Benjamin Moser

The Cost of ‘Order and Progress’

The life of the explorer Cândido Rondon suggests that Brazil might have taken another path—one that avoided the devastation of its ecosystem and the decimation of its indigenous peoples.

Desperately Not Seeking Susan

“The strong feelings about Sontag were exactly what I dreaded when I was first asked to do the biography. If I’d cared too much about that, I couldn’t have written it.”

Sarajevo Revisited

Retracing my own steps to Bosnia, which were earlier in Susan Sontag’s footprints, I found the city still scarred yet inspiring in its affirmation of human dignity.

Sontag in Sarajevo

Her Godot in Sarajevo did answer some of Sontag’s essential questions about the usefulness of modern art. It did not save the boy on the bike whom Leibovitz photographed. Nor did it usher in military intervention. But she found a way to offer everything she had.

Llansol, Poet of the Posthumous

The longer one inhabits Maria Gabriela Llansol’s world, the more one sees what it might mean to write against the novel, to create prose that could aspire to the status of a living being, one that moves and exists without having some artificial form imposed upon it.

Dreaming Up Rio

A new collection Marc Ferrez’s photographs of Rio—with its great forests blanketing its granite-and-crystal mountains, its bright beaches lining its glittering bay—shows a city so glorious that it seems calculated to induce belief in the Creator as a benevolent gardener.

Memories of Susan

Not Rembrandt, But…

Rembrandt & The Jews

Rembrandt—The Jewish Connection?

Pioneers

Small Wonder

Eckhout in Brazil

Start Spreading the News

Dutch Treat

Saboteur in Texas

Culture & the Market