Plus: TB; Postwar British Cinema; Steely Dan; Ishion Hutchinson; Jonathan Swift
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Susan Tallman audits the collections of colonial museums; Pria Anand diagnoses tuberculosis; Geoffrey O’Brien loses it at the theatre; Philip Clark burrows into the studio with Steely Dan; a poem by Ishion Hutchinson; and, from the archives, Robert M. Adams on Jonathan Swift. Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission. Tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide, and, as my recent diagnosis shows, America is hardly immune. The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future. Steely Dan conjured a sealed-in-amber studio perfection—a sound that could alienate listeners as easily as seduce them. Free from the ArchivesToday is Jonathan Swift’s 358th birthday. In the Review’s October 25, 1984, issue, Robert M. Adams reviewed Irvin Ehrenpreis’s “superdreadnought” life of Jonathan Swift (combined, the three volumes come to 2,142 pages). Adams’s assessment: “As exposition the volumes hold up remarkably well. Political, theological, ecclesiastical, and social intricacies are painstakingly explained; and if the explanations create occasional longueurs, no reader who hefts the volumes beforehand will be much surprised or daunted.” But most importantly, “the biography of Swift himself…makes the most solid and sustained part of the story,” and Adams follows Ehrenpreis in his Brobdingnagian enterprise, from Swift’s “disguises, subterfuges, anonymities, ironic masqueradings, and mystifications” to his “outright political hatreds” and finally to his bitter, shrewd, defiant writing. “Jonathan Swift was idealized and despised; he was cruel and tender, noble and base, generous and stingy, a brutal political liar, a devoted friend, a patriotic defender of the oppressed Irish and a party to their systematic exploitation, by turns wrong-headed and inspired, a man of quivering sensitivity and of bristling pride verging on gross rudeness. A man with an infinite sense of fun and play, a man of more severe, narrow, and repressive principles than we today can readily conceive—in short, he was an animated paradox, whose entire life was a provocation to study him.” Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party. The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself. A New York Review Online Event The State of the Left
Fintan O’Toole in Conversation with Congresswoman Pramila JayapalDecember 8, 2025, 5:00 PM EST Join Fintan O’Toole and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of progressive politics. This online event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of ten dollars) and open to the public. Registration is required. The event will last for approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. Special Offer
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