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In the second season premiere of Private Life, host Jarrett Earnest is joined by the writer and critic Lucy Sante to discuss Pauline Kael’s career, pop culture writing, and Sante’s writing for the Review, where she has been a frequent contributor since the 1980s. The conversation focuses on “The Perils of Pauline” (pub
From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense, synchronized, and persist
To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on 157 directors. One of these offers the following superlative assessment: “She remains (now alongside Marguerite Duras) the greatest female auteur of our cinema.” Naming
In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes a
Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single performance. Henrik Ibsen
The concert orchestra is an American specialty. Theodore Thomas, whose touring Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, was the first world-class New World symphonic ensemble, preached, “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera.” Thomas performed Beethoven in cities large and small, coast to coast, no
When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the most adventuresome in
The artist Gladys Nilsson is one of our great watercolorists, and also one of our great mannerists. Mannerist in the sense that she distorts human proportions to stay true both to some private vision and to that very public fact of life, bodily strangeness. On the left side of her tall and hectic watercolor Caught […]
Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the “Apokalypse-Blindheit”—“apocal
Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but of […]
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