Although advances in science and technology are often portrayed as the work of solitary men—for example, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein—science has always been a collective enterprise, dependent on many individuals who work behind the scenes.
In February, 2009, the British medical journal Brain published an article on the intersection of health and politics titled “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?” The authors were David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary, who is also a physician and neuroscientist, and Jonathan Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, who has studied the mental health of politicians. They proposed the creation of a psychiatric disorder for leaders who exhibited, among other qualities, “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to
Like much of Beckett’s work, “Watt” is funny and bleak and also uncompromising in its indifference to such readerly comforts as plot and accessibility. The novel follows its title character as he goes to work as a domestic servant in the home of Mr. Knott. Combine “Watt” and “Knott” and you get “whatnot,” and for some readers, assuredly, “Watt” will never be more than that: two hundred and fifty pages of mannered prose, showy vocabulary (“ataraxy,” “conglutination,” “exiguity”), syllogisms, lists, and Gertrude Stein-like repetitions and variations.
The cagey narrator of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, A Separation, is an unnamed woman who has recently separated from her unfaithful husband, Christopher. He has asked her to keep the split a secret. When Christopher stops returning his mother’s phone calls while traveling in Greece, the narrator is enlisted to go find him, feeling she has no choice but to make the trip. She travels to the small village where he was staying and pretends to perform her wifely duties as she searches for her husband, all the while planning to ask for a long-overdue divorce. Even though Christopher exists
Remember “masturbating with a magazine”? Not the actual act (though that, too), but the opening scene of the late genius Prince Rogers Nelson’s 1984 “Darling Nikki,” in which our hero catches the title character in a hotel lobby, in solo flagrante with the glossy pages of an unnamed publication. As the critic and novelist Ben Greenman reminds us in his new book, Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince (Henry Holt, $28), that line led directly to Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center’s congressional crusade against “objectionable” music, making
It was not just the suddenness of his death that made it hard to realize Louis Kahn was gone. Something about the way he disappeared from the world—irregularly, mysteriously, with that strange two-day gap when nobody he knew could find him—left many people unable to take in the facts of his death.
Just when you’re about to do a proper job as critic, assessing Jeff VanderMeer’s latest and looking at his previous, considering, too, his worldwide success and the good it’s done for science fiction generally—just when you’re about to get serious, his new novel, Borne, hits you with the likes of this:
Mary Gaitskill’s nonfiction differs from her fiction not in quality—the essays in Somebody with a Little Hammer are as intense as the stories—but in delivery and voice. Like Chekhov, Mary Gaitskill uses simple, concrete language to bottle human desire. (She would not use that metaphor. In fact, there are few authors less likely to resort to metaphor than Gaitskill.) Here, though, the first person allows Gaitskill to turn the camera on herself in a way that fiction precludes. In her unboxing of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Gaitskill opens with a joke that both perforates her subject and undoes a stereotype:
Dribbledrams! Doodledums! Nitwitteries! Fools! Thugs! Jackass! Moron! Buffoons! Cowards! Delinquent! Old biddies, the mulligrubs, to motturize. These are among the words and phrases—a litany of family sayings coined, inherited, and appropriated—that are repeated throughout Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. They accrue as the book goes on, evoking a vivid and particular linguistic world: A Barbison, most eminent Signor Lipmann, white lady cutlet, don’t say it’s the teeth, that girl’s going to marry the gasman, I cannot go on painting, sulfuric acid stinks of fart, you too have your little things, the Brot shot in the pot, I don’t recognize my Germany
A 2013 report on the Obama administration’s reaction to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the costs and consequences of a military response.
Cat Marnell—the popular drug-addicted beauty editor and blogger—has written the kind of ’90s-era junkie memoir that lends itself to the morbid curiosity we reserve for anyone who dies before we discover their work. Like Anna Kavan, a lifelong imbiber of heroin, Marnell published her first piece of writing as an addict. (When Kavan died, her friends found forty different shades of lipstick in her apartment.) Marnell’s story does not veer into the kind of self-mythologizing that occasions armchair fact-checking. In fact, it’s a departure from a career spent transmogrifying her troubles for an eager audience.
That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording. People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals. I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I’d found it, without change or addition. I collected audio of thunderstorms, music coming out of cars, the subway trains rumbling underfoot; it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral. I had a
Readers could be forgiven for assuming that the biographer of an architect might devote her most incisive analysis to the work of her subject, particularly if that subject happens to be widely acknowledged as one of the masters of the twentieth century. The first, bracing surprise in Wendy Lesser’s new account of the life of Louis Kahn, then, is that some of its most insightful passages are dedicated to a structure that was not even designed by Kahn, and is surely a serious contender for the title of Worst Building in America. The “monstrosity” in question is New York’s current
In 1989, John Ahearn, a white artist living in the South Bronx, cast a group of local black and Latino people for a series of bronze sculptures commissioned by the city for an intersection outside a police station. As his models, he chose a drug addict, a hustler and a street kid. Ahearn thought that he was paying them homage, restoring the humanity of people who were often vilified in American society. His models found the work flattering, but some members of the community felt that he ought to have depicted more ‘positive’ representatives, while others were insulted that a
The idea was to go for a walk: the baby in a stroller, the child by the hand, the path straight and scenic, the weather warm and breezy, the family fine and in good humor.
Serious writing and thought, he knew, wasn’t a hopeless but honorable pursuit; for the Review’s subscribers it was an essential part of life. An intellectual magazine with a larger, more devoted readership than many lifestyle publications—he proved that was possible.
The solitary artist on the snowy ridge of Peter Doig’s Figure in Mountain Landscape (1997–1998) couldn’t be farther from the Caribbean. Back turned, he looks over his easel toward a smattering of evergreens on a mauve hillside. It is winter, but there is hardly any white on the canvas, and the distant lime-green mountains suggest the arrival of spring. The painter, a flame in the wilderness, seems almost to smolder, covered in jagged pink patches as though pictured by a thermographic camera.
In 2016, the last manufacturer of VCRs, the Funai Corporation, announced it was halting production. Analog holdouts looking to replace their players were finally out of luck. While the obsolescence of VHS may seem like a technological footnote, it also represents a tangible cultural loss. When the Yale University Library acquired roughly 2,700 horror and exploitation films from 1970s and ’80s on VHS tape, the librarian, David Gary, explained that the movies revealed the “cultural id of an era.” Now that VHS has become a relic, it has also become fodder for cheap thrills and shared nightmares: Many films of
A feminism for the 99 percent has been forged by working-class immigrant women who confronted Harvard’s first female president and Sheryl Sandberg.
“You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman,” writes Lauren Elkin, author of the wide-ranging and inspiring new book about walking in the city, Flâneuse. “Just walk out your front door.”
