Reckoning with Nazism in Occupied Norway
To the Editors: In “Planning an Aryan Paradise” [NYR, May 13], Martin Filler writes about Nazi Germany’s plans for occupied Norway (1940–1945). His prime focus is...
Forging an Early Black Politics
At the core of the latest national reckoning over race is an incontrovertible fact: the Civil War killed slavery, but it did not kill entrenched racism...
Dickinson’s Improvisations
“‘It is finished’ can never be said of us,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, and certainly there is nothing finished about Emily Dickinson. Since her death in...
A Haunted Patrimony
Most ages and places have had their iconic forms of self-display. Today we have the carefully curated social media page, with its endless series of aptly...
The Landscapes Inside Us
It is a little-known fact that limpets are brilliant navigators. Renowned for their ability to hold fast, they are surprisingly mobile. When submerged by the incoming...
Dostoevsky and His Demons
How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky, revivified the form...
India’s Streaming Auteurs
My brief love affair with Bollywood—India’s mainstream Hindi-language cinema—began when I was ten, in 1994, with the release of a film called Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!...
More Than Accomplices
One morning in the late spring of 1996, while reporting on the aftermath of the conflict in Bosnia, I was filming in a churchyard in Pale,...
Selfies from Hell
In Martin Amis’s novel Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), a woman with amnesia comes across the works of Jane Austen. “The same thing happened in...
