New Podcasts
Vanessa Redgrave and David Hare on art and politics, Michael Massing on Iraq's precarious future, Mary Beard on jokes, Robert Barnett on the changing face of Tibet, Edmund White on Marguerite Duras.
Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
China: Humiliation & the Olympics
By Orville Schell
After a century and a half of famine, war, weakness, foreign occupation, and revolutionary extremism, a growing number of Chinese have come to look to the Olympic Games as the long-heralded symbolic moment when their country might at last escape old stereotypes of being the hapless "poor man of Asia"; a preyed-upon "defenseless giant"; victim of a misguided Cultural Revolution; the benighted land where in 1989 the People's Liberation Army fired on "the people." In one grand, symbolic stroke, the Olympic aura promised to help cleanse China's messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and humiliation, and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn—"rebranded" in contemporary parlance—as the great nation it once had been, and has yearned for so long to once more become.
The Devastation of Iraq's Past
By Hugh Eakin
Since the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in April 2003, the international press has accorded considerable space to the country's imperiled ancient heritage. Much of this coverage, however, has been devoted to the museum, the impressive campaign to recover its stolen works, and the continued struggle to reopen its galleries. Only occasional, anecdotal reports—mostly from the first year of the conflict—have borne witness to large-scale plunder of archaeological sites, to which the damage is irreversible.
The Democrats & National Security
By Samantha Power
On Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security by J. Peter Scoblic, and Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats by Matthew Yglesias.
The Battle for a Country's Soul
By Jane Mayer
Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.
E.M. Forster, Middle Manager
By Zadie Smith
In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Still, there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird.
Bondage
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
On For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre, and four other books.
Scandal in Africa
By Joshua Hammer
With his ruthless seizure of power in the June 27 runoff election in Zimbabwe, following a well-organized campaign to intimidate and murder members of the opposition, Robert Mugabe joined Myanmar's military junta at the top of the list of the world's most despised dictators.
Plus: John Updike on J.M.W. Turner, Ronald Dworkin on a great victory in the Supreme Court, Christian Caryl on North Korea, Cathleen Schine on Tim Winton's Breath, Orville Schell on China and the West, Benjamin Moser on the "Jewish" Rembrandt, Helen Epstein on the history of birth control, and more.
Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
- F. Kafka, Everyman by Zadie Smith
- From 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel
- Blood Relations by Claire Messud
- Embedded in Iraq by Michael Massing
- Iran: The Threat by Thomas Powers
- In the Night Kitchen by Stephen Greenblatt
- Isn't It Funny? by Mary Beard
- Obama & the Black Church by Darryl Pinckney
- Plus: Jonathan Mirsky on the Dalai Lama, Sanford Schwartz on the art of Peter Doig, Jonathan Freedland on Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, Madison Smartt Bell on Haitian authors, Deborah Eisenberg on Péter Nádas, and more.
Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
- The Reign of Thuggery by Joshua Hammer
- The Jim Webb Story by Elizabeth Drew
- 'The Clarity of Things' by John Updike
- How the Mind Works: Revelations by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff
- India: The Place of Sex by William Dalrymple
- In Love with Duras by Edmund White
- Ghosts by Ian Buruma
- Plus: Pico Iyer on James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief, David Gilmour on Giuseppe Garibaldi, Christopher Benfey on Herman Melville, Francine Prose on Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, a poem by Anne Carson, and more.
Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
- Who Is John McCain? by Michael Tomasky
- Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave by Ahmed Rashid
- The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton
- Economics: Which Way for Obama? by John Cassidy
- The Truth Force at the Met by Daniel Mendelsohn
- The Question of Global Warming by Freeman Dyson
- In the Emperor's Dream House by Joyce Carol Oates
- Plus: Martin Filler on Eero Saarinen, Edward Mendelson on Alfred Kazin, Jasper Griffin on Richard Stoneman's Alexander the Great, Helen Vendler on Jorie Graham's Sea Change, and more.
