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A Gift for the Long Game
Barack Obama, Grayslake, Illinois, 2004; photograph by Phil McAuliffe, from the exhibition ‘Phil McAuliffe: Witness,’ on view at Gallery 270, Westwood, New Jersey, through March 14, 2021 Barack Obama’s...
View ArticleJournalism in a Time of Crisis
On February 24, 2021, The New York Review of Books and Community Bookstore presented a conversation with Mark Danner, Elizabeth Bruenig, Howard French, and Justine van der Leun, moderated by Darryl...
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Our Lady of Deadpan
Joan Didion, 1987; photographs by Dominique Nabokov Let sadness tell you what to read. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” by recalling a time...
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‘She Captured All Before Her’
Elizabeth Peyton: Balmoral (Queen Elizabeth II in the 70’s), 2002 Queen Elizabeth II was seated in St. Edward’s Chair so long ago that her character defined the monarchy, not the other way around. Her...
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Georgia’s Battle Over the Ballot
A line of early voters at the Citizens Service Center, Columbus, Georgia, October 17, 2022 Democracy can get a good person up in the middle of the night to read the newspapers online. When the news is...
View ArticleZimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire
The mental derangement of colonialism was Doris Lessing’s first subject. In her early stories, set in Southern Rhodesia, where she grew up nearly a century ago, racism is learned behavior. The white...
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Black Talk on the Move
Private collection Bill Traylor: Red House with Figures, 1939 James Weldon Johnson was critical of dialect because it had only two stops: pathos and humor. Mark Twain may have listened to how the...
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‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’
Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century and Harlem as the Mecca of the New Negro helped to make it so. In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson, poet and NAACP executive secretary,...
View ArticleOutstanding Personalities
In our May 9 issue, Darryl Pinckney reviews an extensive survey of “the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If anything,” he writes, “the exhibition...
View ArticleBaldwin’s Spell
Harlem histories tell us that the black churches followed their congregations uptown after World War I. I used to put on a suit on Sundays in order to blend in with worshipers at the Abyssinian Baptist...
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