Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©
- Asylum in LimboOn May 11 Title 42 finally expired. The public health order, issued by the Trump administration in March 2020, almost completely shut down asylum processing at our southern border; in the last three years the US has conducted approximately 2.8 million expulsions of migrants, regardless of their reasons for trying to enter the country. The […]
- White BayIn March 2015 I visited a friend, the Argentinean journalist Sandra Crucianelli, and her husband, Gabriel, for dinner in Bahía Blanca, a coastal city about four hundred miles south of Buenos Aires. I had just moved to Argentina from Dubai, seeking to report on environmental issues. Bahía Blanca, known as the “great metropolis of the […]
- The New OrganizersIn December 2021 unions won two victories that have significantly reshaped the American labor movement in the years since: Starbucks Workers United unionized the first store in the company’s history, and the NLRB ruled that organizers be allowed into the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. By early 2022, two enormous corporations that had been considered […]
- Court and SparkIn September 1969 Susan Taubes returned to Budapest, the city where she had lived until the age of eleven. Standing outside her childhood home amid the bustle of the late-afternoon rush hour—the veranda bright with plants, the bushes still filled with berries, the wrought-iron gate closed—Taubes was overcome by a feeling of “beauty and grief, […]
- The Dank UndergroundHow did countercultures commune before the Internet? One quaint and underappreciated precursor to the information highway was the underground press that proliferated during the late 1960s. The medium was never more the message. Sprouting in cities and college towns across America, these rambunctious weekly or biweekly tabloids flourished for a half dozen years, a form […]
- House of DelftJust to the east of the City of London is the district called Spitalfields. It was always a place of exile. Once the habitat of Huguenot weavers fleeing the massacres in France, it later became a refuge for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. By the 1970s it had acquired a new population of […]
- Invitation to a Dance“Lygia Pape: Tecelares” at the Art Institute of Chicago is an endlessly surprising exhibition, lyrical, frisky, and stealthily profound—which is a lot to pack into a bunch of mostly black-and-white polygons and circles. An important figure in Brazilian postwar art, Pape, like her fellow travelers Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, began her career dedicated to […]
- The Gilder AgeThe American Museum of Natural History’s new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation completes that venerable teaching and research institution’s four-city-block campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with decidedly mixed results. The $465 million infill project, which is architecturally fatuous though otherwise highly commendable, was designed by Studio Gang, the Chicago-based firm headed […]
- Name the Lost!A public memorial requires, at minimum, a shared memory—a consensus that something significant happened, if not necessarily what that something meant. The best monuments of remembrance, in fact, are those that inspirit collective emotion while accommodating disparate interpretations. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., evinces patriotic pride for some, renews rage for others. Yet […]
- The Art of Feminine Injury and ExcessLast weekend the NYR Online published “Wages for Housewives,” an essay by the scholar and critic Anna Shechtman on the reality TV series The Real Housewives. The title alludes to the work of the Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici, who in 1974 argued that women’s housework under capitalism was always “destined to be unwaged.” What […]
- A Sea of FormsIn the mid-twentieth century the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was reappraised by Anglophone artists and art historians who considered him a Modernist avant la lettre. In their eyes he had flouted convention at Western art’s pivotal moment, breaking with the naive rendering and garish coloring of medieval painting and using his knowledge of […]
- ‘Autopsies of Many Kinds’One hundred and fifty years ago, the magazine Popular Science launched its first issue, edited by the optimistic polymath Edward Youmans. Youmans, who published and lectured for general audiences on subjects ranging from the laws of thermodynamics to “The Science of Prohibition” and “The Culture Demanded by Modern Life,” admonished readers that “whoever desires to […]
- Getting Sacagawea RightWhen spring came in 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left their winter camp near Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Upper Missouri River and resumed their search for a route to the Pacific Ocean. The day was Sunday, April 7. Included in the party, Clark noted in his journal, was a French-Canadian trapper and […]
- A Life of Sheer WillParis in November. The rain was unrelenting, people huddled in cafés, and umbrellas knocked heads in the cramped streets. Scooters, bikes, and buses zoomed by, spattering muddy water with little regard for pedestrians. Everything felt taxing—even the metro was a mess. The only people engaged with life at a normal speed were those with dogs. […]
- The Two ConstitutionsHistorians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United […]
- Journey to the NorthBack in the early 2010s, when I was writing my first dispatches from the US–Mexico border and volunteering as a humanitarian worker, I would stand on a hill in Nogales, Mexico, and watch as migrants, mostly young men, ducked alone through a hole in the old border fence. They would then dart from bush to […]
- Unwanted ThoughtsIn the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this […]
- Surviving by AccidentIn 1925 a girl named Marina was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, to a Jewish Latvian father and a Protestant Italian mother. Ten years later the parents underwent an acrimonious divorce and the mother took Marina and her sister back to Italy. The girls were raised by their maternal grandmother in an […]
- The Second WarthogsI saw them from the canal, nosingtheir way through a spare enclosure behindthe zoo. Dusk gray, two of a kind,and utterly unimposing, they were aimlesslycrossing their corner of Regent’s Parklike a pair of sullen castoffs from the arkand wearing their dirt shamelessly. Who could blame them for their ennui?They were just the secondwarthogs, their features […]
- Talking to the Sun in Washington SquareLooking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital,a hedge school, a diner, and an open-air prison with my bare handsand operating them at a continual loss. In this instant they are playing and I’m sitting on a bench where the unhindered sun applies itselfand I can feel it on my skin asking how it’s […]
