Books and Arts Archives

Tuesday

November 18, 2025

Did Robert McNamara know Vietnam was unwinnable?

Former US defense secretary Robert McNamara was known in Washington as a relentless, humorless taskmaster or even “a computer on legs.” Then on February 9, 1962, a little over a year after taking office, McNamara made headlines when he danced the twist with Jackie Kennedy at a White House party. A few days later, the then-first lady sent by hand to McNamara a lighthearted Valentine collage she had made from the news coverage of their dance. After her husband’s assassination, their friendship deepened. Jackie’s opposition to the Vietnam War grew, as did her conviction that McNamara secretly opposed it.

Carson Becker

Andrew Ross Sorkin reconstructs the 1929 crash

During the great financial panic of 1907, the banker J.P. Morgan locked the titans of the financial world in his lavish private study to determine which banks to rescue and which to let fail. This intervention saved the banking system, restoring public confidence. But trust in Wall Street was shaken to its core. Six years later, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which sought to stabilize the American financial system by establishing a central bank to regulate credit and serve as lender of last resort. By the mid-1920s, the very mechanisms that were designed to promote stability had fueled a surge in stock market speculation.

Philip Womack

Another collection of Harper Lee’s writings arises

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously unseen short stories. Go Set a Watchman, a novel which was largely viewed as To Kill a Mockingbird in embryo, appeared ten years ago, to not much acclaim.

Jonathan Petropoulos

South America is flush with Nazi-looted art

This summer, a niche story from the art world caught fire: an Old Master painting, stolen by the Nazis from a Dutch-Jewish art dealer, surfaced in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Remarkably, journalists from a Dutch newspaper spotted it on the wall of a house in a promotional photo that was part of a “for sale” real-estate listing. It turned out that one of the sellers of the house was the daughter of a Nazi official who worked for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a notorious art plunderer. When the stolen painting was recognized, the daughter allegedly removed it from the wall, replacing it with another artwork – a tapestry. Argentine authorities then arrested her and her husband and charged them with concealing a crime.

Mario Naves

Rauschenberg is a bore

Pity the security guard at the Guggenheim who must patrol the gallery in which Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped is installed. Mounted in commemoration of the artist’s centennial – Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in October 1925 – Life Can’t Be Stopped includes “Revolver II” (1967), a set of plexiglass discs with images overlaid. A cord leads from the back of this contraption to a pedestal on which there is a control panel – a set of buttons placed in proximity to the viewer. These switches set the plexiglass discs in motion, and they beg to be pushed. On my trip to the museum, visitor after visitor was shushed away from “Revolver II” with the age-old plaint: “Please don’t touch the art.

Suzanna Murawski

Man Ray is alluring in the way a psychopath is

Down to his chosen name, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) worked hard to squash anything about him you might call human. At least that’s what is suggested by the Met’s exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream. The show spans much of his career – he was associated with surrealism and dada, held a day job as a commercial photographer and experimented with almost every medium imaginable – but coheres around his so-called rayographs, also known, in less egotistical fashion, as photograms. Many will know this medium from elementary school: place objects on top of a light-sensitive sheet and expose them to light to yield white silhouettes against a dark background.

Alexander Larman

Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living director?

Who’s the greatest living American film director? Many would say Steven Spielberg, and that can’t be dismissed, but he hasn’t made a really good film since Munich (2005). There are many younger pretenders – such as David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino – and the more esoterically inclined might make the case for anyone from Terrence Malick to Spike Lee. Yet it’s hard not to feel that the don of contemporary American cinema is Martin Scorsese, whose career over the past five-and-a-half decades has existed, sans pareil, thanks to a vast dollop of talent, a considerable degree of good fortune and, crucially, an ability to lure both A-list collaborators and deep-pocketed moneymen into financing his films.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

A new Phantom comes to Broadway

Around midway through Masquerade – the new immersive adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which sees a small audience whirled through a labyrinth of rooms and sets – I feel a hand on my shoulder. Smiling, I turn, expecting to see my friend – and immediately recoil. A tiny circus freak grins at me, revealing teeth like sharpened screwdrivers and a painted face lifted straight from Día de los Muertos. Later, in a carnival scene, that same freak hammers three nails into her face and an ice-pick up her nose. The carnival sequence is not in the original Phantom. It is one of the largest and perhaps most important of Masquerade’s additions.

Wednesday

November 5, 2025

Ian Maxwell

Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value

Six months after she took her own life aged 41, Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s “memoir” Nobody’s Girl, written with her professional collaborator Amy Wallace, has been published. It is bound to evoke distinct and intensified feelings in readers because the account of her suffering, coupled with the manner of her death, increases the emotional impact of the narrative. The writing style and tone of the book feel authentic. Giuffre, who was born in 1983, uses words like “rad,” meaning awesome or cool, and “stoner dude,” to describe someone who smokes a lot of weed plus her constant reliance “on music to make the world make sense” seem very “Xennial” as late Generation Xers or early millennials are sometimes called.

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket is transcendent and exhausting

And just like that, after an excruciating 12-year hiatus, the literary world’s answer to Harry Houdini is back. Thomas Pynchon, that notorious recluse, has resurfaced with Shadow Ticket, a tricksy Prohibition-era detective caper that is by turns exhilarating, exasperating and inimitably Pynchonian. A new Pynchon novel is simultaneously a reviewer’s wet dream and feverish nightmare. There’s so much to unpack, you’re never going to do it full justice after a single reading. This is, after all, the writer famous for Byzantine, convoluted plots which zigzag their way across entire continents, ideologies and historical epochs, brimming with mysterious entities and delightfully nutty characters. Shadow Ticket is no different.

