Ian Buruma

Otto Dix: Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran. Two Victims of Capitalism, 1923

Art of a Degenerate World

Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One

an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, June 5–September 23, 2018

Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s

by Stefanie Heckmann, Andreas Huyssen, Olaf Peters, Alfred Pfabigan, and Ernst Ploil

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic

an exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, October 27, 2017–February 25, 2018

September 27, 2018 issue

V.S. Naipaul, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, 1981

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018)

September 27, 2018 issue

V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and who tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked.

August 13, 2018

Araki, Erotomaniac

Araki is not shy about his sexual predilections, recorded in thousands of pictures of naked women tied up in ropes, or spreading their legs, or writhing on hotel beds.

May 17, 2018

Lauren Ambrose and Harry Hadden-Paton in My Fair Lady, Lincoln Center Theater, 2018

Doolittle Done Well

To end the musical with the artist and his creation falling into romantic bliss would indeed be a betrayal of Shaw’s intentions. For to be free, in the way Shaw wanted women to be free, Eliza has to break with Higgins.

May 3, 2018

Photograph by Daidō Moriyama from ‘Tokyo Color,’ December 2008–July 2015; included in Daido Tokyo

Stray Dog

On the photography of Moriyama Daidō

Daidō Moriyama: Record

edited by Mark Holborn

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960/1975

edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser

Daido Tokyo

by Daidō Moriyama

April 19, 2018 issue

Nazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II standing to hear the verdict in their trial, Nuremburg, October 2, 1946. Albert Speer is third from right in the back row of defendants; Karl Dönitz is at the far left of the same row.

Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?

Marcel Ophuls’s ‘The Memory of Justice’

The Memory of Justice

a documentary film directed by Marcel Ophuls, restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation

August 17, 2017 issue

Utamaro: Moon at Shinagawa (detail), 1788-1790

Myth-Maker of the Brothel

Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation.

June 29, 2017

Earthenware dog, Henan Province, eastern Han dynasty, 25–220 AD

Ancient China Unburied

The fascinating exhibition of Qin and Han dynasty artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents objects that lay buried in tombs for many centuries.

May 6, 2017

Robert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books, early 1980s

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

May 11, 2017 issue

Kitagawa Utamaro: The Young Man’s Dream, from the series Profitable Visions in Daydreams of Glory, circa 1801–1802. In this woodcut, Ian Buruma writes, a wakashu,or ‘beautiful youth,’ is ‘dreaming of sleeping with a famous high-class courtesan (the dream is revealed in a cartoon-like bubble over his head), while a young woman solicitously wraps a jacket around his shoulders lest he catch a cold.’

The ‘Indescribable Fragrance’ of Youths

A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings (1600–1868)

an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, May 7–November 27, 2016; and the Japan Society, New York City, March 10–June 11, 2017

May 11, 2017 issue

He Wasn’t the Shogun

March 9, 2017 issue

Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute

Silence

a film directed by Martin Scorsese

February 9, 2017 issue

Letter

Gerald E. Kadish

He Wasn’t the Shogun

March 9, 2017 issue

Guy Burgess (right) with the British journalist Tom Driberg, who flew to Moscow after Burgess’s defection to interview him for a biography, August 1956

The Weird Success of Guy Burgess

Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring

by Andrew Lownie

Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone

by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert

December 22, 2016 issue

Oscar Wilde having lunch with Lord Alfred Douglas near Dieppe in 1898, after his release from Reading Gaol

Oscar Wilde’s ‘Living Death’

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison

an exhibition produced by Artangel at Reading Prison, Reading, England, September 4–December 4, 2016

November 24, 2016 issue

Auschwitz on Trial

Mick Jackson’s new film Denial tells the story of the 2000 trial between British Holocaust denier David Irving and American academic Deborah E. Lipstadt.

September 28, 2016

Belgian soldiers posing for a photograph while patrolling the Grand Place, Brussels, December 24, 2015

In the Capital of Europe

Brussels is still a capital in search of a nation

April 7, 2016 issue

China's Exploding Future

Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May Depart, tells the story of Tao, a bouncy young woman caught in a love triangle between two suitors who represent different faces of modern China.

February 17, 2016