Sam Needleman

Straight to It, Then

“Everyone has an opinion, but clarity is apparently in short supply.”

‘On the Brink of Erasure’

Tacita Dean’s mesmerizing, elegiac drawing and filmmaking spring from both broad exploration and acute focus.

History in Open Air

“Local history bonds people today to the place where they are, giving them a stake in local people and local politics.”

The Pen and the Brush

“Style is what finally draws me most profoundly to writers and artists.”

In a Good Way

“The contemporary novel is not only alive and well but healthier than ever: as brave, as accomplished, certainly more diverse.”

A Curious Temperament

“I don’t have any programmatic agenda for art, merely a hope to cut through received patterns of thought.”

Games We Play

The Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong extracts raw drama from scenes of leisure and crime.

A Permanent Elegy

“As it happens, sorrowful sensualism is congenial to Arabic poetry.”

Édouard/Edgar

“It is not a question of who is following whom, but of overlapping networks and a shared commitment to be ‘of one’s time.’”

Private Equity, Public Poverty

“What happens when the owners of wealth cease to have any broader social interest at all?”

Broomstrokes

The American painter Ed Clark took his medium to its limits and back again.   

Guardian of Memory

“We cannot tell the story if we do not recognize how the past changes as we try to seize and fix it.”

Down to the Wire

The Venezuelan artist Gego worked in many mediums, but she achieved her most expansive effects in sculpture. 

Dancing Queen

“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.”

The Superego of the Magazines

“I’m looking for the fractures in the identities that seem to be doing most harm.”

Michaelina’s Boys

In “The Five Senses,” the long-forgotten Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier shows her vision of vision. 

Whose Streets?

“For the Sisi regime Tahrir is a dangerous place from which the memory of the uprising needs to be erased. It belongs to the state now, and no one else.”

‘A Trusted Guide’

“I’ve always had a lot more to say about race and inequality than the four corners of any case would allow”

Late Style

“I’m interested in the shapes of careers, in the way that one book answers and builds on its predecessors, responds to the shelf that’s stretched out behind it.”