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
THE NEW REPUBLIC MAGAZINE (April 23, 2025): The latest issue features ‘How the Radical Right Captured The Culture’…
Who Were Those Gullible People Who Believed Donald Trump’s Bullsh*t?
His campaign promises, from peace in Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many people believed him.
Will Trump Finally Kill the Bretton Woods System?
For better and often for worse, the U.S.-led IMF and World Bank have dominated the post–World War II international economy. Project 2025 and the Trump administration could change that.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW (April 23, 2025): The Creativity Issue features Defining creativity in the Age of AI: Meet the artists, musicians, composers, and architects exploring productive ways to collaborate with the now ubiquitous technology. Plus: Debunking the myth of creativity, asteroid-deflecting nukes, bitcoin-powered hot tubs, and a new way to detect bird flu.
Forget one-click creativity. These artists and musicians are finding new ways to make art using AI, by injecting friction, challenge, and serendipity into the process.
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
Boomers Daily 