A selection of the year's interviews
| This year at The New York Review, we published forty interviews as part of our weekly “Brief Encounters” series. Nearly every Saturday, we ask one of our contributors to illuminate her process, or ask another to tell us more about his passion for the subjects about which he writes. As in the magazine, the topics of these conversations are eclectic, ranging from art, music, and dance to history, economics, and physics. The anxiety of politics was nearly unavoidable in the interviews this year. Reflecting on the art of photographing trees, Benjamin Swett was also focused on the need to plant climate-resilient flora. Nina Siegal, discussing a French museum curator who helped recover thousands of paintings looted by the Nazis, was reminded of the ongoing need to “fight back against injustice and cruelty.” This is not to mention the writers whose expertise is the law or government: David Cole criticized President Trump’s “utter disregard for legal constraints,” and the Uyghur activist Abduweli Ayup described the repression he faced in China—and the need for Western governments to accept refugees. Below we have collected a selection of interviews from the year alongside the articles that inspired them. “It is called ‘school choice,’ but the schools choose, not the students or families.” For a range of far-right activists, Trump’s second term will be a chance to discipline public schools—and ultimately defund them. “I’m a believer in the proscenium. An increasingly high-definition fidelity to life bores me; the point is to look through a veil.” Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso and Faulkner, whose name is shorthand for a whole field. “I’ve been trying to find some way to engage and comment on what’s been going on in Israel and Palestine, feeling that I couldn’t really sit back as a noncombatant, ducking and covering while this was happening.” “I wonder if nonfiction somehow taps into my (otherwise largely suppressed) competitive instincts. I never feel competitive when I’m writing fiction.” 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. “One might invoke the situation in India—the widespread damage that the Modi government has done to religious coexistence and free speech—to underline the danger to these precious rights in our own land.” You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when. “What we’ve come to call ‘election denial’ is, of course, a conspiracy theory, and support for that is an article of faith for many Trumpists who want to work in the administration, so to a greater or lesser extent, they’re all under the spell of conspiratorial thinking.” An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant. “The only things separating Donald Trump from the twentieth century’s fascist leaders are time and opportunity.” By choosing an unqualified far-right appointee to lead a federal agency tasked with protecting government integrity, Trump is showing just how far his efforts to remake the civil service will go. “Democracy isn’t just some woolly ideal but the very means by which material lives might be improved.” The arrival of a Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and liberal colleges should be understood as the culmination of the conservative movement that William F. Buckley shaped and defined beginning in the 1950s. “The responsibility falls to anyone who wants to stay alert and actually understand the radical right and combat it, not just make theatrical gestures.” 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. “No one should be surprised that the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the indiscriminate targeting of Latinos in Los Angeles precipitated the zip-tying, beating, and lengthy detention of black people in Chicago.” By effectively sanctioning ICE’s raids in Los Angeles, the Supreme Court is showing its readiness to discard centuries of equitable tradition in law. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back. Special Offer
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