Alexander Larman

Woody Allen’s first novel takes on cancel culture

Say what you like about the actor, director and writer Woody Allen – and people have undeniably been known to – but it takes a certain amount of gall to publish your first novel at the age of 89. Not that Allen doesn’t have form in this regard: he has brought out five collections of short stories, most recently 2022’s Zero Gravity and a 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, which was greeted with horror by the publishing industry and literary critics alike. The New York Post described it as one of “the most tone-deaf, disgusting, bitter, self-pitying, horrifically un-put-downable memoirs since Mein Kampf.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Sam Shepard’s life was as dramatic as his theater

Sam Shepard and I crossed paths several times when we were both living near Charlottesville, Virginia, he with Jessica Lange and their family, and me as a student at the University of Virginia. He towered over passersby on the Downtown Mall, walking as if invisible spurs should be clinking on his bootheels, mane of dark floppy hair pushed back off his forehead and behind his ears, keen eyes above a quick grin. I last saw Shepard 20 years later, having a coffee and reading the Daily Racing Form in a Greenwich Village restaurant; he looked even better then. He was a true Renaissance man. There he was, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, charged with writing a screenplay for a movie somehow set in the concert tour.

Alexander Larman

Uncovering Brian Wilson’s real genius

The death earlier this year of Brian Wilson, aged 82, was marked by the usual tributes to a man who was not only a pioneer of popular music, but also a sadly troubled genius whose early years of wild success were quickly overtaken by decades of drug addiction and mental health problems. A recurring theme in the obituaries was what might have happened in the aftermath of the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, 1966’s Pet Sounds, if Wilson, by then the band’s producer and lead songwriter, had not descended almost immediately into narcotic-induced torpor. It has commonly been suggested that Paul McCartney – who revered Wilson – was also jealous of the achievement of Pet Sounds, which arguably overshadowed the Beatles’ Revolver, and that Sgt.

Zachary Ginsberg

Sixties Surreal at the Whitney is a bad trip

The Whitney’s Sixties Surreal is not about Surrealism. I spent about a week trying to figure out what it might actually be about, before I gave up. The show claims to seek to answer a simple question: what if Surrealism, rather than Cubism, had been the dominant thread in modern American art? This is funny to me, as Dalí’s melting clocks are far better known in America than any Cubist painting. Regardless, the museum never provides an answer. Instead, the Whitney jumps right to its agenda: reviving what it deems an overlooked thread of countercultural art. Ah, yes, the woefully neglected subject of… counterculture in the 1960s.

Jane Coombs

Why is the Met making medieval art perverse?

Unwitting historians often reveal just as much – if not more – about their own time and place than the time and place they claim to describe. The curators of Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, a new exhibition at the Met Cloisters, are prime examples. Gathering manuscript illustrations, paintings, sculptures, jewelry and more from the 13th to 16th centuries, the exhibition promises to uncover “the hidden sexuality and sensuality of medieval art.” The intent is “queering the past,” and the objects were chosen to show expressions of “desire” in as many forms as possible – a saucy premise that appeals to contemporary trends. But many of the new interpretations range from the woolly to the laughable.

Peter Tonguette

Drowning in the neon swamp of Tron: Ares

Sitting in the nearly empty movie theater at which I saw Tron: Ares, I found myself swamped by neon. Its hues are unappealing in real life – redolent of dive bars, arcades and other unsavory venues – but neon is downright unbearable when experienced in a movie theater, where you have no choice but to stare at the screen unless you want a perfectly good $21.51 to go to waste.

Luke Coppen

Are black-metal bands going Christian?

In his youth, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s “most evil album.” The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black-metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its singsong tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like ABBA. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers – badass early Christian monks – and St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Friday

October 31, 2025

Matthew Gasda

The free market can’t stop AI actress Tilly Norwood

The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon. But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.

Tuesday

October 21, 2025

Travis Aaroe

Kamala Harris is living in dreamland

Toward the end of 107 Days, Kamala Harris appears on something called The Checkup podcast. Though she was meant to be having a short interview about RFK Jr., the host suddenly asks if the then vice-president could talk on the hoof a bit about some of her star issues: healthcare costs, women’s health, and healthy meals for children. Alarmed, Harris fumbles for her “briefing sheet.” For any media appearance Harris requires one of these sheets, listing the questions to be asked and the answers to each of them. It isn’t there. After the interview she yells at her staff. The ancients used to warn that democracy would lead to the rule of silver-tongued demagogues who would promise the mob anything. In fact, it has been a good deal worse than that.

Madelaine Lucy Hanson

Addie E. Citchen’s debut novel is unsettling and ambitious

More than ever, arguments about tradition and gender roles are flaring up across the States and beyond. It is timely, then, that Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, Dominion, arrives in this climate of revivalist misogyny and debates about rigid patriarchy. It is a story of power cloaked in piety, and of the damage done when pride usurps justice. Citchens is obviously an author of steely intelligence who possesses a crisp and sharp eye for tiny vignettes of ordinary cruelty, and has unwavering compassion and love for her subjects. Nothing is obvious in her work, and nothing is contrived. Citchens sets her story within a claustrophobically tight-knit black Missionary Baptist community in Mississippi.