- The Creation of NigeriaLast February, with countries in many parts of Africa rigging constitutions to allow incumbent leaders to remain in office indefinitely or backsliding toward authoritarianism, Nigeria did something that seemed to set it apart: it held the latest in a series of regularly scheduled, democratically contested presidential elections dating back to 1999. That, at least, was […]
- Ideal DetachmentsThe interiors of Andy Warhol’s Factory, at 231 East 47th Street, were famously all silver: silver foil on the walls, silver paint on the pipes and ducts and furniture, mirrors everywhere. Even the elevator was silver. The intention of Warhol and his decorator, the photographer and Factory acolyte Billy Name, was to create an environment […]
- The Price of CryptoNone of this had to happen. In the fall of 2008, amid the great shipwreck of the international financial order, an anonymous person or group of persons writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a new electronic cash system called Bitcoin. In the “white paper” proposing the system, initially circulated to a cryptography mailing list, […]
- Best GuessesTo the Editors: Fintan O’Toole is a brilliant writer, and usually a sharp-eyed observer of things cultural and political, here and abroad. In his latest piece, “Bump and Grind” [NYR, May 11], he again excels as a writer. Regrettably, however, he falls short as a legal observer, and in a way that is unhelpful to […]
- Don’t Blame the SouthernersTo the Editors: Praising the Hulu version of the 1619 Project, Adam Hochschild [NYR, May 25] writes: We hear about the powerful southern congressional committee chairmen who forced New Deal programs like Social Security to exclude categories of labor in which Blacks were concentrated, like domestic and agricultural work. This claim became popular in the […]
- Words into ImagesI began reading pieces for our May 25 issue while in London visiting family and friends. This included a trip to Charleston, the country home in East Sussex where the Bloomsbury group sometimes convened. I brought a stack of galleys in my bag for the ninety-minute train ride from Victoria Station to Lewes, but they […]
- ‘The Real World Is Not Here’George Balanchine, the great choreographer and cofounder of New York City Ballet, who arrived in the United States in 1933, almost always had a girlfriend—often a few.1 His first American girlfriend, Holly Howard, apparently had four or five abortions in their first year together. Is it possible to get pregnant four or five times in […]
- What Is Wildness?Blood doesn’t flow through our arteries and veins by gravity or magic or the force of our personalities. It is pushed. What pushes it is an elaborately engineered muscle (or muscular organ) that serves as a pump: the heart. Without the continuing, impelling action of that pump, the rest dies. The heart can survive without […]
- Wages for HousewivesHousewifery is hard work: taxing, by all accounts; isolating, by default; unwaged, by design. That is until 2006, when five women in Orange County were reportedly each given a few thousand dollars to be Housewives, Real Housewives, on cable television. They tottered, top-heavy, around Coto de Caza, their gated community, got Botox and went to […]
- Kelly Akashi’s Ecology of CraftAt the height of the shelter-in-place mandates in 2020, the Los Angeles–based artist Kelly Akashi began learning stone carving. It was partly a practical decision—she could carve outdoors and without assistance from others—and partly proof of her yen for centuries-old craft traditions, having already trained in glassblowing, lost-wax bronze casting, lacemaking, and rope making. One […]
- Writing into SilenceJune 16, 1948, was the beginning of the twelve-year conflict that would come to be called “the Malayan Emergency” by British colonial troops and “the Anti-British National Liberation War” by the predominantly ethnically Chinese Communist fighters seeking to overthrow them. Five thousand civilians died, and as much as 10 percent of the entire population of […]
- A Culture of Repression and Neglect On May 1 in New York City, a twenty-four-year-old white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny choked a thirty-year-old Black man named Jordan Neely to death on the F train as it headed toward the Broadway-Lafayette station. Neely was a street performer known for his skilled Michael Jackson impersonation. He was also mentally ill, homeless, and had […]
- Stories AdriftMedia attention to war-torn countries follows a pattern. At first outrage and the pursuit of justice drive a twenty-four-hour cycle of coverage. Journalistic principle promises to keep it going until the war subsides, yet inevitably it recedes long before. Only occasionally do humanitarian tragedies prompt reminders of the ongoing hardship. The body of a three-year-old […]
- Golden Coats, Sacred SpoonsIs the third time the charm? Charles’s first coronation was at Gordonstoun school in November 1965, when he played Macbeth. There is a photograph in the Royal Collections of him in a get-up nearly as strange as those he is wearing at Westminster Abbey almost sixty years later, sporting a bad fake beard and what […]
- The Superego of the Magazines“It is blind acquiescence to collective madness, the twisted appeal to the common good, that propels citizens into fascism,” writes Jacqueline Rose in the May 11 issue of the Review. Her subject is Good, a 1982 play by C. P. Taylor that was staged at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London last winter. The main […]
- The Oracle of Public RadioMichael Silverblatt’s voice has been described as “so hypnotic, so compelling, that it apparently has prevented people driving on the LA freeways from committing acts of road rage.” What those drivers are listening to, more likely than not, is Silverblatt in conversation with an author. He hosts Bookworm, a thirty-minute interview program on the Los […]
- At Odds with Two Worlds“Let them eat grass,” said Andrew Myrick, a trader who owned several stores on the Dakota reservations in Minnesota. He was referring to the hungry warriors desperate for the food promised them by the federal government.* It was the summer of 1862, the second year of the Civil War. The Dakota were starving, their children […]
- Bewitched by GoetheWe can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice; produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke; sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it. What can […]
- Farewell Poemfor Dmitry Golynko You are leaving with all these poems. You are leaving. An over-the-shoulder bag is over your shoulder. And the river is leaving. It is making its unwavering way to no longer being a river. It is moving among façades that are neither moving nor moved. They are repeating like stanzas in a […]
- The ExtinctLong ago, I find the housewith one blazing window and sneak upto peek in: there are my parents in each other’s armsnaked in the rumpled bed, mouths locked, eyesradiant like the glass. I put my ear to the sashto listen but the pane thrums and the cat Jupitercomes padding: Am I a sparrow? A grasshopper?I […]
