www.nybooks.com/online/2025/... "Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not, as some critics suggest, a stale collection of old creeds but a dynamic system with small businesses at its core."

Fintan O'Toole (Irish Times, NYRB) has been hosting panel discussions breaking down current events and possible counters. The events, as well as his regular contributions to publications, are musts for me to cut through the noise. Payment is on sliding scale. www.eventbrite.com/e/the-emerge...

The Spiritual Jazz of Alice Coltrane | Adam Shatz Alice Coltrane reinvented her adoptive Hinduism by interweaving it with the music of the Black church. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Dan Chiasson on Zohran, Bernie, socialism, biryani, and the DSA

"Sooner or later he has to fall down to earth." On Reichardt's 'The Mastermind' in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

“There is an all-embracing humanity, community, and optimism in Watteau’s treatment of these youthful figures, with their lives and loves still fully ahead of them.” —Colin B. Bailey

“That Alice Coltrane, an African American woman from Detroit, died a Hindu guru in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains is a story no less extraordinary than her husband’s.” —Adam Shatz

“[Psychological] breakdown is not what New York School poetry is usually about…. But James Schuyler found a way to write poetry that neither sensationalizes nor skirts mental illness.” —Langdon Hammer

I was wondering what @fotoole.bsky.social thought about all this Both a fair assessment of how we got here and a call to arms going forward (I’m an old pinko so i agree w his conclusions) Really interesting essay I’d highly recommend and I’m insisting my son read

Alex Ransom on Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind

“How can we reestablish the conditions for literature to offer the possibility of awakening, of transcendence, or however you want to put it?” —Tash Aw

“The Constitution does not save itself. It survives only through the vigilance of those who live under it.” —an interview with Duncan Hosie

“The amplitude, the riot and hoot…of One Battle After Another make for cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially unconfronted.” —Jonathan Lethem

“As Frankenstein’s fame increased, the name of its author began to compete with that of the late husband to whose poetic reputation Mary Shelley dedicated her life.” —Miranda Seymour

St. Augustine (yes, that one), the African. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“What [Dick Cheney works] to preclude is any acknowledgment that the issue at hand, whether it is avoiding military service or authorizing torture, might have a moral or an ethical or even a self-interested dimension that merits discussion.” —Joan Didion

“Understanding the death of states is necessary for understanding their turbulent rebirths.” —Linda Kinstler

Colin B. Bailey on Watteau’s melancholic clown

“Zoning may be what American cities control, but that is largely because their power over so much else has been stripped away by federal and state policy and budget reforms.” —Samuel Stein

P.S. here's the piece—I highly recommend it: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“No one should be surprised that the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the indiscriminate targeting of Latinos in Los Angeles precipitated the zip-tying, beating, and lengthy detention of black people in Chicago.” —Duncan Hosie

I had the great honor of writing the introduction to the @enchantedlion.bsky.social edition of Gianni Rodari's Adventures of Cipollino, translated by Antony Shugaar. This expands on that introduction! Huge thanks to Max Nelson for letting me dig into kids' books, produce, and the joy of the absurd.

these guys lie about basic historical facts to justify running more and more of the pentagon- seems bad! www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

this Jonathan Lethem piece is the first writing on One Battle After Another i've seen that deals directly with this deliberate discrepancy it's also the first great negative take on the film that i've encountered www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Here's a smart piece explaining how the Supreme Court has got its values backwards, disguised in the way that the six-vote majority must be weighing the "balance of equities." Fictive presidential injury matters to SCOTUS far more than mass and very real pain. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

"Days disappear, and what we feel goes with them." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“It is impossible not to extrapolate freely from Cipollino’s dense materiality, not to transpose our own urgent concerns onto its sly inventions. That we’re mostly dealing with fruits and vegetables shouldn’t discourage…generative projection.” — @markkrotov.bsky.social

Adam Shatz on the transcendent life and music of Alice Coltrane

“James Schuyler’s poems can make you feel the funk of a humid afternoon, taste the melted butter on a plate of scallops, or shiver in a new snow’s blue shadows.” —Langdon Hammer

“I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican.... But I’m interested in the idea that [my local church] provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere.” —Zadie Smith

“Mary Shelley’s writing thrived on Percy Shelley’s company and creative input: their shared reading experiences in Bath suggest that the intensely literary couple spent many hours discussing [Frankenstein].” —Miranda Seymour

Samuel Stein on America’s recent infatuation with zoning reform

Women who wait to freeze their eggs until their late thirties “are [not] particularly poor decision makers,” Anne Diebel writes. “They’ve found themselves casualties of profound changes in mating trends.”

“Selling a book that is essentially an autopsy report feels at best pointless, at worst tasteless.” — @fotoole.bsky.social on Kamala Harris’s new memoir

“One Battle After Another, prepared and shot before Trump’s reelection, is something more than prescient; it seems to have won an existential gamble.” —Jonathan Lethem

Zadie Smith, Tash Aw, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez on literature and the soul

After WWI, “it became clear to politicians and lawyers that no empire could claim to be immortal and that they had no shared words or laws to describe what happens when one dies.” —Linda Kinstler

Gianni Rodari’s “satire is lived-in and a little mournful,” writes @markkrotov.bsky.social, “unconcerned with either pure escapism or dogmatic allegory.”

“Israel has long thwarted the viable development of the Gaza Strip, with the primary goal of precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the economic foundation on which it could be built.” —Sara Roy

Anne Diebel on why women freeze their eggs

Miranda Seymour on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s monster

I’m not a believer but I very much believe in the power of Alice Coltrane’s work. In the new @nybooks.com I write her musical and spiritual journey. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Astonishing by Ben Lerner: Cardiography. "My only defense against reality: to transform it into literature.... [A]s a result I felt thingly under her touch, reduced to my material." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings." @davidcole-gtown.bsky.social www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

A great, skeptical take on One Battle After Another from Jonathan Lethem in the NYRB. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Jonathan Lethem and his 15 year old son on One Battle After Another www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“Wheatley‬⁩, an Australian-born professor at Princeton University, has a penchant for metaphor and an inventive flair that make her legal histories come alive.” Fantastic kudos from the great ⁦‪Linda Kinstler‬⁩. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’: Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“Being the party that feels the world’s pain is not a good answer to a president who invites his supporters to share the unalloyed joy of being able to inflict it.” — @fotoole.bsky.social on Kamala Harris’s new memoir