April 2013
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Epistle to a Godson by W.H. Auden
DEAR PHILIP. “Thank God for boozy godfathers”
you wrote in our guest-book, which was flattering:
though I’ve reached the years when discretion
calls for a yearly medical check-up,
who am I to avouch for a Christian
baby, far less offer ghostly platitudes
to a young man? In yester times it
was different: the old could be helpful
when they could nicely envisage the...
March 2013
9 posts
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Mango Seedling by Chinua Achebe
Through glass window pane
Up a modern office block
I saw, two floors below, on wide-jutting
Concrete canopy a mango seedling newly sprouted
Purple, two-leafed, standing on its burst
Black yolk. It waved brightly to sun and wind
Between rains—daily regaling itself
On seed-yams, prodigally.
For how long?
How long the happy waving
From precipice of rainswept sarcophagus?
How long the...
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“We wanted a book review worthy of its subject, in which writers we admired—and...”
– Jason Epstein on the founding of The New York Review
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“These arbitrary cuts are exactly the opposite of what the economy needs both in...”
– Jeff Madrick, The Sequester’s Hidden Danger
February 2013
11 posts
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“The strangest experience of my early tenure at The New York Review involved one...”
– Andrew Martin on his time as an intern at the Review.
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WatchOn February 5, The New York Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an evening at Town Hall in New York City. Before a packed crowd of 1,400 people, editor Robert Silvers introduced John Banville, Mary Beard, Michael Chabon, Mark Danner, Joan Didion, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Darryl Pinckney, who read from their past work in the Review and spoke about their relationship with the magazine, and...
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“We value great art most fundamentally not because the art as product enhances...”
– From “What Is a Good Life?” by philosopher and longtime New York Review contributor Ronald Dworkin, who died on February 14 at the age of 81
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January 2013
18 posts
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“The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that...”
– Michael Chabon, on Wes Anderson’s Worlds
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“No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so...”
– Garry Wills, Dumb America
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“Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid...”
– Susan Sontag, The Ideal Husband, 1963.
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Happy birthday, Stephen Hawking
Martin Gardner had this to say of the legendary physicist back in 1988: “He is already a legend, not just because of his brilliant contributions to theoretical physics, but also for his courage, optimism, and humor in the face of a crippling illness. Lou Gehrig’s disease may be gnawing away at his body, but it has left his mind intact.”
The Ultimate Turtle by Martin Gardner
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“It’s hard to explain to people who don’t live here what further escalation means...”
– Nomika Zion, in a letter to Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu she wrote during the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in November. She is the founder of Migvan and member of a grassroots organization of citizens from Sderot who call for a nonviolent solution to the ongoing conflict.
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“One measure of how complicated Egyptian politics has become is that hardly...”
– Yasmine El Rashidi, Egypt: Whose Constitution?
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December 2012
20 posts
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“The strenuous debate between President Obama and House Speaker Boehner over how...”
– Jeff Madrick, Either Way We’re Going Over the Cliff
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“It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody...”
– Zadie Smith on joy
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“The horror of Newtown cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the...”
– Garry Wills, Our Moloch
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“In days like ours when help can still mean ruin and saving mean slaying, when...”
– Janet Adam Smith explains the enduring appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, from our December 14, 1972 issue.
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“Furniture lay on the street in soggy, reeking heaps—the pathetically intimate...”
– Michael Greenberg returns to the Rockaways, where he grew up, a week after Hurricane Sandy hit.
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“Yet those who take in their stride the most abstruse complexities of Beethoven,...”
– Charles Rosen, from an article discussing Elliot Carter’s Double Concerto (read the rest here). Probably the best explanation of the difficulty listeners have in accepting/understanding modern works as will ever be said by anyone. He passed away yesterday at the age of 85. (via jackthemusicologist) 