- The DeerWalking alone in a forest, I came upona deer—this was not a vision.It faced me, on its four thin legs,unmoved as a cave paintingbrushed by light. I made myself still.I spoke to it, softly. I can’t rememberwhat I said. The deer regarded me as a god would,eased by my astonishment.Then, slowly, I moved closer, and […]
- Saving Lives and Making a KillingThis past December the American Society of Hematology held its annual meeting in New Orleans. More than 30,000 attendees listened to presentations of the most recent research on blood and its disorders. As you might expect, the audience was primarily composed of people working in the field—clinicians, laboratory scientists, and trainees in fellowship programs—who focused […]
- From Russia, with LoveIf you order Jennifer Homans’s Mr. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, you might want to tell the delivery man to bring a hand truck. With the endnotes, nearly 1,500 of them, the book is close to eight hundred pages long. Balanchine deserves such coverage, though. His career spanned most of the twentieth century, during which […]
- Seeing Through It AllAre novelists required to like humans? It’s fair to say, on the evidence of her published writing, that Sara Baume is not a people person. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), tells the story of Ray, a self-proclaimed misfit who goes on the run in rural Ireland with One Eye, his adopted dog. […]
- The Frontier JusticeSupreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had all the makings of a successful politician. His rugged good looks accompanied an energetic personality that fit well with his “cowboy” image. His widely accepted exaggerations about his military service and childhood poverty diverted attention from his numerous extramarital affairs and neglect of his children, not to mention […]
- The Limits of Language1. In the mid-Aughts, advocacy groups for sexual assault survivors began to publish guidelines for journalists covering sexual violence. “Reporting Sexual Assault: A Guide for Journalists,” produced by the Michigan Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, came out online in 2004. “Reporting on Rape and Sexual Violence,” a forty-page media “toolkit,” was issued by the […]
- Blues, Grays & GreenbacksIn August 1861, a couple of weeks after the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase traveled from Washington to New York in search of money. Bull Run had destroyed hopes of a swift end to the fighting, and the war was already costing more than $1 million per day. (The […]
- The Documentarian“I have always had two ideas: that one day I would have to write about my father’s story, and that if I ever did so I would never be able to write another thing again.” This sentence appears near the beginning of Zachary Lazar’s 2009 memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and […]
- Shifting SandsEarly on the morning of May 6, 1682, the Royal Navy warship Gloucester careered into a large sandbank off the port of Yarmouth. It bounced along the ridge, the rudder sheared off, a neighboring plank broke, and water poured into the hold. As men rushed on deck the ship was suddenly swept into deep water […]
- ‘Tell Your Story, Omar’In 1721 an ancestor of mine in South Carolina, Elias Ball, bought a Muslim woman named Fatima on the wharf in the port city of Charleston and brought her twenty-five miles inland to his rice plantation on the Cooper River. The Ball family had enslaved West Africans and Native Americans for two decades by then, […]
- The Fight for Fair WagesAt the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the giant wooden front doors swing open to reveal the company’s sprawling, multilevel temple to itself. The space, which contains a cocktail bar, a gift shop, and a bakery in addition to a café, is done up in walnut and leather, with tastefully displayed […]
- The Inventor of Magical RealismNeither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for […]
- Loot Under the LindensPartially clad in a Baroque façade of glowing cherubs, gods, and lions, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum was conceived as a way to make a shattered city whole. The building is a reconstruction of the Stadtschloss, or City Palace, the main residence of the Hohenzollerns from 1443 to 1918, as they evolved from a family of counts […]
- Political BlindnessTo the Editors: Susan Neiman’s review of my Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes [NYR, April 6] combines her own remembrances and conceptions of Jacob Taubes and of his second wife, Margherita von Brentano (with whom Neiman studied and whose works she has edited), with a cavalcade of her own concerns. What […]
- Originalism’s LimitsTo the Editors: David Cole’s “Originalism’s Charade” [NYR, November 24, 2022] is a devastating critique of originalism as a method of interpreting the Constitution. Among other things, Cole argues that the theory does not deliver on its promise of constraining judicial discretion, because of the many interpretive choices it leaves to judges. But there is […]
- Naipaul & AfricaTo the Editors: Howard French criticizes V.S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River [“Naipaul’s Unreal Africa,” NYR, December 22, 2022] for its “essentialization” of Africa, which he claims is “deeply rooted [in] racist fantasies of the Western past.” He also alleges that Salim, the novel’s prejudiced narrator, is a “fictional voice for Naipaul’s sensibilities.” […]
- Every Man His Own HipsterThe neglected work has a number of advantages over the acknowledged masterpiece. First, it has the element of surprise: we are less likely to know how we are supposed to interpret it. But in its messiness or “wrongness” it can also be more inviting. Because it requires more generosity to appreciate, it gives the viewer […]
- History Bright and DarkAmericans have often been politically divided, never more so than during the Civil War, in which we managed to kill more than 600,000 of each other. But have the divisions over how we recount our history ever been so deep? Following the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in 2020, at least four […]
On May 11 Title 42 finally expired. The public health order, issued by the Trump administration in March 2020, almost completely shut down asylum processing at our southern border; in the last three years the US has conducted approximately 2.8 million expulsions of migrants, regardless of their reasons for trying to enter the country. The […]
In March 2015 I visited a friend, the Argentinean journalist Sandra Crucianelli, and her husband, Gabriel, for dinner in Bahía Blanca, a coastal city about four hundred miles south of Buenos Aires. I had just moved to Argentina from Dubai, seeking to report on environmental issues. Bahía Blanca, known as the “great metropolis of the […]
In December 2021 unions won two victories that have significantly reshaped the American labor movement in the years since: Starbucks Workers United unionized the first store in the company’s history, and the NLRB ruled that organizers be allowed into the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. By early 2022, two enormous corporations that had been considered […]
