Plus: Alice Coltrane; Kelly Reichardt; Watteau; Dick Cheney
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Dan Chiasson follows Zohran Mamdani on election night; Adam Shatz listens to Alice Coltrane; Alex Ransom watches Kelly Reichardt’s new movie; Colin B. Bailey ponders Watteau’s melancholy clown; and, from the archives, Joan Didion on the late Dick Cheney. Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not, as some critics suggest, a stale collection of old creeds but a dynamic system with small businesses at its core. Alice Coltrane reinvented her adoptive Hinduism by interweaving it with the music of the Black church. In Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, a self-centered art thief finds himself ever more entangled in a system of dependence. In Pierrot, Jean-Antoine Watteau depicted the all-embracing humanity of commedia dell’arte. The Emergency Court
Fintan O’Toole in Conversation with
David Cole and Pamela KarlanThursday, November 6, 2025, 5 PM EST Join The New York Review’s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole for a wide-ranging conversation on the Supreme Court. Our panelists for this online event are Review contributors David Cole and Pamela Karlan. This event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public; registration is required. Free from the ArchivesVice President Dick Cheney died this week, aged eighty-four. In the Review’s October 5, 2006, issue—three and a half years after the Iraq War began and five years before the last American combat troops were withdrawn from the country—Joan Didion assessed Cheney’s political life and character. She found that “in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration” it was the vice-president “who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring…apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.” “What Dick Cheney’s tortured and in many cases invented legalities are designed to preclude is any acknowledgment that the issue at hand, whether it is avoiding military service or authorizing torture, might have a moral or an ethical or even a self-interested dimension that merits discussion.... This is not law. This is casuistry, the detritus of another perfect storm, the one that occurred when the deferments of the Vietnam years met the ardor of the Reagan Revolution.” “One moment you’re in the OR, the next moment you’re in recovery, but the tubes and wires run between those experiences, and when they pull them, they tug some of the controlled trauma into consciousness.” “The rapidity with which many in the contemporary far right have shed their libertarian principles…indicates that the economic philosophies of Rothbard and Hoppe were more disposable than their racial project.” Special Offer
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