Stephen Sedley
Rae Armantrout
Thomas Meaney
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
Three decades into “This American Life,” the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of “The Daily.”
By Sarah Larson
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
Plus: Hildegard Bechtler on the art of stage design, very fancy Victorian ice creams, the art market braces for stormy weather, a Madonna pregnant with meaning and a preview of Parcours des Mondes; reviews of Kafka in Oxford, the gardeners of the Bloomsbury Group, and the silversmith who struck gold for Tiffany & Co.
President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. By Jonathan Blitzer
Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
Until recently, it wasn’t clear that the two men would ever share a stage again. Now there’s a potential for even greater stakes and strangeness than four years ago. By Evan Osnos
Neal ElAttrache, the surgeon to the stars of sport and screen, can fix anything. By Zach Helfand
Is the Pennsylvania senator trolling the left or offering a way forward for Democrats? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines.
By Adam Gopnik
The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.
By Zach Helfand
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt.
Allen Lane, 385 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 64766 0
In the 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything could, it seemed, be attributed to anxiety: whether it presented as a specific phobia or a panic attack, a somatic symptom or just a lurking sense of dread, anxiety was at the root. It was this sort of all-purpose explanation, with no apparent scientific rigour or falsifiability, that the authors of DSM-III were trying to root out.
When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.
The State of Israel v. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3
Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, Ap
The Week In Art Podcast (June 14, 2024): This week: it’s arguably the best loved of the major art fairs among collectors and dealers, but what have we learned about the art market at this year’s Art Basel, in its original Swiss home?
The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, tells us about the big sales in Switzerland amid the wider market picture. The journalist Lynn Barber has a new book out, called A Little Art Education, in which she reflects on her encounters with artists from Salvador Dalí to Tracey Emin. We talk to her about the highs and lows of several decades of artist interviews.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Woman Leaning on a Portfolio (1799) by Guillaume Lethière. Lethiére was born in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to a plantation-owner father and an enslaved mother, but eventually became one of the most notable painters of his period in France and beyond. We talk to Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay, the curators of a major survey of Lethière’s work opening this week at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, US, and travelling later in the year to the Louvre in Paris.
Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, until Sunday, 16 June.
A Little Art Education by Lynn Barber, Cheerio, £15 (hb).
The truly disquieting thought was that the cult of personality around the Prime Minister had become suffocating and seemingly impossible to pierce—until now. By Isaac Chotiner
After Governor Kathy Hochul’s flip-flop on congestion pricing, a cop reconsiders his retirement while inching his Lexus through snarled-up traffic on the F.D.R.
By Ben McGrath
Many left-leaning, middle-class Americans speak of kids as though they are impositions, or means to an end.
By Jay Caspian Kang
The Week In Art Podcast (June 7, 2024): This week: we explore the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition dedicated to what Georgia O’Keeffe called her New Yorks—paintings of skyscrapers and views from one of them across the East River, which marked a turning point in her career.
Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the curators of the show, tells us more. One of the most distinctive of all London’s contemporary art spaces, Studio Voltaire, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and has begun a fundraising drive to consolidate its future, with a gala dinner this week and a Christie’s auction later this month. We talk to the chair of Studio Voltaire’s trustees and a non-executive director of Frieze, Victoria Siddall, about the anniversary and the precarious funding landscape, even for the UK’s most dynamic non-profits.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is an untitled painting from the Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth’s 2022 series Francisco de Goya, Still Life with Ribs and Lamb’s Head. Based on a work by the Spanish master in the Louvre in Paris, Jungwirth’s painting features in a new survey of her work that has just opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. We speak to its curator, Lekha Hileman Waitoller.
Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks, Art Institute of Chicago, until 22 September; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from 25 October-16 February 2025.
The date of XXX, as the sale of works to benefit Studio Voltaire at Christie’s is called, is yet to be confirmed. Check the organisations’ websites for updates; Beryl Cook/Tom of Finland, Studio Voltaire, London, until 25 August.
Martha Jungwirth, Guggenheim Bilbao, until 22 September.
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