In September 1969 Susan Taubes returned to Budapest, the city where she had lived until the age of eleven. Standing outside her childhood home amid the bustle of the late-afternoon rush hour—the veranda bright with plants, the bushes still filled with berries, the wrought-iron gate closed—Taubes was overcome by a feeling of “beauty and grief, […]
How did countercultures commune before the Internet? One quaint and underappreciated precursor to the information highway was the underground press that proliferated during the late 1960s. The medium was never more the message. Sprouting in cities and college towns across America, these rambunctious weekly or biweekly tabloids flourished for a half dozen years, a form […]
Just to the east of the City of London is the district called Spitalfields. It was always a place of exile. Once the habitat of Huguenot weavers fleeing the massacres in France, it later became a refuge for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. By the 1970s it had acquired a new population of […]
“Lygia Pape: Tecelares” at the Art Institute of Chicago is an endlessly surprising exhibition, lyrical, frisky, and stealthily profound—which is a lot to pack into a bunch of mostly black-and-white polygons and circles. An important figure in Brazilian postwar art, Pape, like her fellow travelers Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, began her career dedicated to […]
The American Museum of Natural History’s new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation completes that venerable teaching and research institution’s four-city-block campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with decidedly mixed results. The $465 million infill project, which is architecturally fatuous though otherwise highly commendable, was designed by Studio Gang, the Chicago-based firm headed […]
A public memorial requires, at minimum, a shared memory—a consensus that something significant happened, if not necessarily what that something meant. The best monuments of remembrance, in fact, are those that inspirit collective emotion while accommodating disparate interpretations. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., evinces patriotic pride for some, renews rage for others. Yet […]
Last weekend the NYR Online published “Wages for Housewives,” an essay by the scholar and critic Anna Shechtman on the reality TV series The Real Housewives. The title alludes to the work of the Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici, who in 1974 argued that women’s housework under capitalism was always “destined to be unwaged.” What […]
In the mid-twentieth century the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was reappraised by Anglophone artists and art historians who considered him a Modernist avant la lettre. In their eyes he had flouted convention at Western art’s pivotal moment, breaking with the naive rendering and garish coloring of medieval painting and using his knowledge of […]
One hundred and fifty years ago, the magazine Popular Science launched its first issue, edited by the optimistic polymath Edward Youmans. Youmans, who published and lectured for general audiences on subjects ranging from the laws of thermodynamics to “The Science of Prohibition” and “The Culture Demanded by Modern Life,” admonished readers that “whoever desires to […]
When spring came in 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left their winter camp near Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Upper Missouri River and resumed their search for a route to the Pacific Ocean. The day was Sunday, April 7. Included in the party, Clark noted in his journal, was a French-Canadian trapper and […]
Paris in November. The rain was unrelenting, people huddled in cafés, and umbrellas knocked heads in the cramped streets. Scooters, bikes, and buses zoomed by, spattering muddy water with little regard for pedestrians. Everything felt taxing—even the metro was a mess. The only people engaged with life at a normal speed were those with dogs. […]
Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United […]
Back in the early 2010s, when I was writing my first dispatches from the US–Mexico border and volunteering as a humanitarian worker, I would stand on a hill in Nogales, Mexico, and watch as migrants, mostly young men, ducked alone through a hole in the old border fence. They would then dart from bush to […]
In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this […]
In 1925 a girl named Marina was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, to a Jewish Latvian father and a Protestant Italian mother. Ten years later the parents underwent an acrimonious divorce and the mother took Marina and her sister back to Italy. The girls were raised by their maternal grandmother in an […]
I saw them from the canal, nosingtheir way through a spare enclosure behindthe zoo. Dusk gray, two of a kind,and utterly unimposing, they were aimlesslycrossing their corner of Regent’s Parklike a pair of sullen castoffs from the arkand wearing their dirt shamelessly. Who could blame them for their ennui?They were just the secondwarthogs, their features […]
Looking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital,a hedge school, a diner, and an open-air prison with my bare handsand operating them at a continual loss. In this instant they are playing and I’m sitting on a bench where the unhindered sun applies itselfand I can feel it on my skin asking how it’s […]
Last February, with countries in many parts of Africa rigging constitutions to allow incumbent leaders to remain in office indefinitely or backsliding toward authoritarianism, Nigeria did something that seemed to set it apart: it held the latest in a series of regularly scheduled, democratically contested presidential elections dating back to 1999. That, at least, was […]
The interiors of Andy Warhol’s Factory, at 231 East 47th Street, were famously all silver: silver foil on the walls, silver paint on the pipes and ducts and furniture, mirrors everywhere. Even the elevator was silver. The intention of Warhol and his decorator, the photographer and Factory acolyte Billy Name, was to create an environment […]
None of this had to happen. In the fall of 2008, amid the great shipwreck of the international financial order, an anonymous person or group of persons writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a new electronic cash system called Bitcoin. In the “white paper” proposing the system, initially circulated to a cryptography mailing list, […]
To the Editors: Fintan O’Toole is a brilliant writer, and usually a sharp-eyed observer of things cultural and political, here and abroad. In his latest piece, “Bump and Grind” [NYR, May 11], he again excels as a writer. Regrettably, however, he falls short as a legal observer, and in a way that is unhelpful to […]
To the Editors: Praising the Hulu version of the 1619 Project, Adam Hochschild [NYR, May 25] writes: We hear about the powerful southern congressional committee chairmen who forced New Deal programs like Social Security to exclude categories of labor in which Blacks were concentrated, like domestic and agricultural work. This claim became popular in the […]
