What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

W hen Frankenthaler was visiting Spain in 1953, her friend Sonya Rudikoff wrote to her and asked for her impressions of political life under Franco. She did not answer the question. “She had more ...

Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages.

Cymbidium Lowianum, a color lithograph by Joseph Mansell, after a painting by Henry George Moon from Reichenbachia: Orchids Illustrated and Described, Second Series, Vol. 2, Tab 53, c. 1888–94, by ...

Future-proofing the American workerListen to an audio version of this article. I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one ...

“P aul says I’m just dicknotized.” Paul is Lily’s gay best friend and closest romantic confidant. Grating portmanteaus are a crucial part of their relationship. “Dickmatized?” I pronounce the word ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. T oward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 ...

Is Donald Trump a fascist or a plutocrat?I t is powerfully tempting to call the new president of the United States a fascist. Donald Trump’s bullying tone, his scowl, and his jutting jaw recall Benito ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...

Discussed in this essay: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. T his buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous ...

On the enduring legacy of Marshal PétainNevertheless, Pétain chose to return voluntarily to France in April 1945, shortly before the German surrender that ended the war in Europe. Perhaps, shut up in ...