Lucy Jakub

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, and how these species have been mythologized, even as most of them have disappeared from the wild. Ford makes paintings of paintings of animals.

Wild Speculation: Evolution After Humans

After Man, a book that imagines how other species will evolve after humans go extinct, fifty million years in the future, has aged well. It has been reissued a dozen times since its publication in 1981.

Marching for Our Lives

The organizers of the March for Our Lives knew that what the people want now, above all, are the kids. We came to listen and to look them in the eyes.

A Plate of Jellyfish

Ernst Haeckel believed that evolution would unite science with art and philosophy under one discipline, through which humans could reach a greater understanding of their world.