I began reading pieces for our May 25 issue while in London visiting family and friends. This included a trip to Charleston, the country home in East Sussex where the Bloomsbury group sometimes convened. I brought a stack of galleys in my bag for the ninety-minute train ride from Victoria Station to Lewes, but they […]
George Balanchine, the great choreographer and cofounder of New York City Ballet, who arrived in the United States in 1933, almost always had a girlfriend—often a few.1 His first American girlfriend, Holly Howard, apparently had four or five abortions in their first year together. Is it possible to get pregnant four or five times in […]
Blood doesn’t flow through our arteries and veins by gravity or magic or the force of our personalities. It is pushed. What pushes it is an elaborately engineered muscle (or muscular organ) that serves as a pump: the heart. Without the continuing, impelling action of that pump, the rest dies. The heart can survive without […]
Housewifery is hard work: taxing, by all accounts; isolating, by default; unwaged, by design. That is until 2006, when five women in Orange County were reportedly each given a few thousand dollars to be Housewives, Real Housewives, on cable television. They tottered, top-heavy, around Coto de Caza, their gated community, got Botox and went to […]
At the height of the shelter-in-place mandates in 2020, the Los Angeles–based artist Kelly Akashi began learning stone carving. It was partly a practical decision—she could carve outdoors and without assistance from others—and partly proof of her yen for centuries-old craft traditions, having already trained in glassblowing, lost-wax bronze casting, lacemaking, and rope making. One […]
June 16, 1948, was the beginning of the twelve-year conflict that would come to be called “the Malayan Emergency” by British colonial troops and “the Anti-British National Liberation War” by the predominantly ethnically Chinese Communist fighters seeking to overthrow them. Five thousand civilians died, and as much as 10 percent of the entire population of […]
On May 1 in New York City, a twenty-four-year-old white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny choked a thirty-year-old Black man named Jordan Neely to death on the F train as it headed toward the Broadway-Lafayette station. Neely was a street performer known for his skilled Michael Jackson impersonation. He was also mentally ill, homeless, and had […]
Media attention to war-torn countries follows a pattern. At first outrage and the pursuit of justice drive a twenty-four-hour cycle of coverage. Journalistic principle promises to keep it going until the war subsides, yet inevitably it recedes long before. Only occasionally do humanitarian tragedies prompt reminders of the ongoing hardship. The body of a three-year-old […]
Is the third time the charm? Charles’s first coronation was at Gordonstoun school in November 1965, when he played Macbeth. There is a photograph in the Royal Collections of him in a get-up nearly as strange as those he is wearing at Westminster Abbey almost sixty years later, sporting a bad fake beard and what […]
“It is blind acquiescence to collective madness, the twisted appeal to the common good, that propels citizens into fascism,” writes Jacqueline Rose in the May 11 issue of the Review. Her subject is Good, a 1982 play by C. P. Taylor that was staged at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London last winter. The main […]
Michael Silverblatt’s voice has been described as “so hypnotic, so compelling, that it apparently has prevented people driving on the LA freeways from committing acts of road rage.” What those drivers are listening to, more likely than not, is Silverblatt in conversation with an author. He hosts Bookworm, a thirty-minute interview program on the Los […]
“Let them eat grass,” said Andrew Myrick, a trader who owned several stores on the Dakota reservations in Minnesota. He was referring to the hungry warriors desperate for the food promised them by the federal government.* It was the summer of 1862, the second year of the Civil War. The Dakota were starving, their children […]
We can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice; produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke; sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it. What can […]
for Dmitry Golynko You are leaving with all these poems. You are leaving. An over-the-shoulder bag is over your shoulder. And the river is leaving. It is making its unwavering way to no longer being a river. It is moving among façades that are neither moving nor moved. They are repeating like stanzas in a […]
Long ago, I find the housewith one blazing window and sneak upto peek in: there are my parents in each other’s armsnaked in the rumpled bed, mouths locked, eyesradiant like the glass. I put my ear to the sashto listen but the pane thrums and the cat Jupitercomes padding: Am I a sparrow? A grasshopper?I […]
Walking alone in a forest, I came upona deer—this was not a vision.It faced me, on its four thin legs,unmoved as a cave paintingbrushed by light. I made myself still.I spoke to it, softly. I can’t rememberwhat I said. The deer regarded me as a god would,eased by my astonishment.Then, slowly, I moved closer, and […]
This past December the American Society of Hematology held its annual meeting in New Orleans. More than 30,000 attendees listened to presentations of the most recent research on blood and its disorders. As you might expect, the audience was primarily composed of people working in the field—clinicians, laboratory scientists, and trainees in fellowship programs—who focused […]
If you order Jennifer Homans’s Mr. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, you might want to tell the delivery man to bring a hand truck. With the endnotes, nearly 1,500 of them, the book is close to eight hundred pages long. Balanchine deserves such coverage, though. His career spanned most of the twentieth century, during which […]
Are novelists required to like humans? It’s fair to say, on the evidence of her published writing, that Sara Baume is not a people person. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), tells the story of Ray, a self-proclaimed misfit who goes on the run in rural Ireland with One Eye, his adopted dog. […]
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had all the makings of a successful politician. His rugged good looks accompanied an energetic personality that fit well with his “cowboy” image. His widely accepted exaggerations about his military service and childhood poverty diverted attention from his numerous extramarital affairs and neglect of his children, not to mention […]
1. In the mid-Aughts, advocacy groups for sexual assault survivors began to publish guidelines for journalists covering sexual violence. “Reporting Sexual Assault: A Guide for Journalists,” produced by the Michigan Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, came out online in 2004. “Reporting on Rape and Sexual Violence,” a forty-page media “toolkit,” was issued by the […]
