Books & the Arts

Illustration by Doug Chayka

Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics? Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics?

Gene editing could correct genetic mutations for serious illnesses. Will it also create a new eugenics of personal choice?

Jul 16, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Nathaniel Comfort

Tony Judt

The NYRB Is Rewriting Tony Judt’s Stance on Israel The NYRB Is Rewriting Tony Judt’s Stance on Israel

Judt called for a just resolution to the conflict, not the preservation of a “Jewish State.”

Jul 14, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Rachel Cusk

The Passivity Project The Passivity Project

In Rachel Cusk’s fiction, the self is suppressed to the point of destruction.

Jul 2, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Alexandra Schwartz

Protest at the New York Public Library, March 11, 2014.

Patience and Fortitude Patience and Fortitude

Scott Sherman’s masterful history of the fight to save the NYPL.

Jul 2, 2015 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella

Three Figures

The 2015 Venice Biennale The 2015 Venice Biennale

Islands of meaning in a morass of incoherence.

Jul 2, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky

Yuval Noah Harari

70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages 70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and the rise of Deep History.

Jul 2, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Saler

Bombed Greenwich Village Building

Ignorant Good Will Ignorant Good Will

How an excesses of idealism and the embrace of violence destroyed the American left in the 1970s.

Jun 17, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Rick Perlstein

The High Line, Manhattan

Another City Another City

A cruel economics of forced mobility is the new planning mantra of New York City.

Jun 17, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin

Still image from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Strange Worlds Strange Worlds

Maybe action movies, like youth itself, are wasted on the young.

Jun 17, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Outside Less Outside Less

I have been outside less, I have taken to saying, in the days since my daughter was born— passive, as though it were somebody else who bore her. And bore her, I also have taken to…

Jun 17, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Natalie Shapero

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