The New Yorker (June 17, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresAdrian Tomine’s “Eternal Youth” – For parents trying to look hip, no effort goes unpunished.
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
After the European Elections, President Macron Makes a Gamble
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
Deaccessioning the Delights of Robert Gottlieb
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.
London Review of Books (LRB) – June 14 , 2024: The latest issue features Good Riddance to the Torries; Adam Shatz on ‘Israel’s Descent’; Patricia Lockwood – My Dame Antonia; William Davies – Generation Anxiety…
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
Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2024): The latest issue features Freud’s Discontents – George Prochnik on the father of psychology; A great novel on the American Frontier; Death becomes them – The mourning rituals of the Victorians; Cover-up – An atrocity committed by US troops in the Philippines….
The New Yorker (June 10, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Pawns in the Park” – The artist captures a corner of calm contemplation in the midst of New York’s hustle and bustle.
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.
Times Literary Supplement (June 5, 2024): The latest issue features Reading the Raj – E.M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’, Way-Out Philosophy, Michelangelo at the British Museum…
The New Yorker (May 30, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features John Cuneo’s “A Man of Conviction” – The former President is found guilty on all thirty-four counts.
The jury has convicted the former President of thirty-four felony counts in his New York hush-money trial. Now the American people will decide to what extent they care.
When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open
In the courtroom with the former President at the moment he became a convicted felon.
London Review of Books (LRB) – May 29 , 2024: The latest issue features Daniel Trilling – Trouble with the Troubles Act; Primordial Black Holes; The Village Voice….
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
Times Literary Supplement (May 29, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Kafka’s Century’ – Karen Leeder, Becca Rothfeld, Gabriel Josipovici, Michael Hofmann et al…; Colm Toibin returns to Brooklyn; India under Modi; A Jim Crow insane asylum and Literary cricket…
The New Yorker (May 27, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features
Sergio García Sánchez’s “Scoot” – The artist depicts the thrill of leaning into summer in the city.
The People’s Commencement at Columbia
It’s 1968 all over again, as New York Ivy Leaguers flip the script and stage an unofficial counter-graduation ceremony at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The Bronx Cheers—Mostly—for Trump
Biden’s a pedophile; Trump’s a fascist; the maga Hasidim have to get their act together—and other sentiments spewed at the former President’s rally in Crotona Park.
How to Pick Stocks Like You’re in Congress
The team at Autopilot, an app that lets you copy the trades of Nancy Pelosi’s husband (up forty-five per cent last year) or Dan Crenshaw (up forty-one), choose their newest offering.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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