Books and Arts Archives

Tuesday

September 23, 2025

Trump is right to take on the Smithsonian

The last time Republicans were this mad at the Smithsonian Institution was in 1991. Then as now, America’s national museum system was gearing up to celebrate a major date: in that case, the quincentenary of the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Senators threatened spending cuts, accusing Smithsonian officials of having a “political agenda” with their representations of race and immigration in exhibitions. Thirty-four years later, on the eve of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, Republicans are saying the same things. Donald Trump reworded his predecessors’ criticisms in his own style, suggesting on Truth Social that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on the negative, too little on the positive.

Diane Cole

Ben Shahn’s work remains as timely as ever

How can an artist express social and political dissent in a polarized, volatile time? Look no further than the sobering and rousing Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity. Throughout his decades-long career, Shahn (1898-1969) crafted paintings, murals, posters, drawings, photographs and prints chronicling the news of the world, with a focus on the suffering of society’s most wounded. This is the first major retrospective of his work to appear in the US since 1976. The country has changed, and yet Shahn’s work remains as timely as ever. His social-realistic approach fell out of fashion as critics came to prefer abstract and pop art. But Shahn remained true to his own aesthetic, as the show’s 175 works demonstrate.

Bethany Lorden

Eyes of the Storm revisits an era

At Eyes of the Storm, the de Young Museum’s exhibition of photographs taken by Paul McCartney, mainly on the Beatles’ first American visit, the typical viewer will be surprised to find herself empathizing more with the rock stars than the audience. In early photos, the crowds – and the band members – are eager, curious and frank. But through the months and the cities and photoshoots, the Beatles learn to pose. They soon find themselves flattened by a camera’s gaze in a way all too familiar to just about everyone today. The collection opens with the Beatles’ British tour in 1963 and residency in Paris in early 1964. “We were just wondering at the world,” McCartney writes, “just excited about all these little things that were making up our lives.

Isaac Sligh

Nick Drake’s explosive creativity

Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left (1969) had so much going for it. Supported by tasteful string arrangements and a cast of noteworthy musicians, Drake (1948-74) sang with a delicate croon that sounded like Chet Baker if he’d gone to Eton, and he played some of the finest acoustic guitar this side of Segovia. Joe Boyd, the impresario who’d launched Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention, produced the album, and it bore the imprimatur of Island Records, London’s hippest label. On the cover, Drake cut a shy but handsome figure, nonchalantly clad in blue jeans and blazer, gazing wistfully out the second-story window of an abandoned house in Wimbledon.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Viola’s Room is beguiling

What is theater? For most people it’s live performance, whether solo or in a troupe. Punchdrunk, the immersive theater company led by Felix Barrett, is not most people. Take its latest iteration now on at the Shed: Viola’s Room features no real-time actors. There is no stage and no seated audience. In this creepy gothic fairy tale, the story is narrated through headphones; the audience moves (sometimes walking, sometimes crawling) through a maze of spaces and the senses – including touch, smell, sight and sound – are as central as the script. Viola’s Room is intimate, small and contained. Every detail, every sound, every object feels intentional. Indeed, much of what makes Viola’s Room so beguiling is the rare sensation of giving up control.

Shane Devine

Over the Moon renders the present with an eye toward the timeless

Audiences are hard to please. Give us too much of modern life in a work of art, and we find it shallow. Give us too little, and we are prone to call it stuffy and academic. There is a sweet spot between realist exposé and classically restrained theater. This is the case with Over the Moon, a new play written and directed by Matthew Gasda. In the witty, self-undercutting, and absurdly clinical language that is the contemporary speech of the young, the play’s Generation Z and millennial protagonists navigate the confusing vagaries of love. The action remains in one place: the shared uptown Manhattan apartment of 20-something cousins Eden (Lilly Brown) and Cody (Spencer Cramer). They recently moved in together after breaking up with their boyfriends.

Tuesday

September 9, 2025

Robert Dean Lurie

Frank S. Meyer was a political paradox

Noel Parmentel’s quote, “The right wing was fun back then,” is one of the takeaways from Daniel J. Flynn’s new book The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Fun? The progenitors of post-World War Two American conservatism were, as portrayed here, a high-spirited lot. They were also intemperate, combative, self-destructive, often brilliant, not infrequently loony – and always deeply interesting. One could apply those qualities to the subject of the book, a character who looms large in the minds of intellectual conservatives and hardly anywhere else. Frank Meyer is not a household name like William F. Buckley Jr.

