February 8, 2024 Issue

Philip Clark

The Bernstein Enigma

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, Maestro fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

Maestro

a film directed by Bradley Cooper

Ben Okri

Who’s Canceling Whom?

Conservatives often charge their opponents with “cancel culture,” but the right poses as significant a threat to free speech as the left.

The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution

by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

Brenda Wineapple

‘The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit’

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad” and who often believed the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

God’s Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

by Clark Davis

Ben Lerner

The Pain Artist

The artist Ed Atkins’s video Pianowork 2 poses questions about the representation of reality.

Ed Atkins with Steven Zultanski

an exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, New York City, November 17, 2023–January 6, 2024

Laura Kolbe

Month to Month

What we as a society prefer not to know about periods extends beyond menstruation itself to its management and the management of women’s health more broadly.

Cash Flow: The Businesses of Menstruation

by Camilla Mørk Røstvik

Period: The Real Story of Menstruation

by Kate Clancy

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began

by Leah Hazard

Christine Smallwood

Time Unregained

In La Captive, Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière, she offers us a Marcel unredeemed by art.

Ann Lauterbach

War Zone

a poem

Peter Brown

Charged Wonders

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to give voice and density to the Christian cultures in Africa with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Africa and Byzantium

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, November 19, 2023–March 3, 2024; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 14–July 21, 2024

Vivian Gornick

Isn’t It Interesting?

The most common quarrel between Lore Segal and me—between the novelist and the memoirist—is how to make use of “the way it feels.”

Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories

by Lore Segal

Christopher R. Browning

Fragile, Resilient Weimar

Understanding how German democracy survived the crises it faced in 1923 helps illuminate its demise ten years later.

Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis

by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Hitler’s Putsch

by Mark William Jones

In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

by Michael Brenner, translated from the German by Jeremiah Riemer

Geoffrey O’Brien

A Craving for Crime

Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted.

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

by David Bordwell

The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators

by Martin Edwards

The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir

by David Lehman

Tamsin Shaw

Ethical Espionage

What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

by Calder Walton

Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence

by Cécile Fabre

Colin Thubron

Hard Solaces

Jonathan Raban’s memoir recounts his experience in a rehabilitation ward after a stroke, interleaved with his father’s experience as a young artillery officer during World War II and his own childhood memories.

Father and Son

by Jonathan Raban

Joan Silber