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
Mary Robison on the Art of Fiction: “The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”
Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.”
Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.
Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”
Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.
Art by Farah Al Qasimi and Chris Oh.
Country Life Magazine (June 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Why we adore Venus’, Move over Buckingham Palace – Our grandest houses, Jeremy Clarkson’s favorite painting and Old Masters – Chippendale and Coward revisited…
The television presenter and farmer immerses himself in the age of steam by selecting a 19th-century masterpiece that really stokes the imagination
Michael Hall lays bare the story of the art world’s enduring love affair with the alluring goddess Venus, from the 4th century BC right up to the modern era
Iridescence is one of the natural world’s greatest special effects. Laura Parker showcases the shimmering, jewel-like hues that can take your breath away
It’s the final straw for Hetty Lintell as she picks perfect summer accessories crafted from raffia
Giles Kime is whisked through a Sicilian palazzo, a Gothic castle and a Baroque bedroom thanks to the wonders of WOW!house
The London homes of the British aristocracy were often grander than their country counterparts and perfect for entertaining, says Lucien de Guise
Mugwort is connected with child-birth as ‘the mother of herbs’, but John Wright prefers to focus on its many uses in the kitchen
Why are beaming faces such a rarity in our portrait galleries? Claudia Pritchard seeks out the grins among the grimaces
Puck has been causing mayhem and misery for a millennium and more. Ian Morton traces the story of the mischievous sprite
Scotland’s only furniture school is keeping alive the old crafts of upholstery and marquetry, doing justice to its Chippendale name, as Mary Miers discovers
Michael Billington finds a depth of emotion behind the laughs in a rare revival of Noël Coward’s last work — a welcome antidote to mind-boggling technology
In the second of two articles, John Goodall applauds the remarkable revival of Wolterton Hall in Norfolk as a modern home equipped for the 21st century
Victoria Marston hails Douglas Bunn, whose desire to test top British riders to the max led to the drama of the Hickstead Derby
Kathryn Bradley-Hole finds no end of reasons to stop and stare as she explores the dramatic garden created from a flat water-side site at Emmetts Mill, Surrey
Melanie Johnson conjures up a trio of dishes to demonstrate the versatility of the courgette
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).
Country Life Magazine (June 11, 2024): ‘The Green Issue’ features How to make the Countryside beautiful again….
As the General Election looms large, we present our practical 10-point plan that could make a real difference to the planet
Soil is both full of life and the very stuff of life, so it’s high time we stopped treating it like dirt, suggests Sarah Langford
Building ‘ecoducts’ to connect wildlife habitats separated by road and rail is the way forward, argues John Lewis-Stempel
Jane Wheatley meets the biodynamic farmers following the lunar calendar to tend their crops in tune with Nature
What happened to the golden fleece? Harry Pearson tracks the fall of wool from medieval marvel to unwanted by-product
Madeleine Silver profiles the people, places and products currently turning heads with genuinely green credentials
Helen Scales wades in to forage for seaweed, seeking everything from sea spaghetti to sugar kelp
James Alexander-Sinclair talks to John Little about the amazing diversity of his garden in Essex
Royal favourite Edward Seago lived a life as vibrant, varied and colourful as his paintings, discovers Peyton Skipwith
The commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards chooses a majestic portrait of Elizabeth II
Minette Batters celebrates the remarkable recovery of grey partridge on the South Downs
In the first of two articles, John Goodall examines the creation of Wolterton Hall in Norfolk
Russell Higham applauds the enduring appeal of Britain’s elegant Victorian bandstands
David Austen dedicated his life to creating the perfect English rose, as Tiffany Daneff reveals
Hetty Lintell casts her net far and wide for fishy accessories
Giles Kime hails designers who are at one with the environment
The Dunvegan Castle gardens are a verdant oasis on the Isle of Skye, finds Caroline Donald
Wormwood is an old absinthe ingredient best kept at arm’s length, advises John Wright
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.
Boomers Daily 