In August 1861, a couple of weeks after the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase traveled from Washington to New York in search of money. Bull Run had destroyed hopes of a swift end to the fighting, and the war was already costing more than $1 million per day. (The […]
“I have always had two ideas: that one day I would have to write about my father’s story, and that if I ever did so I would never be able to write another thing again.” This sentence appears near the beginning of Zachary Lazar’s 2009 memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and […]
Early on the morning of May 6, 1682, the Royal Navy warship Gloucester careered into a large sandbank off the port of Yarmouth. It bounced along the ridge, the rudder sheared off, a neighboring plank broke, and water poured into the hold. As men rushed on deck the ship was suddenly swept into deep water […]
In 1721 an ancestor of mine in South Carolina, Elias Ball, bought a Muslim woman named Fatima on the wharf in the port city of Charleston and brought her twenty-five miles inland to his rice plantation on the Cooper River. The Ball family had enslaved West Africans and Native Americans for two decades by then, […]
At the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the giant wooden front doors swing open to reveal the company’s sprawling, multilevel temple to itself. The space, which contains a cocktail bar, a gift shop, and a bakery in addition to a café, is done up in walnut and leather, with tastefully displayed […]
Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for […]
Partially clad in a Baroque façade of glowing cherubs, gods, and lions, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum was conceived as a way to make a shattered city whole. The building is a reconstruction of the Stadtschloss, or City Palace, the main residence of the Hohenzollerns from 1443 to 1918, as they evolved from a family of counts […]
To the Editors: Susan Neiman’s review of my Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes [NYR, April 6] combines her own remembrances and conceptions of Jacob Taubes and of his second wife, Margherita von Brentano (with whom Neiman studied and whose works she has edited), with a cavalcade of her own concerns. What […]
To the Editors: David Cole’s “Originalism’s Charade” [NYR, November 24, 2022] is a devastating critique of originalism as a method of interpreting the Constitution. Among other things, Cole argues that the theory does not deliver on its promise of constraining judicial discretion, because of the many interpretive choices it leaves to judges. But there is […]
To the Editors: Howard French criticizes V.S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River [“Naipaul’s Unreal Africa,” NYR, December 22, 2022] for its “essentialization” of Africa, which he claims is “deeply rooted [in] racist fantasies of the Western past.” He also alleges that Salim, the novel’s prejudiced narrator, is a “fictional voice for Naipaul’s sensibilities.” […]
The neglected work has a number of advantages over the acknowledged masterpiece. First, it has the element of surprise: we are less likely to know how we are supposed to interpret it. But in its messiness or “wrongness” it can also be more inviting. Because it requires more generosity to appreciate, it gives the viewer […]
Americans have often been politically divided, never more so than during the Civil War, in which we managed to kill more than 600,000 of each other. But have the divisions over how we recount our history ever been so deep? Following the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in 2020, at least four […]
New York Times Books©
- Martin Amis: An AppreciationOur critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son.
- Book Review: ‘NB by J.C.,’ by James Campbell“NB by J.C.” collects the variegated musings of James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement.
- In ‘Fires in the Dark,’ Kay Redfield Jamison Turns to HealersIn “Fires in the Dark,” Jamison, known for her expertise on manic depression, delves into the quest to heal. Her new book, she says, is a “love song to psychotherapy.”
- The Detective Novel ‘Whose Body?,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers, Turns 100Dorothy L. Sayers dealt with emotional and financial instability by writing “Whose Body?,” the first of many to star the detective Lord Peter Wimsey.
- Book Review: ‘Dom Casmurro,’ by Machado de Assis“Dom Casmurro,” by Machado de Assis, teaches us to read — and reread — with precise detail and masterly obfuscation.
- Book Review: ‘The Late Americans,’ by Brandon TaylorBrandon Taylor’s novel circulates among Iowa City residents, some privileged, some not, but all aware that their possibilities are contracting.
- Martin Amis’s Best Books: A GuideThe acclaimed British novelist was also an essayist, memoirist and critic of the first rank.
- The Best Romance Books to Read in 2023Looking for an escapist love story? Our columnist is tracking the year’s sexiest, swooniest reads.
- The Best Books to Read in 2023Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.
- ‘How to Write About Africa: Collected Works’ Shows Binyavanga Wainaina’s LegacyBinyavanga Wainaina attacked insulting clichés in the essay, “How to Write About Africa,” in 2005. In a posthumous collection of the same name, his range as a writer is on display.
- Book Review: ‘Kairos,’ by Jenny ErpenbeckJenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Kairos” folds intimations of German history and cultural memory into a torrid romance.
- Book Review: ‘Lucky Girl,’ by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu; ‘The Skin and Its Girl,’ by Sarah Cypher; and ‘Ghost Girl, Banana,’ by Wiz WhartonNew books by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu, Sarah Cypher and Wiz Wharton showcase young women embarking on journeys of discovery around family and self.
- ‘Sybil’ 50 Years LaterThe “true story” of a woman with multiple personalities was a 1973 sensation and is still in print 50 years later. Why do such lurid tales hold their grip?
- Stanley Engerman, Revisionist Scholar of Slavery, Dies at 87His two-volume study, written with Robert W. Fogel, used data to challenge commonly held ideas about American slavery, including that it was unprofitable and inefficient.
- Book Review: ‘The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men,’ by Manuel BetancourtIn his new essay collection, “The Male Gazed,” the writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt explores society’s portrayals of masculinity.
- Book Review: ‘The House on Via Gemito,’ by Domenico StarnoneDomenico Starnone’s novel “The House on Via Gemito” is a searching work of autofiction about a family in postwar Naples.
- Winnie the Pooh ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ Book Draws Parents’ IreThe Dallas school district apologized for not providing guidance to parents when it sent students home with a book that teaches how to respond to dangerous situations at school.
