All posts tagged: Brief Encounters

Protesting with Panache | Poorna Swami, Nawal Arjini

Protesting with Panache | Poorna Swami, Nawal Arjini

Published by Jenni Sidey

Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines of caste, religion, and gender. Swami is herself a student, working on a Ph.D. at Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies, as well as a translator of Urdu, a dancer, and a longtime cultural critic. On the streets of Delhi, among protesters marching under the constant threat of violence, she saw the movement’s leaders attempt to subdue political chants; Hindu-nationalist sympathizers chanting along with anticaste activists; and the daring jocularity of the young people assembled before baton-wielding policemen, especially evident in their famous “sexualized posters: ‘Daddy, beat me.’” Swami’s earlier essays for the NYR Online have brought her historical and political analysis to bear on cultural matters; as she told me, “I’m interested in how the past pushes against the …

A Plum Assignment | Lena Beug, Jason Logan, Leanne Shapton

A Plum Assignment | Lena Beug, Jason Logan, Leanne Shapton

Published by Jenni Sidey

The cover for our Fall Books Issue—a painting of ripe purple plums in a punnet, surrounded by hand-painted cover lines—was an unexpected collaboration between the Irish-born New Yorker Lena Beug, a commercials director, and the Canadian Jason Logan, who makes ink from natural pigments that he forages from rural and urban environments.  I had assigned the fully illustrated cover to Logan, who was visiting New York at the end of August, and invited both Logan and Beug to dinner. While he was sketching ideas, she arrived bearing plums to cook the popular New York Times plum torte. The dinner table was covered in paint and paper, and Beug sat down and made some quick brush studies before starting to bake. After Logan’s first idea was rejected a few days later, he went back to the drawing board and made inky paintings of leaves and landscapes, hand lettering around the shapes. He then tossed one of Lena’s paintings into the ring. We agreed that it looked luscious. (The editors at first thought the punnet looked like a chair, but flipping …

‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’ | Christopher Alessandrini, Nandini Krishnan

‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’ | Christopher Alessandrini, Nandini Krishnan

Published by Jenni Sidey

In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks and interdune meadows, feral hogs and plovers, lofty cabbage palms and live oaks hung with portieres of Spanish moss.” It was the perfect setting for what became, alongside Genesis, a sister program founded there a decade later, a “multidisciplinary retreat” for a “Who’s Who of twentieth-century American cultural history,” including writers and artists like Ralph Ellison and Sally Mann, as well as “scientists, historians, literary theorists, naturalists, religious leaders, philosophers, businesspeople, and anthropologists.” Alessandrini is a managing editor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s digital department. His writing has appeared in, among other places, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Interview, and the anthology Points of View: 100 Connections to Art (2026) from Yale University Press. For the Review, he has also written …

Expatriate Dreams | Nahid Siamdoust, Janhavi Munde

Expatriate Dreams | Nahid Siamdoust, Janhavi Munde

Published by Jenni Sidey

“It was out of estisal that some Iranians chose war,” writes Nahid Siamdoust in the NYR Online. Estisal, which, loosely translated from Persian, means “having no options” or a state of helplessness, is also, she contends, what has made some Iranians vulnerable to the disinformation being spread by both state and private media—a perhaps more familiar concept to American readers. When the Iranian regime’s state-controlled “static” disrupts the airwaves and blocks out all other networks, Iran International, a pro–regime change satellite channel based out of London and backed by Saudi money, fills the vacuum with monarchist propaganda. With homegrown media largely censored, most Iranians are trapped in an information environment manufactured by either right-wing shah supporters—mostly expatriates and foreigners—or the brutal Islamic Republic’s state media. Born in Iran, Siamdoust is now an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin and, for 2026, a Humboldt Foundation fellow in Berlin. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent, reporting from Iran and the Middle East for Time magazine, Al Jazeera, Der …

All of Life | Joe Dunthorne, Aleander Santos

All of Life | Joe Dunthorne, Aleander Santos

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the Review’s June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne writes about a recent oral history of the New York School poets and poses himself a challenge: “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?” His essay suggests that the poetry in the scene, by writers ranging from Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, emerged in part from their social and family lives. The vivacity of their work drew from the eclecticism of their world, or, as Dunthorne quotes Notley, “We’re inside each other’s lives.” “Despite the disputes and grievances that run through these pages,” he continues, “there is a sense that what survives of these poets, apart from their poetry, is the generative and spiky sociability that brought them together in the first place.” Dunthorne is an eclectic writer in his own right. He is the author of three novels, including his debut, Submarine (2008), which was adapted into a film by Richard Ayoade; a collection of poetry, O Positive (2019); …

