“The dollar plays a similar role to that of the English language in global commerce”, writes Edward Chancellor in his lead review of three books devoted to American financial supremacy. “Both enjoy network effects: the more they are used, the more others are obliged to use them.”
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour
Letters
Galen Strawson, Rachel Hammersley, Colin McArthur, Jeremy Whiteley, Richard Davenport-Hines, Terry Hanstock, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, George Anderson, Koldo Casla, Martin Rose
Ed Kiely
Short Cuts: University Finances
Susan Pedersen
Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Neal Ascherson
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis by Norman Lewis, introduced and selected by John Hatt
The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.
The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel
An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker
Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home
Other cities have better infrastructure, fewer rats, cleaner streets, plentiful public toilets, more elbow room. Yet people continue to flock here.
By Alexandra Schwartz
Ed Helms Dives Into Disaster
In a new book, the boundlessly curious “Hangover” star probes history’s greatest blunders—like how the C.I.A. tried to make Castro’s beard fall out—as a way to face the present.
By Henry Alford
Why Can’t New York Have Nice Mayors?
As the Trump Administration encroaches on the city, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams try to salvage their political careers.
THE EUROPEAN REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 1, 2025): The latest issue features …Around the world in strawberry red. Schengen’s pseudo-borderless « Europe ». A day in Minsk & an eternity at the border. A trip through Syria’s now-uninhabited terror apparatus (archivists needed). Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, agricultural-novelists in Switzerland & France, tree-huggers in The Hague…
Our first piece from Issue Eight, out from behind the paywall! « It’s best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction. by George Blaustein
Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we’re headed—or where we already are. By Andrew Marantz
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (April 24, 2025): The latest issue features the Art Issue—with Susan Tallman on warp and weft, Ingrid D. Rowland on Vitruvius, Jerome Groopman on antivaccine lunacy, Martin Filler on the new Frick, Julian Bell on art in an age of crisis, Lisa Halliday on Claire Messud, Heather O’Donnell on the Morgan librarian, Noah Feldman on the rule of law, Jarrett Earnest on fancy furnishings, Madeleine Thien on Fang Fang, Coco Fusco on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jed Perl on Surrealism, poems by Ben Lerner and Carmen Boullosa, and much more.
Two exhibitions focused on weaving go beyond the functional, the folkloric, and the feminine, tracking fiber’s escape from the connotations of the grid.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction – an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, April 20–September 13, 2025
Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art – An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.
All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes by Indra Kagis McEwen
During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.
Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health by Adam Ratner
So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levenson
In an ambitious and long-overdue renovation, the architect Annabelle Selldorf attempted to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic while asserting her Modernist credentials.
One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying making sense of its aims and effects.
Surrealism – an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 4, 2024–January 13, 2025, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 8, 2025–February 6, 2026
Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton, translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Revised and Updated Edition by Mark Polizzotti
Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School by Martica Sawin
Surrealism and Painting by André Breton, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor, with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 