- Remembering Martin AmisThe Times critics Dwight Garner and Jason Zinoman celebrate the life and work of the great British novelist and literary critic, who died last week.
- New Crime Books for SummerOur columnist looks at a clutch of summer crime novels, including “I Didn’t Do It,” set at a mystery writers’ conference.
- New Summer ThrillersOur columnist on “Death Watch,” “Going Zero” and other pulse-pounding summer novels.
- New Historical Fiction Books to Read This SummerThese books rewind time, depositing readers in the Cumbrian countryside, coastal Maine, rural Wyoming and beyond.
- New Summer Romance BooksOur columnist recommends six dreamy new romance novels.
- New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books for SummerNew novels by Fonda Lee, Martha Wells, Nick Harkaway, Kelly Link and Emma Törzs.
- New Audiobooks for SummerFive new audiobooks to download this summer include a breakdown of quantum computing and a tribute to Mary Oliver.
- Best Beach Reads for Summer 2023These five novels go well with sand, sunscreen and hot afternoons. (Landlocked on a rainy day? That works, too.)
- New Horror Books From Riley Sager, Cynthia Pelayo and MoreIf your idea of a good summer read involves abject terror, we’ve got some recommendations for you.
- How ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ Became a Surprise Best SellerGabrielle Zevin didn’t expect a wide audience for “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” her novel about game developers. It became a blockbuster with staying power.
- Book Review: ‘Mild Vertigo,’ by Mieko KanaiIn Mieko Kanai’s 1997 novel, newly translated into English, a wife and mother’s monotonous days are punctured by quiet revelations.
- Burhan Sönmez on the Tensions Between Politics and Art in TurkeyBurhan Sönmez, who is president of PEN International, discusses the tension between politics and art and the role of literature in authoritarian societies.
- 9 New Books We Recommend This WeekSuggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
- Langston Hughes and Elmer W. Brown: A Collaboration DeferredThe famous poet and his artist friend wanted to publish “The Sweet and Sour Animal Book” in 1936. But there were no takers. A Cleveland exhibition makes up for the lost time.
- Book Review: ‘Good Night, Irene,’ by Luis Alberto Urrea“Good Night, Irene,” a novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, sends two female volunteers to the Western Front.
- Book Review: ‘Beware the Woman,’ by Megan AbbottIn Megan Abbott’s new novel, “Beware the Woman,” a romantic dramedy morphs into horror.
- Tiffany Hammond Believes Stories Are the Best TeachersIn her No. 1 best-selling picture book, “A Day With No Words,” the debut author shows an average day in the life of a boy who has autism.
- Poem: Ladies of the Sarasota SewerAn elegy to the ecstasy of life in the gutter.
- Interview: Brandon Taylor Loves to Read Romances and European History“Indeed, the two have a lot in common!” says the author, whose new novel is “The Late Americans.”
- Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem, “The Hill We Climb,” Restricted by Florida SchoolA grade school in Miami-Dade County said “The Hill We Climb,” which Ms. Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, was “better suited” for older students after a parent complained about it.
- Book Review: ‘Gone to the Wolves,’ by John Wray“Gone to the Wolves” follows three young Floridians shredding their way through the heavy metal scenes of the 1980s and ’90s.
- The High-Risk Feat of Bringing ‘American Born Chinese’ to TVFor years, Gene Luen Yang was convinced a single character in his groundbreaking graphic novel would doom any attempt at an adaptation. What changed?
- Book Review: ‘Women We Buried, Women We Burned,’ by Rachel Louise SnyderRachel Louise Snyder lost her mother to cancer at 8 and was kicked out of her high school and her home at 16. “Women We Buried, Women We Burned” chronicles her quest to create a fulfilling life on her own terms.
- Decades Old? No Problem: Publisher Makes a Bet on Aging BooksA company is republishing books that have fallen out of print and finding new ways to market works that are years, even decades, old.
- Book Review: ‘Genealogy of a Murder,’ by Lisa BelkinIn “Genealogy of a Murder,” Lisa Belkin maps the meandering roads that wound through families and decades before intersecting in tragedy.
- Newly Published, From Fluid Friendship to Fatherhood in VerseA selection of recently published books.
- ‘Time Shelter,’ by Georgi Gospodinov, Wins International Booker PrizeGeorgi Gospodinov’s acclaimed satire, translated by Angela Rodel, is the first Bulgarian novel to win the prestigious award.
- A Hospital Visit Reveals Medieval Secrets Hidden in BooksUsing CT scanning on 16th-century books, researchers uncovered bits of parchment salvaged from handwritten manuscripts.
- How a Novelist Became an Innkeeper“These days, my role as an innkeeper occupies me almost as much as fiction,” writes Joyce Maynard, who, during the pandemic, hired locals in a Guatemalan village to turn her writing retreat into a guesthouse.
- Book Review: ‘Built From the Fire,’ by Victor LuckersonAn ambitious new book by Victor Luckerson traces the history of Greenwood, Okla., from its prosperous early days through the 1921 race massacre and its aftermath.
- Book Review: ‘Halcyon,’ by Elliot AckermanElliot Ackerman’s alternate history reimagines the politics and science of the early 21st century.
- Book Review: ‘Cleopatra’s Daughter,’ by Jane DraycottA new biography by Jane Draycott shines a light on an African queen whose career has been overshadowed by that of her famous forebear.
- Book Review: ‘Brave the Wild River,’ by Melissa L. SevignyIn Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.
- Book Review: ‘Wild Things,’ by Laura KayIn Laura Kay’s new novel, “Wild Things,” a timid young woman embarks on a year of adventure, only to stumble into romance along the way.
Our critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son.
“NB by J.C.” collects the variegated musings of James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement.
