These buildings could be disassembled and reassembled in a new location—a process of literally “walking the house.” For Suh, the phrase describes how we carry multiple places with us across space and time. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"When we say “we’ve lost our city” we mean that a civilization has been destroyed." www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

“Virtuous or vicious, to most of their subjects the Caesars were interchangeable…. Nations have survived monarchs who were senile, mad, or [just] checked out. Rulers can set a tone, but it is the palace people who keep things running.” — @aristofontes.bsky.social

“At the root of the Chinese gastronomical tradition is a yearning for a lost age.” —Leslie T. Chang

“Of all the women incarcerated worldwide, one in four is imprisoned in the US. Over the past four decades, the number of women in state prisons has grown by almost 600 percent.” — @scottwstern.bsky.social

In Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, “patterns emerge from the vatic flood of language,” David Schurman Wallace writes. “[There is] a love of antithesis—life is death, death is life, dreaming is waking and waking dreaming.”

“The [Supreme Court’s] traditional balance of equities has been inverted: abstract and imaginary assertions of sovereign injury now outweigh concrete proof of immediate human suffering.” —Duncan Hosie

Do Ho Suh is “best known for making replicas of places he has lived: architectural spaces in fabric or paper that are extraordinary feats of magical engineering.” —Adam Thirlwell

For those interested, my review of three (fairly) recent books on Roman emperors is out in @nybooks.com.

“The members of the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project demolish many of the myths surrounding the institution, proving that its founders…were far more abusive than conventional accounts suggest.” — @scottwstern.bsky.social

Gregory Hays @aristofontes.bsky.social on keeping up with the Caesars

Leslie T. Chang on the history of China’s diverse, sophisticated, subtle, inventive, and seductive cuisine

“After a lull of some fifty years, the Wages for Housework anticapitalist ‘perspective’…has come roaring back.” —Dorothy Sue Cobble

David Schurman Wallace on giving into the mystery of Marguerite Young’s colossal novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

Adam Thirlwell on Do Ho Suh’s replicas, rubbings, drawings, films, and paintings of home, now on view at Tate Modern

“The last and hardest lesson of The Chinese Tragedy of ‘King Lear’ is that surviving totalitarianism exacts a price in self-respect, even from the innocent.” —Catherine Nicholson

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group “left a trail of destruction—and self-destruction—in their wake,” writes Joshua Hammer. In some places, “it made the mercenaries wildly popular.”

“Both the optimists and the pessimists [of the energy transition] have valuable insights. But they both miss the fundamentals of the political economy of extraction, because ‘Is there enough?’ is the wrong question to ask in the first place.” —Thea Riofrancos

Dorothy Sue Cobble on the resurgence of the Wages for Housework movement

“No matter how uncanny octopuses are, there’s something oddly familiar about them, something that helps us feel connected as we look across clades.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg

“[Graham Watson’s] Charlotte Brontë is cannier, more complex…a woman who exploited the dramatic potential of her situation before trading her genius for what he calls ‘serfdom’ to a low-wattage man.” —Frances Wilson

Scott W. Stern @scottwstern.bsky.social on how a group of incarcerated women rewrote the history of their prison

“In cases like Vasquez Perdomo, the Court is doing nothing less than remaking the legal system itself—reshaping the law of remedies to concentrate power at the top.” —Duncan Hosie

“In the 1930s the Communist Party as well as liberals and pacifists in Gotham wanted the US to stay out of the war,” Brenda Wineapple writes. “Many of [them]…came together under the flag of America First.”

Duncan Hosie on how the Supreme Court has used its “shadow docket” to sweep aside the equitable tradition of American law

Trump is ordering the premeditated killing of civilians not engaged in hostilities — because, he says, they are drug smugglers. There’s no death penalty for drug trafficking. There’s no due process when the military blows a boat out of the water. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

There’s abuse of power. And then there’s ordering the killing of civilians in cold blood. The latter is called murder under federal law. Trump has crossed a line. Will it matter? Getting Away with Murder | David Cole | The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

“Totalitarian regimes involve everyone in their cruelties, not for efficiency’s sake but to preempt accountability; shame is a potent inducement to amnesia.” —Catherine Nicholson on King Lear

“Extraction is the material foundation of a zero-carbon world. ‘Green capitalism’ can therefore sound like an oxymoron.” —Thea Riofrancos

“How could sympathy for a small nation imprisoned and brutalized within the USSR be reconciled with evidence of its widespread participation in Nazi crimes?” —Neal Ascherson on the Holocaust in Lithuania

David Cole (@davidcole-gtown.bsky.social) on the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on civilians in international waters buff.ly/beaalrL

Great interview with designer Matt Willey in the New York Review of Books. Also lovely to read at the end that Vehicle’s on his TBR pile! www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

‼️ Read an adapted excerpt from EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism in @nybooks.com ‼️ Extraction is officially published TOMORROW (9/23) 👀 www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

“The confluence of crypto, fitness, right-wing populism, and misogyny is not accidental. This is a culture that sees all human relations as forms of hypercapitalist competition.” — @harikunzru.bsky.social on Adolescence

“Finding a disappeared person in Mexico is like chasing a ghost through a labyrinth full of false doors.” — @marcelaturati.bsky.social

“Prigozhin’s rise from street criminal to billionaire….dovetailed with Russia’s transformation into a rogue state with revanchist dreams and a determination to extend its reach—often by force—around the globe.” —Joshua Hammer

NYR: The End of Equity By effectively sanctioning ICE’s raids in Los Angeles, the Supreme Court is showing its readiness to discard centuries of equitable tradition in law. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/... "constitutional law as glib reassurance."

Writing Their Prison’s History A recent study by a group of incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison reveals how progressive reforms turned into profitable abuse. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

On the cold-blooded execution of alleged drug smugglers. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Pacificists, fascists, Communists, New Dealers, Abstract Expressionists, mobsters, émigrés, antiquing philosophers, Frank Sinatra—wartime New York was “a teeming, heterogenous place…[a] boisterous assortment of characters.” —Brenda Wineapple

Catherine Nicholson on King Lear in China

“I went to college to do illustration, because I wasn’t brave enough to paint. Coming out the other side as a graphic designer felt a little accidental.” —Matt Willey, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

Thea Riofrancos on lithium mining and the contradictions of “green capitalism”

Thea Riofrancos on lithium mining and the contradictions of “green capitalism”

“To encounter an octopus is to be implicated in a question about being that engulfs you both.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg

“The popular novelist in Charlotte Brontë ignited the popular novelist in Elizabeth Gaskell: in this sense they invented each other.” —Frances Wilson on Brontë and her biographer

“Khamenei is the regime’s most important unifying force, and he looks likely to exit the scene when the Islamic Republic is at its most vulnerable.” —Christopher de Bellaigue on Iran’s future

“With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some 30 meters long.” —Neal Ascherson on a daring escape during the Holocaust

“That plaintive question, ‘Do you like me?,’ underlies almost all manosphere discourse.” — @harikunzru.bsky.social on Adolescence