Nabokov, Meet 50 Cent: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind. "Those who have been paying attention to Zadie Smith since her White Teeth debut likely already know about her affinities for E.M. Forster, Lil Wayne, George Eliot, Kafka, and Fawlty Towers. She's one of probably three working writers capable of smuggling a riff on the perils of "keeping it real" into The New York Review of Books."
posted by geoff. on Nov 11, 2009 - 15 comments

NYRB-filter: The Truth About The Election by Elizabeth Drew
posted by wittgenstein on Nov 30, 2008 - 33 comments

Oliver Sacks on Manic-Depression.
posted by vronsky on Sep 7, 2008 - 30 comments

Talking back to Prozac. Review article in The New York Review of Books, covering some issues concerning the diagnosis and treatment of depression.
posted by hydatius on Nov 21, 2007 - 57 comments

Bill McKibben reviews Armstrong and Moulitsas's book Crashing the Gate in the New York Review of Books. More importantly, Kos gets his own David Levine caricature.
posted by russilwvong on Apr 10, 2006 - 18 comments

Max Rodenbeck reviews a new collection of Osama bin Laden's speeches and a biography by Peter Bergen. David Cole discusses the US side of the conflict, reviewing the latest book by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon: "--when it comes to fighting the decentralized threat of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, Benjamin and Simon maintain, the best defense is not a good offense, but a good defense." More on al-Qaeda: Rodenbeck, MetaFilter.
posted by russilwvong on Feb 24, 2006 - 1 comment

How To Get Ahead. "In this, the high summer of the great conservative revolt, no one, whatever his past political aberrations, can remain unaffected. I am not. Accordingly, I am here offering, also in a great conservative tradition, advice and counsel to the young—advice and counsel on how to get ahead in an ideologically restructured world. I propose to tell you, graduates of the class of [...], how now to proceed if you wish the acclaim and goodwill as well as the income of your fellow men. The advice I offer I do not find wholly acceptable for myself. But that too is in a great tradition of advice to the young".
John Kenneth Galbraith, from an Address to the Yale Graduating Class, 1979. (more inside)
posted by matteo on May 11, 2005 - 16 comments

David Garland's disturbing new book addresses the question why there are so many more people in jail in America and Britain than anywhere else... Its broader concern is with "cultures of control," how societies treat deviance and violence and whom they single out for what treatment. Here are some facts about skyrocketing imprisonment... There are approximately two million people in jail in America today, 2,166,260 at last count: more than four times as many people as thirty years ago. It is the largest number in our history... [and] between four and ten times the incarceration rate of any civilized country in the world... Twelve percent of African-American men between twenty and thirty-four are currently behind bars (the highest figure ever recorded by the Justice Department) compared to 1.6 percent of white men of comparable ages. And according to the same source, 28 percent of black men will be sent to jail in their lifetime... It was not until crime rates had already leveled off that incarceration rates began their steady, year-by-year climb. Between 1972 and 1992, while the population of America's prisons grew and grew, the crime rate as a whole continued at the same level, unchanged. Jerome S. Bruner reviews The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society for The New York Review of Books, as does Austin Sarat in the American Prospect.
posted by y2karl on Sep 18, 2003 - 9 comments

When Most Of The Reviews (And Indeed Books) Are Long Since Forgotten, David Levine's extraordinary portraits of the public figures and obsessions of the last 40 years will stand as a lasting impression of our literary and political lions, masters, avatars and bugbears. The generous and ever essential New York Review of Books offers us a complete and fully searchable gallery of the great caricaturist's work since its first issue hit the stands back in 1963 - almost 2,000 cartoons in all. It's fascinating to trace the sequence and evolution of Levine's drawings through the years of particular figures: Nabokov and Beckett, for instance.
posted by MiguelCardoso on May 29, 2003 - 10 comments

Over the last few years, Tony Judt has been writing some brilliant commentary on the world political situation in the NYRB. His latest is one of the best pieces I’ve read for ages. Sanity, reason, non-shrillness, etc – and it’s only the first of three articles.
posted by Mocata on Mar 17, 2003 - 8 comments

Compulsory reading for the 'American Civil War was fought over states' rights' crowd.
posted by Mocata on Mar 27, 2001 - 2 comments

Very good election analysis by Joan Didion in the current NYRB. (More inside.)
posted by Mocata on Oct 17, 2000 - 4 comments