Lotte Brundle

The thrill of ghostwriting

“I begin to see the outlines of a scene, so I open my computer and start revising, growing it into what I think he intended it to be. This is the job of a ghostwriter, and I’m going to do it with fidelity.” If Julie Clark is clear about anything in The Ghostwriter, her gripping fifth novel, it’s the magnetic power of narrative – particularly when filtered through layers of secrecy, memory, and artifice. Clark, a New York Times bestselling author, has a flair for sleek, psychological crime fiction and delivers a taut and addictive story that is both clever and compulsively readable.

John Mac Ghlionn

A more rounded picture of James Baldwin

James Baldwin never wanted to be a symbol, but became one anyway: a stand-in for defiance, for beauty, for pain wrapped in elegance and for the entire weight of a country’s unresolved sin. Baldwin didn’t just write about America – he exposed it: the good, the bad and the ugly. He told the truth, even when it hurt. He didn’t soften the edges. What he never quite got, in his lifetime, was intimacy on the page about his own life. Biography existed around him, but he was rarely at the center of it. If we see him now, we see a man who smoked too much, drank too much and who sometimes ran from both his lovers and himself – rather than what he was: an intangible literary icon. Nicholas Boggs tries, in Baldwin: A Love Story, to give us a more rounded picture of the author.

Julia Yost

Why Jane Austen is still the queen of romance

Jane Austen was born in Hampshire on December 16, 1775, the seventh child of a poor country rector. Despite being red-cheeked and a good dancer, she never married. And despite the handful of novels she wrote under the byline “A Lady,” she was always considered by her family less promising than her older sister. She died of a painful illness at 41. Her books found a readership that included the Prince Regent, but she had some prominent detractors. Charlotte Brontë scorned them: “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” Where were the windswept moors, the big feelings? In the next century, D.H. Lawrence dismissed Austen as “mean” and “snobbish.

Suzanna Murawski

Vermeer’s Love Letters is something of a riddle

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is doubtless a blockbuster artist, but the Frick’s exhibition, Vermeer’s Love Letters, is the size of a postage stamp – or, maybe more fittingly, a wax seal. The Frick has three Vermeers of its own, but only one made the cut: “Mistress and Maid” (c. 1664-67). From the 37 known works by the artist, the museum has only borrowed two to bolster the show: “Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid” (c. 1670-72) and “The Love Letter” (c. 1669-70). Each depicts a woman, her maid and at least one letter somewhere in the mix. Though we don’t know exactly what’s written in those papers, it’s fair to say that these discreet works have an air of romance. The show’s effect is something of a riddle. Why has the Frick picked these three?

Diane Cole

How Esther inspired the imagination of Rembrandt

If you attended Sunday or Hebrew school, you know the story. There once lived in the ancient Persian city of Susa a King Ahasuerus and his Jewish wife, Queen Esther. At first she hid her Jewish identity from the king, only revealing it in order to foil the plot hatched by Haman, her husband’s Jew-hating second-in-command, to exterminate all who shared her faith. In doing so, Esther saved her people from destruction – and earned a volume in the Hebrew Bible named for her. Less well-known is that centuries later, in the Amsterdam of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), Esther’s valor also made her a heroine to the citizens of the predominantly Protestant Dutch Republic.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The problem with Heathers: The Musical

There is a euphoric moment in Heathers: The Musical, based on the cult 1989 film of the same name, when anything seems possible. It happens when 17-year-old Veronica – facing ostracism from the popular clique for barfing on the group’s tyrannical leader, Heather Chandler – climbs through the bedroom window of her crush, J.D. He’s in bed, asleep. As she mounts him, she sings the sassy, come-hither “Dead Girl Walking.” She’ll be toast come Monday morning, she’s “hot and pissed and on the pill,” and J.D. is her “last meal on death row.” Cue the boldest sex scene I’ve ever seen on stage. Veronica straddles J.D. and takes charge, ripping open her shirt to reveal her bra.

