• review • December 21, 2016

    They Have, Right Now, Another You

    A few months ago The Washington Post reported that Facebook collects ninety-eight data points on each of its nearly two billion users. Among this ninety-eight are ethnicity, income, net worth, home value, if you are a mom, if you are a soccer mom, if you are married, the number of lines of credit you have, if you are interested in Ramadan, when you bought your car, and on and on and on.

    How and where does Facebook acquire these bits and pieces of one’s personal life and identity? First, from information users volunteer, like relationship status, age, and university affiliation. They also come

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  • excerpt • December 14, 2016

    On Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr

    Christopher Lyon: First I'd like to say something about the book we're here to discuss. This 828-page tome on the art and life of Louise Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 and died in 2010, is the product of some thirty years of work on Robert Storr's part. It comprehensively surveys Bourgeois's career as an artist, which spanned nearly seventy-five years, with more than nine hundred illustrations. Chapters relating Bourgeois's life and analyzing her creative achievement alternate with portfolios, in chronological sequence, that show the unfolding of her oeuvre. The final chapter is a coda that

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  • review • December 09, 2016

    Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life by Philippe Girard

    In 1840, soon after Napoleon Bonaparte's spectacular rise and fall, the always-provocative Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle declared, "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men": Individual heroes who changed the world through sheer willpower, charisma, or exceptional virtue. Carlyle's pantheon included Napoleon, as well as Luther, Shakespeare, Cromwell, and others. The "Great Man" theory of history launched a public debate, one Carlyle would ultimately lose to Herbert Spencer and his enduring thesis that even "great men" must be understood as products of their society.

    In

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  • review • December 06, 2016

    After the Islamic State

    Last May, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the second most powerful leader in the Islamic State, hinted that the caliphate was crumbling. "Whoever thinks that we fight to protect some land or some authority, or that victory is measured thereby, has strayed far from the truth," he said, in a long audio message that was released to fellow-jihadis. He also suggested a shift in strategy. "It is the same—whether Allah blesses us with consolidation or we move into the bare, open desert, displaced and pursued."

    Adnani, a thirty-nine-year-old Syrian, ran the organization's propaganda shop and a secret

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  • review • December 05, 2016

    We Are Orphans Here

    Standing at an intersection in Shuafat Refugee Camp, in East Jerusalem, I watched as a boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a beat-up sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver's-side window, signaling like a Nascar driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about 12.

    "No one cares here," my host, Baha Nababta, said, laughing at my astonishment. "Anyone can do anything they want."

    As Baha and I walked around Shuafat this spring, teenagers fell in behind us, forming a kind of retinue. Among them were cool kids who looked like cool kids the world

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  • review • December 02, 2016

    How to Win at Feminism: The Definitive Guide to Having it All—And Then Some! by Beth Newell, Sarah Pappalardo, and Anna Drezen

    In September 2015, in an effort to appeal to millennial voters, Hillary Clinton submitted to an interview with Lena Dunham for Lenny, Dunham's newsletter. "What would a Clinton administration bring back to the White House?" Dunham asks perkily. Hillary begins: "I will focus on raising incomes, women's rights, and . . . " But Dunham interrupts: "I mean more like what furniture. Like, what cute furniture are you definitely going to bring back with you. Like I don't know if you're into Etsy or Anthropologie." Hillary looks at her with exaggerated shock. "Uh . . . " she falters. It's a nauseatingly

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    The Knockout

    When I was seventeen, I had my long hair cut off in an attempt to emulate Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Alas, it turned out that the Cleopatran effect—a look the young Streisand seemingly cultivated through a combination of thick makeup and pure willpower—wasn't so easy to re-create. I took the precaution of not telling anyone why I'd done it, but even if somebody had wanted to make a joke, Streisand had already beaten them to it. A woman goes to her hairdresser and asks for the "Barbra" look, she used to say. So he takes the hairbrush and breaks her nose.

    One great Streisandian mystery is

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971

    THE INFLUENTIAL AND coolly glamorous gallerist Virginia Dwan finally gets her due in Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971, an impressive exhibition catalogue celebrating her 2013 gift of 250 artworks to the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). Most were acquired directly from the artists she featured in more than 130 shows in her galleries in Los Angeles, beginning in 1959, and New York, where she moved in 1964. Reflecting the era's feverish pace of change, the art reproduced in the book's excellent plate section shows a startling range of styles, from late AbEx and Nouveau

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    The Trauma of the Gifted Child

    Somewhere a child is being hidden. The time is mid-July, 1942, and the first great roundup of Jews—more than thirteen thousand foreign Jews in all, including four thousand children—has begun in Paris, to be followed by more arrests days later in the unoccupied zones. A small boy—"born in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power," he recalls in the memoir he will grow up to write—has been living for two years in Néris, a resort town in France known for its waters, with his parents. Before this, the family has been continually on the run, trying to flee across

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    The Human Factor

    Folks in general, especially those of varied shades of pink and brown most in need of his wisdom and perspective, still haven't discovered, much less figured out, Albert Murray. It's not as though they haven't had enough time to try. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Murray's birth, and he almost made it to the centennial finish line, missing it by three years. His first book, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970 when he was fifty-four, was a collection of essays submitting vibrant, complex, and liberating counterarguments to those—well-intentioned or not, militant and moderate

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    No Witness to an Execution

    At the end of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when the two hapless title characters, aboard their fatal voyage, open the letter that sentences them to death, Guildenstern says: "Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? . . . To be told so little—to such an end—and still, finally, to be denied an explanation—" He doesn't finish the sentence, of course; "to be denied an explanation" is simply his life's condition. In fictional narratives, and in the narratives we piece together uneasily out of history, some lives always seem like that: shapeless, except

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2017

    Never Built New York

    IF YOU BELIEVE New York City's ongoing infestation of sliver towers and chain stores is ruining the town you love, you may find some small cheer in knowing how much worse things could be. Never Built New York provides detailed, copiously illustrated accounts of citywide plans spanning a century—a few intriguing, others fanciful, many examples of outright vandalism—that highlight how technological change, commercial exigencies, and architectural vanity could combine to distastefully ill effect. In his late-1960s effort to "reimagine" Robert Moses's doomed Lower Manhattan Expressway, the

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