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.

String Theory

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 & the Warlords

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

Measles Gone Wild

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

The Frick Reinvigorated

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.

A Century of Surrealism

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