When Ann Manov was an undergraduate humanities student at the University of Florida at the beginning of the 2010s, Florida ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

From an interview with the economist Branko Milanovic that was conducted by Alice Liu and published in April on Global Inequality and More 3.0, Milanovic’s Substack newsletter. alice liu: You’ve ...

Ten long years ago, an act of Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group in charge of overseeing the nation’s two-hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebrations.

When I was diagnosed with secondary myelofibrosis three and a half years ago, like many others in similar situations, I took serious stock. The past few years had been difficult: I had experienced a ...

From The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, out in February from Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was ...

Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, by Jonathan Haslam. Harvard University Press. 368 pages. $29.95. The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press. 96 pages. $13 ...

From “Save Penn Station,” which was published in Issue 31 of the New York Review of Architecture. “Hellhole” was the word that New York governor Kathy Hochul used for the existing Pennsylvania Station ...

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set ...

During her time working as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981, Calle took photographs of the rooms she was assigned to clean. The Hotel, which includes her observations alongside the ...