In “Fires in the Dark,” Jamison, known for her expertise on manic depression, delves into the quest to heal. Her new book, she says, is a “love song to psychotherapy.”
Dorothy L. Sayers dealt with emotional and financial instability by writing “Whose Body?,” the first of many to star the detective Lord Peter Wimsey.
“Dom Casmurro,” by Machado de Assis, teaches us to read — and reread — with precise detail and masterly obfuscation.
Brandon Taylor’s novel circulates among Iowa City residents, some privileged, some not, but all aware that their possibilities are contracting.
The acclaimed British novelist was also an essayist, memoirist and critic of the first rank.
Looking for an escapist love story? Our columnist is tracking the year’s sexiest, swooniest reads.
Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.
Binyavanga Wainaina attacked insulting clichés in the essay, “How to Write About Africa,” in 2005. In a posthumous collection of the same name, his range as a writer is on display.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Kairos” folds intimations of German history and cultural memory into a torrid romance.
New books by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu, Sarah Cypher and Wiz Wharton showcase young women embarking on journeys of discovery around family and self.
The “true story” of a woman with multiple personalities was a 1973 sensation and is still in print 50 years later. Why do such lurid tales hold their grip?
His two-volume study, written with Robert W. Fogel, used data to challenge commonly held ideas about American slavery, including that it was unprofitable and inefficient.
In his new essay collection, “The Male Gazed,” the writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt explores society’s portrayals of masculinity.
Domenico Starnone’s novel “The House on Via Gemito” is a searching work of autofiction about a family in postwar Naples.
The Dallas school district apologized for not providing guidance to parents when it sent students home with a book that teaches how to respond to dangerous situations at school.
The Times critics Dwight Garner and Jason Zinoman celebrate the life and work of the great British novelist and literary critic, who died last week.
Our columnist looks at a clutch of summer crime novels, including “I Didn’t Do It,” set at a mystery writers’ conference.
Our columnist on “Death Watch,” “Going Zero” and other pulse-pounding summer novels.
These books rewind time, depositing readers in the Cumbrian countryside, coastal Maine, rural Wyoming and beyond.
Our columnist recommends six dreamy new romance novels.
New novels by Fonda Lee, Martha Wells, Nick Harkaway, Kelly Link and Emma Törzs.
Five new audiobooks to download this summer include a breakdown of quantum computing and a tribute to Mary Oliver.
These five novels go well with sand, sunscreen and hot afternoons. (Landlocked on a rainy day? That works, too.)
If your idea of a good summer read involves abject terror, we’ve got some recommendations for you.
Gabrielle Zevin didn’t expect a wide audience for “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” her novel about game developers. It became a blockbuster with staying power.
In Mieko Kanai’s 1997 novel, newly translated into English, a wife and mother’s monotonous days are punctured by quiet revelations.
Burhan Sönmez, who is president of PEN International, discusses the tension between politics and art and the role of literature in authoritarian societies.
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The famous poet and his artist friend wanted to publish “The Sweet and Sour Animal Book” in 1936. But there were no takers. A Cleveland exhibition makes up for the lost time.
“Good Night, Irene,” a novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, sends two female volunteers to the Western Front.
In Megan Abbott’s new novel, “Beware the Woman,” a romantic dramedy morphs into horror.
In her No. 1 best-selling picture book, “A Day With No Words,” the debut author shows an average day in the life of a boy who has autism.
An elegy to the ecstasy of life in the gutter.
“Indeed, the two have a lot in common!” says the author, whose new novel is “The Late Americans.”
A grade school in Miami-Dade County said “The Hill We Climb,” which Ms. Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, was “better suited” for older students after a parent complained about it.
“Gone to the Wolves” follows three young Floridians shredding their way through the heavy metal scenes of the 1980s and ’90s.
For years, Gene Luen Yang was convinced a single character in his groundbreaking graphic novel would doom any attempt at an adaptation. What changed?
Rachel Louise Snyder lost her mother to cancer at 8 and was kicked out of her high school and her home at 16. “Women We Buried, Women We Burned” chronicles her quest to create a fulfilling life on her own terms.
A company is republishing books that have fallen out of print and finding new ways to market works that are years, even decades, old.
In “Genealogy of a Murder,” Lisa Belkin maps the meandering roads that wound through families and decades before intersecting in tragedy.
A selection of recently published books.
Georgi Gospodinov’s acclaimed satire, translated by Angela Rodel, is the first Bulgarian novel to win the prestigious award.
Using CT scanning on 16th-century books, researchers uncovered bits of parchment salvaged from handwritten manuscripts.
“These days, my role as an innkeeper occupies me almost as much as fiction,” writes Joyce Maynard, who, during the pandemic, hired locals in a Guatemalan village to turn her writing retreat into a guesthouse.
An ambitious new book by Victor Luckerson traces the history of Greenwood, Okla., from its prosperous early days through the 1921 race massacre and its aftermath.
Elliot Ackerman’s alternate history reimagines the politics and science of the early 21st century.
A new biography by Jane Draycott shines a light on an African queen whose career has been overshadowed by that of her famous forebear.
In Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.
In Laura Kay’s new novel, “Wild Things,” a timid young woman embarks on a year of adventure, only to stumble into romance along the way.
The Chronicle of Higher Education©
- DEI: The Case for Common GroundThere's more room for agreement than might appear.By James E. Ryan
Golden Cosmos for The Chronicle
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There's more room for agreement than might appear.
There's more room for agreement than might appear.By James E. Ryan
Golden Cosmos for The Chronicle
// for full bleed half split - figure's parent container shouldn't calc max-height
// and should be set to 100% instead - querySelector === baseClassName
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parent.style.maxHeight = "100%"
There's more room for agreement than might appear.