Hippie, Romantic, and Harpoon, The Last Word on Evil, The Last Days of Nietzsche (also of Nature, Pinochet, the Poets, New York, and Hong Kong). Endings have been a particular theme: The End of the Affair, End of the Line, End of its Tether—but also, more hopefully, The Beginning of the End, Oddly Brilliant Beginnings, and Where the Fun Starts.

Games have been played: The Lying Game, Confidence Games, Cat-and-Mouse Games, The Waiting Game in the Balkans, War Games in the Senate. And many Strange and Curious Cases have been described, from that of Pushkin and Nabokov through Jefferson’s Subpoena, the Spotted Mice, and the Loony Lexicographer.

Review headlines have been rich in superlatives: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. The Best Turnips on the Creek, How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy. The Best of Both Worlds, The Worst Place on Earth. The Best Faces of the Enlightenment, The Worst of the Terror. The Best He Could Do.

“He”—who’s he? or she? One of the Review’s distinctive headline constructions has been what might be called the Pronoun with Indeterminate Antecedent. Was He Peeking? Did He Goof? She Was from Seattle. He Had His Ups and Downs. They Never Met. What Did He Really Think About Race? He Knew Manet. She Was His Concubine. They Didn’t Use Animals. They’d Much Rather Be Rich. They’re Taking Over!

Devoted nyrbologists will no doubt have their own favorites. Space constraints prevent a full listing from a a a a a a… to Zuni Tunes so what follows is merely a selection from the more than 19,000 headlines published in the first fifty years of The New York Review of Books.

Greetings

Hello to Berlin
Hello Out There
Hello, Dolly!
Welcome to al-Sadr City!
Welcome to Doomsday
Welcome to New Dork
Welcome to Munciekin Land
Welcome Homer!
Greetings from Far Away
Hello to All That
Hello to All That
Hello to All That
Hello to All That!