John Washington
Burning Up
Reading John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.
Ingrid D. Rowland
Nature’s Rival
Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.
Susie Linfield
What’s in a Face?
The longstanding obsession with Jewish looks has always been essentially political—and never more so than now.
Danny Lyon
Photographing a Lost New York
When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighborhood before the city knocked it down.
Andrew Ross
Migrant Workers in Their Own Land
After closing its borders to Palestinians employed in critical sectors, Israel’s government has faced a labor shortage—which is being met by Indian migrant workers.
Free from the Archives
In the Review’s October 26, 1978, issue, Diane Johnson engaged with “the continued proliferation of self-help books” via Families, an account of modern conceptions of the family unit by the journalist Jane Howard. The features that distinguished the book and genre—“It seems to be a series of meditations on truth and behavior, with exempla,” marked by high-quality “observations and enlivening associations”—are ultimately, Johnson argued, better served by fiction: “the artist’s controlling intelligence,…the shorthand powers of image and symbol. Howard can tell us something, but Chekhov can make us understand.”
Diane Johnson
Home Remedies
“Self-help books are nothing new, they are nearly the oldest form of literature. Cautionary tales, rules for life, admonitions from saintly models convey the reassuring impression that something can be done. Maybe it can, even. Have you hugged your kid today?”
Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue
Politics Literature Arts Ideas
You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.
