ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about. By James Somers
Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack
The President’s goals were clear on the first day of his term, when he issued an executive order overruling the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. By Jelani Cobb
Mobsters We Have Seen on High
The jewel heist at the Louvre reminded Brooklynites of the time, in 1952, when two bejewelled crowns were swiped from a beloved local church—the one with a Mob boss on the ceiling. By Susan Mulcahy
The Poems of Seamus Heaney By Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found By Andrew Graham-Dixon
A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene.
Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life By Gerri Kimber
The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry.
The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. By Adam Gopnik
Trump and the Presidency That Wouldn’t Shut Up
His posts and rants are omnipresent, ugly, and unhinged. Don’t look to history to make it make sense. By Jill Lepore
Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid
A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. How long can this last? By Stephen Witt
As a long-overdue ceasefire takes hold amid the ruins of Gaza, the President’s visit to Jerusalem is more about transactional politics than transformative peace. By David Remnick
With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved. By Molly Fischer
Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball
Russell Vought is using the White House budget office to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy—firing workers, decimating agencies, and testing the rule of law. By Andy Kroll
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB “Alien“,which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”
A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.
Authority by Andrea Long Chu
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld
Those Passions: On Art and Politics by T.J. Clark
Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick
The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field
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