A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red, until red takes her over to transform her into a drowning figure in a blackened lake.
Books
How Sweden Became a Symbol
When the march of progressivism seemed inexorable, Sweden was happy to play poster child and humbly let uninformed outsiders label the place a social paradise. Now that the spread of progressive values around the world is facing its stiffest test in decades, Sweden finds itself on the front line. And for the traditionalists seeking to reverse the liberal trend, to show that Sweden—Sweden—is failing offers an effective way to shortcut the argument.
Slavery and the American University
According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee co-founded the College of New Jersey, known today as Princeton. From their very beginnings, the American university and American slavery have been intertwined, but only recently are we beginning to understand how deeply. In part, this can be attributed to an expansion of political will.
Caricature Or, Guston’s Graphic Novel
The ongoing visual gag of the book, especially as Philip Guston finds his groove and really gets going, is Richard Nixon-as-dick, or Tricky Dick with chin as hairy scrotum and nose-dong—sometimes priapic, sometimes flaccid—though Nixon’s earliest appearances are almost certainly internalizations of Robert Crumb’s Flakey Foont, a sort of everyman character blindly shuttered by American lies and ambitions until his enlightened old Squirrel Cage pal Mr. Natural blows his mind with the cosmic truths, or at least tries to.
Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?
These months mark the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Mao’s most infamous experiment in social engineering, the Great Leap Forward. It was this campaign that caused the deaths of tens of millions and catapulted Mao Zedong into the big league of twentieth-century murders. But Mao’s mistakes are more than a chance to reflect on the past. They are also now part of a central debate in Xi Jinping’s China, where the Communist Party is renewing a long-standing battle to protect its legitimacy by limiting discussions of Mao.
Doing the New York Hustle
With her quiver of exclamation marks, Tina Brown persists in portraying herself as the wide-eyed ingenue, even when she is taking an ax to her underlings. Perhaps the most chilling phrase in her diaries is “Gotta clean house.”
Toughing It Out in Cairo
I observed, in myself and my friends, how inured we had become to the events of our own recent history, which were landmarked by the sites where they had occurred: this was where the Copts got trampled by army tanks; on this street corner I saw a pile of dead bodies; here supporters of Morsi opened fire on young activists; there two hundred people were killed at the hands of the police; and this was where the prosecutor general was assassinated by a car bomb. It was only as I made these mental notes that I realized how I, too, had slipped into some variation of the so-called inertia.
Whose Nation? The Art of Black Power
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power is rigorous and encyclopedic. As a catalogue, it is certainly lavish, and while it spends time on individual artists, its strength lies in its acknowledgment of the important part institutions play in art’s creation and reception. Within the racist and sexist history of the American art world, black curators, collectors, and galleries have exerted a crucial countervailing influence.
Art et Liberté: Egypt’s Surrealists
Though Art et Liberté was universalist in its philosophical convictions, the writing and visual art produced for the group’s five exhibitions and multiple publications—of which more than a hundred works and a similar number of archival materials are on display at the Tate—responded to specific Egyptian concerns. The Egyptian group’s work was no mere imitation of that of André Breton and his associates in the Parisian Surrealist scene, which tends to be regarded by critics as the movement’s one and true home. Rather, Egypt had its own distinct history and a style of Surrealism that, some argued, stretched into its ancient past.
Confederation: The One Possible Israel-Palestine Solution
The peacemaking of the Oslo Accords is stuck over the same linked problems that thwarted peacemaking during the previous generation: terrorism, settlements, Jerusalem, borders, the economy, and refugees. It seems vain to blame only leaders or “narratives” for the impasse, and not the way peacemakers have framed the peace that is notionally to be made. “One state” is a mirage. But so, now, is “two states”—unless this portends an overt structure of independence and interdependence: in effect, a confederation. No other arrangement can work.
Sig Nordal 