Lost Illusions
November 10, 2021: Twenty Israeli settlers, armed with guns and clubs, their faces masked, descend upon the hamlet of Halat al-Dab’ in the South Hebron hills....
Black Voices, German Song
In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross writes about what he calls “Wagner scenes” in literature—episodes in which a young concertgoer is spiritually transformed by an...
Left Behind in Lisbon
Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if brutally reductive title for this unsparing depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Lisbon, executed by the Portuguese writer...
Ode to February in New York
Even in weekone you show upscuffed and muddyit’s just your natureand no onelikes youbut we drivethrough your townof boot andbouillon factoriesinto March withits shoe storeand soup...
Regarding the Solace of Others
In 1793 the French mathematician, intellectual, and moderate revolutionary the Marquis de Condorcet, who had hoped that the Revolution could bring about a peaceful era of...
Intimate and Invasive
At the small family practice in Edinburgh where I work as a physician, I happen to be the only male staff member—all my medical, nursing, and...
In the Pencil Zone
Readers—fans, devotees—of Susan Bernofsky’s nonet of Robert Walser translations and cotranslations (from Masquerade in 1990 to Looking at Pictures in 2015) have been alerted for some...
Deeper in the Drawer
To the Editors: It has been brought to my attention that the essay on Isaac Babel written by my father, Irving Howe, and described as “recently...
Which Weil?
To the Editors: I am grateful to The New York Review for publishing Jacqueline Rose’s smart and sympathetic essay on Simone Weil [“An Endless Seeing,” January...
Adele FaceTimed sad fans to apologize for her postponed shows. Obviously, everyone cried.
Leave it to Adele to make a COVID-19 cancelation seem almost magical. On Thursday, the British singer-songwriter announced the postponement of her Las Vegas residency, set...
