Conceived after Teju Cole suffered an attack of papillophlebitis, or “big blind spot syndrome,” in 2011, “Blind Spot” and its companion volume of the same title complete what he calls “a quartet about the limits of vision.” It combines the omnivorous erudition of his 2016 essay collection Known and Strange Things with the associative structure of Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011), peripatetic novels set, respectively, in Lagos and New York. The show is a record of Cole’s extensive travels between 2011 and 2017, but it is less concerned with his own itinerary than with the paths of others.
bookreview
Our Trouble with Sex: A Christian Story?
What interest do people living in a supposedly secular and liberal society have in regulating perhaps the most intimate aspect of an adult’s life—consensual sexual behavior with another adult? How do people decide which sexual acts, conducted in private, have a public impact and, therefore, become the public’s business? For our purposes, why do Americans think as we do about sex, and how have we used the Constitution, and the laws of the fifty states, to instantiate those beliefs?
Twelve Ways of Looking at Frank Lloyd Wright
Few things are more satisfying in the arts than unjustly forgotten figures at last accorded a rightful place in the canon. Then there are the perennially celebrated artists who are so important that they must be presented anew to each successive generation, a daunting task for museums, especially encyclopedic ones that are expected to revisit the major masters over and over again while finding fresh reasons for their relevance. Yet the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” was a more hazardous proposition than its universally beloved subject might indicate.
The Mysterious Music of Georg Trakl
Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger found themselves, at pivotal moments in their careers, turning to the arresting work of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914). Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein and Heidegger responded to Trakl’s striking and still mysterious poems in sharply divergent—one might almost say opposite—ways.
God’s Gift to Men
Wonder Woman allows its heroine all the trappings of free, courageous, independent womanhood. It even cheers her on when she bashes up men. It merely propagates the unhelpful myth that if a woman is nice enough, pretty enough, feminine enough, she can do such things without ever causing offense, or being called a bitch.
The End of the End of Obamacare
Republicans have been implacable in their determination to put an end to Obama’s proudest legislative achievement ever since it was passed in March 2010. This has as much to do with disdain for our first black president as it does resistance to a historic expansion of government. But the Republicans didn’t reckon on two things: that the program would become popular once people signed on to it; and that after two terms Obama would end up one of our most liked presidents.
Nuclear Diplomacy: From Iran to North Korea?
North Korea is years beyond the nuclear “breakout” the US so fears in Iran. Pyongyang’s first nuclear test was more than a decade ago. Four more have followed with yields up to twice the size of the Hiroshima bomb. The country is believed to have around twenty fission bombs and to be progressing along the path to a much larger hydrogen bomb. Moreover, the regime is consistently making faster progress on missile technology than US intelligence has expected.
Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights
Trump’s campaign ran on promises to “take back” a sense of safety and “bring back” a simpler time. When he pledged to build the wall or to fight a variety of non-existent crime waves (urban, immigrant) he was promising to shield Americans from the strange, the unknown, the unpredictable. Queers can serve as convenient shorthand for change.
How the Communists Helped the Scottsboro Boys
To the Editors: I write to give credit where credit is due in one paragraph of Bryan Stevenson’s outstanding essay “A Presumption of Guilt.” It was not the NAACP but rather the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, that launched the international campaign to save the “Scottsboro Boys” from Alabama’s electric chair. NAACP officials believed that the defense should should be conducted quietly, in the courts. The defendants and their parents chose the Communists, and the NAACP played only a peripheral role in the case.
The First Women Voters
To the Editors: In her essay “The Abortion Battlefield,” Marcia Angell writes that “women couldn’t vote in the United States until 1920.” This is incorrect. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, did grant the universal right of women to vote. However, for decades before this federal constitutional amendment American women voted in certain towns, cities, counties, and states.
Sig Nordal 