A Nation Deranged
| 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: “If the opposite of war is peace,” Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), “the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”
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. Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same. —February 7 “For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have become the shock troops of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).” —February 15 A graphic conversation —February 27 The AI-generated vision of postwar Gaza that Trump posted on social media was only thirty-three seconds long, but it spoke volumes about how his administration sees the world. —March 2 A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life. —March 19 Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it. —March 27 The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper. —April 18 The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. —April 24 New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail. —April 27 America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy. —June 26 For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. —August 12 “A dog team has no reins, no spurs, and a brake that works only when the snow conditions are right. You, the musher, stand on the back of the sled’s runners, pulled forward into the land by six, eight, sometimes twelve or fourteen dogs running two abreast. The lead dogs are your hope of control: it is they who turn left (haw!) and right (gee!) at your ask; it is they who set the pace.” —August 15 Lately I have found myself returning to a puzzling episode from my childhood in Richmond, Indiana. —August 20 For liberal supporters of the “abundance” movement, deregulation is crucial to solving climate and economic crises. Their critics argue something more confrontational is needed. —September 25 Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints. —November 6 Special Offer
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