THE EUROPEAN REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 1, 2025): The latest issue features …Around the world in strawberry red. Schengen’s pseudo-borderless « Europe ». A day in Minsk & an eternity at the border. A trip through Syria’s now-uninhabited terror apparatus (archivists needed). Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, agricultural-novelists in Switzerland & France, tree-huggers in The Hague…
Our first piece from Issue Eight, out from behind the paywall! « It’s best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction. by George Blaustein
World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.
Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon said they still felt sadness and fury. And some, at last, had a sense of closure.
The Trump administration did not immediately provide details about the agreement, and it was not clear what it meant for the future of U.S. military support for Ukraine.
Gates Foundation Is Rattled by Trump’s Threat to Its Mission
As the Trump administration dismantles foreign aid, Bill Gates, whose philanthropy is devoted to global health, is trying to talk to anyone with the president’s ear.
The North America edition showcases Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, who achieved a remarkable victory in Monday’s federal election. As our reporter in Ottawa Leyland Cecco explains, Carney reversed a huge Liberal party poll deficit after voters backed him over his conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, to stand up to the threats of Donald Trump. Can the dour but tough former central banker succeed in fending off the aggressive advances of his US counterpart?
The big story | Kharkiv suffers in the shadow of a peace deal While US-led negotiations threaten to carve up Ukraine, deadly Russian attacks continue amid deep cynicism about the process. Luke Harding reports from a city under siege
Science | Why f ish farms on the moon aren’t such a wild idea The Lunar Hatch project is studying whether aquaculture might be able to provide a source of protein for astronauts on space missions. Kim Willsher paid them a visit
Feature | The dirtiest race in Olympic history How did the 2012 Olympics women’s 1500m get its reputation? Athletes cheated out of medals talk to Esther Addley about what happened – and how the results unravelled
Opinion | Will Pope Francis’s compassionate legacy endure? Some, especially within the US, see the forthcoming conclave as an opportunity to establish a more conservative leader, says Guardian associate editor Julian Coman
Culture | The genius of Barrie Kosky and his Wagner phantasmagoria He put Carmen in a gorilla suit and had Das Rheingold’s Erda represented by a naked elderly woman. What are the the opera director’s plans for his edge-of-the-seat Die Walküre? Fiona Maddocks finds out
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 Vietnam War effectively ended on 30 April 1975 with the arrival of the North Vietnamese army in Saigon. Thousands fled the city, but many more were left behind.
Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes
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
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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