Silicon Valley, strictly speaking, does not exist. Its geographic boundaries are fluid and contested; even the places considered central to it are oddly placeless. Driving through Menlo Park and Mountain View, you could be forgiven for thinking you were nowhere at all. What defines the Valley is something you can’t see: the velocity of the […]
Rachel Kushner's fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.
During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholar have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of works that envelop and overwhelm the viewer.
In another era the men at the center of Joseph O’Neill’s novels might have made good spies. His protagonists are men adrift—unmoored from their families and belonging in no one place, they move across the globe with ease, acquiring no particular loyalties and demanding no more than handsome payment. See: Hans van den Broek, the […]
The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers' savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.
In her memoir 1974, Francine Prose recounts her brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
Same Bed Different Dreams, the second novel by the American writer Ed Park, opens with a question: “What is history?” A confusing thing to ask, impossibly grand, slightly ridiculous. Seemingly unanswerable—though for the rest of the novel various characters give it their best shot. “A litany of trackable moments, the realm of machines,” offers an […]
Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.
Can Babel work? An exhilarating new book about preserving the languages of the most linguistically diverse city in history believes it can.
In April 2011 Mexican soldiers discovered mass graves in San Fernando, a city of some 30,000 people in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. One hundred and ninety-three corpses were exhumed and moved to the border city of Matamoros. Soon the local morgue was swamped with people trying to discover whether their disappeared family members were […]
The satirist’s troubles begin with a bad review. Anna, the writer who narrates The Book of Ayn, has published a comic novel about the opioid crisis that a New York Times critic condemns as “classist.” The novel skewers Big Pharma execs and drug dealers as well as addicts, for which the Times accuses Anna of […]
For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan's undershirts to nerve repair.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.
Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood's golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.
Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.
In Mark O'Connell's A Thread of Violence, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.
In a novel that fuses horror with historical fiction, Victor LaValle explores the lives of African American women who went west around the turn of the twentieth century.
Steve Coll's The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein's rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.
The Irish columnist Megan Nolan began writing fiction under the spell of Karl Ove Knausgaard. She read little else while starting her first novel, Acts of Desperation (2021). Nolan is hardly a newcomer to self-exposure: her columns and personal essays, animated by breezy, humane candor, tackle intimate subjects light and heavy—often sex, romance, and drinking […]
The party of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains a strong hold on power, but it has lost the people's mandate. Will there be a transfer of power to the opposition candidate Edmundo González — the true victor of this summer's election?
Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?
In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.
The project concerns the renovation of a typical 70s detached house, where small openings and partitioned spaces were demolished to create open, transversal spaces. Inspired by the Mediterranean context, the project seeks to create a neutral, minimalist envelope connecting the architect's values, the client's identity and the natural, artisanal feel of the materials. The new spaces offer the freedom to adapt to everyday use. Furniture is designed as an integral part of the architecture. Planters... Читать дальше...
Two physicists have come across infinitely many novel equations for pi while trying to develop a unifying theory of the fundamental forces
