“Now that his trio of high-profile cultural projects has been completed, speculation is rife in architectural circles about whether David Adjaye can regain his former eminence.” —Martin Filler

“She was the ‘queen of the comeback,’ Judy Garland liked to say; she couldn’t go to the powder room without making a comeback.” —Frances Wilson on Liza Minnelli’s memoir

Jarret Earnest on all the crushes, kisses, tears, and broken hearts of pop music

Charlie Lee on John Gregory Dunne’s descent into the “idiot Disneyland,” Las Vegas

David Wheatley (@nemoloris.bsky.social) on the contemporary Scottish poets Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson

"Dunne 'was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack.' And in Vegas he found the perfect material." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"Poetry has been, faute de mieux, one of the metaphors most frequently used for Atget’s bittersweet gaze. There’s something Dickinsonian about his empty spaces, his often quite literal slant." Excellent Max Norman piece on the stark, angular genius of Eugène Atget. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

There's a lot of concerning new reporting about Vitamin K refusal but unfortunately that's been going on for a while. Here's one of the best pieces I've read about it, from 2019: www.nybooks.com/online/2019/...

Adam Hochschild on Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Bund

“As Silicon Valley took its modern shape in the 1990s, it did so under the shadow of Bill Gates.... He was the father they rebelled against and, in so rebelling, became.” —@bentarnoff.com

“Trump & Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.” @bellaiguec.bsky.social in a terrific essay on #Iran published in the latest @nybooks.com

Dennis Lim’s NYRB write-up of the Georgian drama DRY LEAF is unassuming and expansive and exemplary—a Dennis Lim specialty. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The Guerrilla Girls “presented a feminist protest that was at first completely disembodied: a set of posters [that were]...cerebral, fact-based, ironic, with feelings and genitals only distantly implied.” —Elaine Blair

“Pedantry has often been imagined as a physical condition,” Clare Bucknell writes. “Accusations of pedantry often take this form because getting to grips with minds is difficult.”

“There is another kind of dance you might see in Darfur today: the dance of those who survived massacres…. By dancing they forge a kind of noble, sorrowful equilibrium that might help them go on living or escape once again.” —Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

“The best way to learn something,” Michael Gorra writes, on a class he offered for most of his career, “is to teach it.”

“June Leaf’s need to literally feel her way through her work is also a subject of her art—perhaps her overriding subject.” —Nicole Rudick

“Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s music is about as eclectic as his career, managing to fuse together all of the traditions he loves: European romantic melodies, African drumming, jazz, folk, and of course a healthy dose of synthesizers.” —@bijan.bsky.social

Jane Bayard Curley on the ninetieth anniversary of ‘The Story of Ferdinand’ at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

“We underestimate the consequences of losing [salt lakes],” Rosa Lyster writes. “Their disappearance represents a public health crisis, already underway in some parts of the world.”

"In Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s music, the present moment is an astonishing, improbable gift" @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

“I consciously write bespoke biographies, cutting my cloth to fit my subject. It’s a form of homage.” —Frances Wilson, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

“I find finance boring at best and evil at worst—and yet I’m always closely observing men who work in it. When I look at these people, do I see something I recognize?” —an interview with Daniel Lefferts

“When I first caught sight of [David Adjaye’s Princeton University Art Museum], the term Costco Brutalism crossed my mind, but on further reflection I decided that was inaccurate.... [It’s] more like a genteel suburban Nordstrom.” —Martin Filler

“Think of salt lakes as the canary in the coal mine...Keeping watch over what is happening to these places is a good way of keeping watch over everything else.” —Rosa Lyster

“Paul Chan’s sculptures are complicated social creatures…. [They] come so eerily close to the brink of life, the gallery at times felt hard to stomach as the venue of their display.” —Dawn Chan

“The high gore quotient of Titus has proved as problematic for interpreters as for directors. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare could not have written the play.” —James Romm

“That’s a catchy phrase, I thought, ‘ambition and adultery’.... A course with that title might be fun to teach.” —Michael Gorra

“Iranian democrats who were ‘against the war’ desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.” —Christopher de Bellaigue

“Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s music is about as eclectic as his career, managing to fuse together all of the traditions he loves: European romantic melodies, African drumming, jazz, folk, and of course a healthy dose of synthesizers.” —@bijan.bsky.social

“The Guerrilla Girls were not petitioners standing outside a building making demands. They had gotten inside. They were moles and whistleblowers, with a dash of the incognito gossip columnist.” —Elaine Blair

“Our understanding of pedantry is…a relatively narrow one,” Clare Bucknell writes. “The only constant across different time periods and milieus is that no one has wanted to be accused of it.”

Nina Siegel on the real-life Indiana tomb raider

Christopher Tayler (@mansfieldvonrank.bsky.social) on Ben Lerner’s Transcription

“As I grew older I found myself drawn to the basic scenario that animates the Hardy Boys—a menacing force lurking under a seemingly idyllic surface—in other things I read and watched.” —an interview with Daniel Lefferts

“Rather than proceed from underground to the real world above, June Leaf finds value in plumbing things dimly seen.” —Nicole Rudick

“What gives Stojka’s work its power is how finely it balances the clarity of folk art…with a gouging expressionism that keeps the horrors of the Holocaust fresh.” —@benadavis.bsky.social

John Wright of Derby, the “painter of light,” was also “a painter of the Enlightenment,” Julian Bell writes. “Attentiveness may be the stuff of these chiaroscuros.”

Eugène Atget’s “pictures of the deserted streets and shabby interiors of old Paris still breathe mystery a century after his death.” —Max Norman

“Titus Andronicus is rarely seen on the stage, in part due to the traumas it can inflict on an audience. The most notable modern version…reportedly saw twenty faintings at a single performance.” —James Romm

I can't remember when an issue of @nybooks.com had a TOC that grabbed me the way the latest does: 3 authors who are totally different but all ones I enjoy reading & always learn from: Lynn Hunt, Adam Hochschild, & w/ a stunningly good NYRB debut @louisalim.bsky.social www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“Tubiana does not take photos at random; behind every picture is a story about power and money, culture and identity, social and racial inequalities, war and peace.” —Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

"In 1939, when some legislators proposed an exception... that would allow 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States... 25.8 percent of American Jews opposed increasing the tiny quota for refugees, because they feared it would provoke antisemitism." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“A story that reflected the fears and hopes of its day continues, somehow, to reflect those of our own.” —Jane Bayard Curley on ‘The Story of Ferdinand’

"Finding his music again feels right because it’s a connection we sorely needed and nearly missed." —@bijan.bsky.social on Beverly Glenn-Copeland for @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

I'm in the new issue of @nybooks.com thinking about Bill Gates, whose point-blank execution in the South Park movie by a US general who's angry about the shittiness of Windows is a core memory for me www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“The yearning for foreign intervention among some opponents of the regime and the unease this caused in many others have opened a fissure that the Islamic Republic, adept at divide and rule, will exploit.”—Christopher de Bellaigue

What a pleasure to find myself holding forth on Scottish poetry in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. Many thanks to Jana Prikryl and the Review for extending me the hospitality of their pages. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"Computerization meant that the commanding heights of the economy would come to be occupied by men who had spent their formative years getting stuffed into lockers, and were now determined to exact their revenge." (paywall) www.nybooks.com/articles/202...