THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jed Perl on critical thinking, Mark Lilla on the MAGA nation, Ben Lerner on his heart, Clare Bucknell on female critics in early modern England, Cora Currier on twenty-five years of the “war on terror,” Peter E. Gordon on the religion of sociology, Wyatt Mason on Guy Davenport, Josephine Quinn on St. Augustine of Africa, Geoffrey O’Brien on Kavalier and Clay at the Met, Nitin K. Ahuja on the science of death, Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin, a painting by Maira Kalman, poems by April Bernard and Amit Majmudar, and much more.

Impassioned Ferocity

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

No Judgment by Lauren Oyler

Storm Warnings

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

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann