Poetry a special section Black poetry by William Logan Shakespeare’s words by Amit Majmudar Bachmann: the unspeakable spoken by Peter Filkins The new & the old by Katie Hartsock The answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quignard
New translations by Ryan Choi, Frederick Amrine, Patrick Whalen & Beverley Bie Brahic
Israel’s eternal dilemma by Victor Davis Hanson Enrique Gómez Carrillo by Anthony Daniels The singularity of speech by Wilfred M. McClay A life in ballet by Peter Martins
New poems by Amit Majmudar, James Matthew Wilson & Michael Casper
The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.
In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World by Ulinka Rublack
In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.
Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World by Eliane Brum, translated from the Portuguese by Diane Whitty
The importance of Homer by Joshua T. Katz Galaxy brains by Gary Saul Morson The Thames: river of destinies by Jeremy Black “Breakfast Special”: a new story by Woody Allen
New poems by Nicholas Friedman, Jessica Hornik & Michael Spence
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton
Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence by Cécile Fabre
On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.
The New York Review of Books (December 28, 2023) – The latest issue featuresBen Tarnoff on Elon Musk, Julian Bell on Peter Paul Rubens, Fintan O’Toole on the American gerontocracy, Anjum Hasan on recent Sri Lankan fiction, Matthew Desmond on America’s Covid-era experiment with a social safety net, Francine Prose on a vampiric celluloid Pinochet, James Gleick on the science of free will, Frances Wilson on Tove Jansson and the Moomintrolls, Álvaro Enrique on indigenous Americans in Europe, Katie Trumpener on Alexander Kluge, two poems by Jack Underwood, and more.
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
The New York Review of Books (December 21, 2023 Issue) – The latest issue features—the Holiday Issue—with Susan Tallman on William Kentridge, David Shulman on violence in the West Bank, Neal Ascherson on Timothy Garton Ash’s Europe, Elaine Blair on what we talk about when we talk about porn, Rebecca Giggs on the return of dinosaurs, Kathryn Hughes on Jane Austen’s fashion, Mark O’Connell on Werner Herzog, Linda Greenhouse on Covid in the courts, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes, John Banville on liberalism after Hobbes, poems by Lindsay Turner and Greg Delanty, and much more.
Imagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory, with Walt Whitman as a featured speaker. Partially paralyzed by a stroke and described as “reckless and vulgar” by The New York Times—Leaves of Grass was soon to be banned for indecency by the Boston district attorney—Whitman, who had just turned sixty, may well have wondered why he, instead of some respectable graybeard like Emerson, was invited. Was it because he had defended John Brown, the hero of free-soil Kansas? Or was it hoped that a visit might inspire something like his 1871 “Song of the Exposition,” in which Whitman admonished the Muse:
Migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath… For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Hatzegopteryx, a giant pterosaur that lived around 66 million years ago on a subtropical island in what is now Romania; from Prehistoric Planet
Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.
One early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited as much in his Principles of Geology, arguing that since the planet’s climate was cyclical (or so he believed), vanished creatures could yet be revived, along with their habitats, when the right conditions came back around: “The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” As to whether people would get to witness the spectacle of this resurrected bestiary—well, if Lyell was never drawn to that question, it was because the answer was not up for debate. His was an age in which the prospect of Earth bereft of human occupancy was too abominable, too sacrilegious, to contemplate.
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