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
Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. By Jonathan Blitzer
How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington
The President is at the center of a brazenly transactional ecosystem that rewards flattery and lockstep loyalty. By Antonia Hitchens
The Mexican President Who’s Facing Off with Trump
Can Claudia Sheinbaum manage the demands from D.C.—and her own country’s fragile democracy? By Stephania Taladrid
The Powerful Films of the L.A. Rebellion
Also: Adam Gopnik on where to eat near the Frick; Sondheim and Chekhov, Marisa Tomei and Lucas Hedges onstage; the kinetic Afro-pop of Youssou N’Dour; and more.
By Richard Brody, Michael Schulman, Sheldon Pearce, Helen Shaw, Brian Seibert, K. Leander Williams, Jane Bua, and Adam Gopnik
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 16, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Plays for Today’ – On what makes Shakespeare great; Miracles of Siena; Conversations about Gaza; Cyber insecurity and a Letter from Greenland…
What the World Learned from Donald Trump’s Tariff Week
The danger behind the President’s posturing is that, by so emphatically insisting on America’s indispensability, he may be undermining it. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
What Comes After D.E.I.?
Colleges around the country, in the face of legal and political backlash to their diversity programs, are pivoting to an alternative framework known as pluralism. By Emma Green
How to Survive the A.I. Revolution
The Luddites lost the fight to save their livelihoods. As the threat of artificial intelligence looms, can we do any better? By John Cassidy
At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History
The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere. By David Remnick
Protecting the National Airspace, Post-DOGE
For nearly seventy years, the F.A.A.’s experimental safety lab near Atlantic City has run turbulence tests, set fire to seat cushions, and dropped crash-test dummies. Will it survive Elon Musk? By Robert Sullivan
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user. By Kyle Chayka
With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.
Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall
At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?
Boomers Daily 