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Becoming EuropeanWhy a “personal history”? Why not just a “history” of Europe in the postwar and post-Wall generations, or (if you like) during the long interval...
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The Weight of One StoryThe words “she cries” show up sixty times in total in Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind? The men in the book seem to weep less: “He...
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The Dream of a Universal LibraryIn 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost,...
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Uninhibited QuestionsEven apart from its punning subtitle, Porn seems to have the makings of one of those dubious inquiries into sexual experience whose high-minded...
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Shooting Werner HerzogWhat kind of life should an artist live? In a way this is a nonquestion, in that the only serious answer is whatever life might facilitate the...
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An Unhealthy Definition of RightsThe public health profession uses the term “social determinants of health” to describe the social conditions that combine to influence the health...
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Ever-New Sound WorldsI bought my first Henry Threadgill album in 1988, after seeing him in an advertisement for Dewar’s scotch. At sixteen I couldn’t buy Dewar’s, but...
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‘What Happens at the Edges?’Sometime around 1520 Ferdinand Columbus, second son of the famous Christopher, wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (Charles I of...
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The Emptied Cosmos“Does the world ever speak?” My grandson—an impossibly inquisitive four-year-old—once stopped me in my tracks with that. Years later, I still...
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The Ghost in the Labyrinth“I’m going to give you some advice: never attempt to say what a great book is about,” one young man of letters tells another early in Mohamed...
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Jane Austen Gets DressedA few years ago the dress historian Hilary Davidson set out to create an exact copy of a brown silk pelisse that once belonged to Jane Austen. She...
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A Leaf or Two from WhitmanImagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory,...
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In the Streets of BarcelonaIn the first volume of his memoirs, Forbidden Territory (1985), the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo describes a moment in Paris in the late 1950s...
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Two PoemsScardanelli Speaks Can you hear, will you comprehend, if I speak to you of my long, grieving sickness?—Friedrich Hölderlin How can I sing to you,...
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Out of TimeCalvin and Hobbes ended, nearly thirty years ago, in white: snowfall has turned the woods into a “brand-new” world, as Hobbes puts it,...
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To Our Indolent CancerAh, our lazy, our listless, our lovely, our lingeringlanguid turtle; mooching, smooching slow dancer;dozy, dossing, easygoing footdragger;...
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Writing Under FireIf a single image can stand for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is the one that begins and ends the novel: the American guerrilla...
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The Forest/Wanting a ChildWan light, weightless.With the leaves down, the ridgeshowsthrough the trees, rounded and solid and trust-worthy. Up in the mountainsin the forest,...
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Patterns of Uprooting“Poetry,” Ida Vitale remarks in the essay included in her new collection, “like death, perhaps, is surrounded by explanations.” Now living again...
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Back to the State of NatureThomas Hobbes was one of the most clear-eyed and therefore one of the bleakest of social philosophers. He had no illusions about the innate...
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The Lost WorldOne early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited...
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Inexorable MotionOne of my favorite essays in our November 2 issue, which was also our sixtieth anniversary celebration, was Simon Callow’s review...
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A Bitter Season in the West BankAs war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinian...
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Hidden CrimesIn the December 7, 2023, issue of The Review, Nicolas Niarchos grapples with the conclusions of Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red, an urgent but...
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Bad Facts, Bad LawUntil very recently, few people doubted the government’s authority to disarm domestic abusers. That changed two summers ago, when the Supreme...
