The more I disagree with Susan Sontag, the more interesting her mind becomes; her arguments help you realize the terms of your own, until ambivalence becomes inseparable from admiration. A great critic is always better at questions than answers, and here her position outside the university was a help. Sontag was undisciplined, in a positive sense. She took “everything” as her province, spilling from one mode of cultural production to another, asking large questions in a jargon-free style,...| The New York Review of Books
The cavalcade of exhibitions marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973 isn’t going to return him to the exalted position he long| The New York Review of Books
The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.| The New York Review of Books
Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, features an artificial intelligence resembling the new generation of “large language models,” like ChatGPT and| The New York Review of Books
In the second book of the Politics, Aristotle asks whether it is a good thing to encourage changes in society. Should people be offered rewards for| The New York Review of Books
I have closed novels and stared at their back covers for a long moment and felt known in a way I cannot honestly say I have felt known by many real-life interactions with human beings, or even by myself. For though the other may not know us perfectly or even well, the hard truth is we do not always know ourselves perfectly or well. Indeed, there are things to which subjectivity is blind and which only those on the outside can see.| The New York Review of Books
We the undersigned are scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism from different institutions. We write to express our dismay and disappointment at| The New York Review of Books
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the country’s military has killed thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza—a small minority of the 40,000| The New York Review of Books
I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean| The New York Review of Books
Since the protests began on campuses throughout the United States, I have been struck by the verbal contortions many writers have gone through to avoid| The New York Review of Books
I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?| The New York Review of Books
Moira Donegan joins us from Stanford University, where she is a writer in residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Although Moira and I| The New York Review of Books
I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.| The New York Review of Books
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.| The New York Review of Books
