Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 17

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

Activism

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

December 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you. Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...

Film

A Monk Without a Monastery

The paradigm shift of a single shot in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days

December 2, 2024 • by Daniel Kopp and Nicholas Johnston

In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck ...

Film & Performing Arts

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

A review of Attack on Titan: The Musical

November 26, 2024 • by Abha Deshmukh

Sitting in a mezzanine seat at the New York City Center, I was startled by a Colossal Titan coming to eat me. But I relaxed when Survey Corps soldiers came spinning and flying on their mobility gear to slice the Titan’s neck which is, after all, the proper way to ...

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

Art & Design

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

A celebrated young critic hungry for more than our contemporary culture typically offers

October 17, 2024 • by Emma Minor

Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The ...

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

Media

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

A review of Cue the Sun!—The Invention of Reality TV

October 15, 2024 • by Hannah Berman

Emily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer ...

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...

Literature

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

At 85, the author is still too quick for her critics

September 25, 2024 • by Alexander Sorondo

One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than ...

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

Literature

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Poetry on the landscape of race, past and present

September 24, 2024 • by Aditi Bhattacharjee

The transcontinental railroad—one of the great engineering feats of US history—was laid thanks to the labor of Chinese immigrants: between 1865 and 1869, some 12,000 Chinese workers constructed the western line. Yet very little evidence remains in the words of the workers themselves. “This is not to say there are ...

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Middle East & North Africa

On The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy’s journey into his country’s heart of darkness

September 23, 2024 • by Benoit Challand

Gideon Levy, an award-winning journalist for the liberal Israeli English-language daily Haaretz, has been covering the Palestinian occupied territories since the late 1980s. His column, “Twilight Zone,” published during the Oslo process, was famously unsettling to many Israelis because he established, week after week, that the celebrated peace process was ...

On <em>The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe</em>

Higher Ed

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

A novelist questions the price artists pay when mining personal life for inspiration

September 20, 2024 • by Emma Minor

The Material opens with a classroom of aspiring comedians workshopping their latest creations: “On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn't anything left and the budding comedians ...

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

Disability

Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

In a new Richard III, populism is the pathology

September 10, 2024 • by Antoinette Burton

When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience ...