Lucy Jakub

Be Yourself

In her debut film, Janet Planet, the playwright Annie Baker tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard. 

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

A Ghibli Girlhood

“Learning the conditions under which a beloved childhood movie was made can be a loss of innocence, but in the case of Miyazaki, that’s exactly what the films are about.”

Love’s Work

In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.

Who Swims with the Scientist?

“I learned how to duct-tape my feet and walk through blackwater swamps in sandals and shorts, a vastly helpful form of literary qualification.”

A Toxic Bottom Line

“Solidarity between the environmental and labor movements would be powerful because it could provide a vision of a future that isn’t based on extraction.”

A Poet in the Academy

“My experience of writing essays as a poet is like Milton’s notion of his prose being the achievement of his left hand.”

The Asymmetry of Gender

“I’m not ready to jettison identity as a route into political awareness and action. But identity is not politics itself.”

An Evolving View of Inheritance

“Instead of aiming for purity, science should aspire to self-awareness and engagement in a larger project of understanding.”

Perversions of Historical Memory

“Writing about Russia feels different after this invasion.”

Genre Trouble

“When I was younger, I really didn’t pay attention to whether a book was fiction or memoir—I didn’t even register the distinction.”

Season of Epiphany

“I’m much happier with stories that don’t ask me to consent to their principles or believe in their heroes.”

Her Language and Mine

“Lately, I have written about artists and writers who engage directly with their own biographies.”

Auden’s ‘Dialectic’

“Auden was fascinated by the unsolvable problem of how much of life is governed by necessity and how much is chosen through freedom.”

Human Diagnostics

“Life in lockdown is not natural for the majority of Homo sapiens. In the ballooning of mental health problems this year, we’ve seen just how deleterious those kinds of restrictions are.”

In the Drug Archives

“Our current fascination with psychedelics and mental exploration has a longer history than we recognize.”

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

Maine’s Sublime Canvas

I grew up attuned to the strange contradictions of life in the rural yet cosmopolitan towns of Down East Maine, studded with galleries, where well-known writers hide out in old farmhouses.

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Walton Ford: Twenty-First-Century Naturalist

Walton Ford is never interested merely in the natural world, but in the way humans have documented, exploited, and repurposed it.