Curtis Yarvin

The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his most transparent

My name is Curtis. I’m a GenXer. I love Wes Anderson. I also like IPAs. Sometimes it’s OK to be a cliché. The Phoenician Scheme is not Wes Anderson’s best movie (that would be The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), or even his second-best. It may be his most transparent, though. Wes Anderson is certainly our auteuriest of major auteurs. A Wes Anderson film knows it’s a Wes Anderson film and doesn’t mind that at all. As a monarchist, I always point to auteur theory as a micro-reflection of my crackpot political theories. If it were possible for corporations to make movies by committee, it would certainly be done that way. But it isn’t. Instead, even the most hackneyed superhero sequel has a director – just as even the cheapest taquería has a chef.

Tuesday

July 15, 2025

John Mac Ghlionn

Mark Twain’s finest invention was himself

To speak of Mark Twain is to speak of the American psyche laid bare: forever restless, with an insatiable appetite for reinvention and biting commentary. Twain was not just a novelist or humorist: he was, in many respects, the nation’s most accurate mirror. He wrote the truth and then laughed at it. He carved his stories out of riverbanks and war zones, courtrooms and campfires. In his storytelling, Twain blurred the lines between truth and falsehoods, rage and laughter, freedom and fate. He gave us some of the greatest figures in American fiction. But Twain (1835-1910) was a creation more vivid, more volatile and more enduring than any character he put on the page. The “father of American literature,” as William Faulkner called him, didn’t hide behind his fiction.

Arabella Byrne

Glennon Doyle’s latest offering marks a change in direction

Glennon Doyle – wife, mother, lesbian, blogger, former Instagram phenomenon, political influencer – says “we can do hard things.” This aphorism, taken from a poster in a classroom back when she was a third-grade teacher in Virginia, might just be one of the most successful dicta to emerge in recent American history – more successful, even, than Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” When Joe Biden won the presidency in November 2020, his campaign manager swiftly tweeted “We can do hard things... and you just did!” Months later, in January 2021, Democrat Chuck Schumer, addressing Congress after the siege of the Capitol, declared: “In America, we do hard things.

Christopher Sandford

The mechanics of cancel culture

Must we approve of an author’s private life in order to enjoy his or her books? Possibly not, to judge by the continuing popularity of writers as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, P.L. Travers, Roald Dahl and Norman Mailer, to name but a few of those whose domestic affairs have fallen short of the temperate or monogamous ideal. And what of the sage of Cornish, J.D. Salinger, most of whose interactions during his long years of New Hampshire exile involved hanging around with local teenagers? In 1972, a fresh-faced journalism student named Joyce Maynard left college and went to live with the 53-year-old author of The Catcher in the Rye at his invitation. After eight months, she was unceremoniously dumped.

Philip Womack

How to make America read again

Christopher J. Scalia, in 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) hopes not only to refresh “how conservatives talk about fiction,” but also to disabuse the left of the notion that “conservative thought is an oxymoron.” He’s set himself a difficult task, since, as he notes, nobody reads any more; whether this is truer of conservatives than of the left, I don’t know. Using the form of a book in order to attract people who don’t read might seem odd, but Scalia knows his audience and his light, avuncular style proves engaging throughout. He’s also chosen a structure that even the most TikTok-numbed zoomer might appreciate: the extended listicle.

Alexander Larman

The enduring brilliance of C.S. Lewis

Unexpectedly, the Oxford literature professor Clive Staples Lewis – better known as C.S. Lewis – is having something of a moment, more than six decades after his death. Director Greta Gerwig, of Barbie fame, has embarked upon the ambitious project of filming all seven of his Chronicles of Narnia books for Netflix, starting with The Magician’s Nephew. She has assembled a starry ensemble that will include Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, the excellent Emma Mackey as the White Witch and, for the voice of the divine lion Aslan, none other than Meryl Streep. There are rumors that Lewis’s ever-popular satirical epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters is to be turned into an animated film.

A.S.H. Smyth

A walk through Geoff Dyer’s childhood

We all know we’re supposed to draw a line between the artist and the art. The veteran English essayist Geoff Dyer himself once had cause to remind me, mid-enthusiastic gabble, that his book on D.H. Lawrence was, in fact, “a conceit.” But as a reader often more interested in the lives of writers than their works, I must confess the idea of a full-blown memoir – finally! – from Dyer had me excited. I was not disappointed.