  Vincent van Gogh: Corridor in the Asylum, 1889 The year 2025 opened, in the pages of The New York Review of Books, with two stiff drinks. Our first issue, dated January 16—two weeks into the extended hangover between New Year’s Eve and Donald Trump’s second inauguration—featured on its cover a painting by the New York artist Dike Blair of a pair of cocktails, lit as though by a camera flash, an orange slice in the rocks glass and two lime wedges in the Collins glass behind it. Thus fortified, inside the issue there were dark intimations of the year to come: David Shulman condemned “A Deadly Apathy” among Israelis about the atrocities being committed against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Ursula Lindsey recorded the “Joy and Apprehension in Syria” after the fall of the Assad regime, Trevor Jackson found that for wealthy people there was “‘Never Too Much,’” and Caroline Fraser was “Dispirited Away” by an evangelical church. In our February 13 issue—the day Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services—a theme began to suggest itself. Aryeh Neier and Amrit Singh wrote about “Democracy Imperiled” in Guatemala, Gary Saul Morson groaned at life in twentieth-century Russia “With Liberals Like These,” and Caitlin Zaloom argued that the influence of economists over all of American government had become “Too Close for Comfort.” By March 23, in the NYR Online, the theme coalesced: “A Nation Deranged,” as Ben Mauk described a series of photographs of the contemporary United States. Derangement seemed to be everywhere, from “The Unhinged Presidency” to an “Orchid Frenzy”; from “Bewildered Rhapsodies” to “Grand Opera’s Tribulations”; and from people “Vexed by Sex” to those “Forever Unmoored”—gone, perhaps, to “The Twilight Zone,” or simply “Lost in the Landscape.” Well, “What Do You Expect?” Faced with a choice between “Internalizing the Crises” and a kind of “Forced Amnesia” about, for example, the likelihood that the president is “Getting Away with Murder”—about all the “Death in the Air”—one may just become “A Self Divided,” “Serene and Delirious,” vacillating between “Clarity and Delusion.” And what delusion! There were “Shared Delusions”—“Mars Is Heaven!” “Lunar Myths and Mysteries”!—and “The Lingering Delusion”; there were “Electrome Dreams” as well as people “Selling a Defective Dream,” not to mention people selling “Phorm Energy Screamin’ Freedom.” It’s enough to drive someone “Beyond the Asylum.” Amid such madness, a magazine can seem like “The Chronicler of Unhappiness.” “‘Isn’t Reality Sad Enough?’” you might ask. But there is succor to be found in “Ungovernable, Capricious Life.” Consider a quote that Christopher Benfey highlights in his “Anecdote of the Teapot,” from our June 12 issue:
Here is a selection of some of your favorite articles from the last year, as measured by traffic on our website, interspersed with several moments of pastoral. Thank you for reading, and Happy New Year.  Ben Tarnoff |
miércoles, 31 de diciembre de 2025
2025 at The New York Review of Books
domingo, 28 de diciembre de 2025
The Protestant Catholic
 Sponsored by CUNY Graduate Center Today in The New York Review of Books: Robert P. Baird visits Ross Douthat’s church; Bill McKibben breathes carbon dioxide; Andrew Katzenstein laughs with Maria Bamford; and, from the archives, James M. McPherson on John C. Calhoun.  Robert P. Baird |