Spare Me the Hedgehoggery | Clare Bucknell, Julia Shi

Spare Me the Hedgehoggery | Clare Bucknell, Julia Shi

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Getting to grips with minds is difficult,” writes Clare Bucknell in her review of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry in our May 14 art issue, which is perhaps why historical accusations of pedantry were often based less on the practitioner’s actual erudition than their conduct. As it turns out, humans have long been interested in intellectuals and dilettantes behaving poorly. Drawing on case studies from the Sophists of Ancient Greece to the “unmarriageable” studious women of the early modern period, Bucknell traces the evolution of the word “pedantry.”  Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her most recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, explores how poetry anthologies have shaped British politics and society over centuries. Her writing for the Review has covered a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and artists, including Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, James Gillray, John Sloane, and Jane and Maria Porter. She is a contributing writer at the London Review of Books and has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Apollo Magazine. This month, I wrote to Bucknell to ask her about the history …

The Moviegoer | Dennis Lim, Gabriel Winslow-Yost

The Moviegoer | Dennis Lim, Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Published by Jenni Sidey

“What if,” Dennis Lim asks in the May 14 issue of the Review, “a film consists wholly of blurry images?” That is the question presented by Dry Leaf, the newest film by the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, which was shot entirely on a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone—one that “even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use…for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” And yet the result, Lim writes, is strangely beautiful, the footage of smeary, uncertain landscapes “at times evok[ing] Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.” As digital filmmaking becomes ever more accessible, and as our lives become ever more saturated with images, the kinds of images we seek out—the kinds that delight and inspire us—may be changing. Lim has had a long and varied career as a film critic and curator. From 2000 to 2006 he was the film editor of the Village Voice, from 2013 to 2022 the director of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, …

The Innocents Abroad | Suzy Hansen, Dahlia Krutkovich

The Innocents Abroad | Suzy Hansen, Dahlia Krutkovich

Published by Jenni Sidey

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life,” writes Suzy Hansen in our June 11 issue. He is a parody of a certain type of American swashbuckler: brash, aggressive, god-fearing, contemptuous of the wretched refuse beyond our shores. Though a caricature of American chauvinism he may be, the tradition of raining “death and destruction from the sky,” as he described the Trump administration’s bombing of Iran, did not start with Hegseth. Generations of American foreign policy wonks, Hansen notes, have also trafficked in the bloodshed he so enjoys: “With the invasion of Iran, the Trump administration picked up where the Biden administration and the Democrats left off; the Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony.…Whether the perpetrators are Democrats evading responsibility through feigned haplessness or Republicans claiming the power of a wrathful God, the violence is the same.” For twelve years Hansen was based out of Istanbul, where she had a front-row seat to much …

‘Like a Gossamer Sheet’ | David Shulman, Dahlia Krutkovich

‘Like a Gossamer Sheet’ | David Shulman, Dahlia Krutkovich

Published by Jenni Sidey

For the past twenty-four years David Shulman has spent many long days and nights in the West Bank as a protective presence activist—one of a small community of Israeli and international volunteers who document and disrupt the actions of Jewish settlers and soldiers as they attempt to expel Palestinian communities. Since 2009 he’s been writing dispatches for The New York Review about the worsening situation for Palestinians in the West Bank, in particular those who live under full Israeli control in Area C, as well as the “moral rot” of Israeli political life. His most recent essay, in our March 12 issue, documents the liquidation of Ras al-‘Ain, “the last large Palestinian village in the southern Jordan Valley” and his “home away from home” for nearly three years. “In late December 2025, the settlers plowed a large expanse of the village land…and created the rudiments of another illegal outpost inside Ras al-‘Ain.… [They] also besieged several of the houses bordering the plowed field and the outpost, blocking the residents’ access to food, water, and electricity,” …

Home Free | Vivian Gornick, Chandler Fritz

Home Free | Vivian Gornick, Chandler Fritz

Published by Jenni Sidey

Vivian Gornick has been writing essays, memoir, and criticism for sixty years, beginning in 1965 when the Village Voice published her response to a controversial speech made by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) at a gathering at the Village Vanguard. The subject of the gathering was “Art and Politics,” and in many ways Gornick has been addressing that same duality in her writing ever since: the art of the novel and the politics of feminism, the art of the self and the politics of the family, the art of love and the politics of hope. She has often returned to the theme of family relationships, including a book of literary criticism, The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and a work of social history, The Romance of American Communism (1977); Fierce Attachments (1987), perhaps her best-known work, is a memoir about being raised in the Bronx by a working-class immigrant mother of Russian Jewish extraction. Her writing for the Review has likewise touched on personal relationships in literature and life, including friends, classmates, husbands, …