The Editors
Editors’ Note | Circling the Drain
The Editors
It’s a truism that there are no new stories, that each narrative, no matter how novel it appears, is actually an iteration of one of three or seven or twelve archetypal plots. Maybe so, but the cultural landscape feels especially grim these days. After the shock of March 2020, something like a renaissance was supposed to play out — that’s what happens, the forecasters forecasted, when the patterns of ordinary...
Editors’ Note | Hindsight Is 2020
The Editors
“The pandemic is over,” Joe Biden declared in September on 60 Minutes, in a farcical reprise of George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” photo op. The long-running T.V. program was an ideally irrelevant venue for such an irrelevant statement, in a moment that encapsulates the broader aura of irrelevance that has surrounded the Biden presidency. At least until the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), it looked as though Biden's...
Editors’ Note | Gloom and Doom
The Editors
Call it a vibe shift; call it a backlash; call it the dawn of a new reactionary era in America. Even the mainstream liberal media has given up on the idea that Donald Trump was an aberration and that, with him out of office, the nation will course-correct towards something like progress. The paper of record has finally decided to take Tucker Carlson seriously; major publications are sending correspondents into...
Editors’ Note | Good Lord
The Editors
A few months ago, The New York Times Book Review published a much-hyped coffee table anthology in celebration of its 125th anniversary. Ten years earlier, the occasion might have prompted unbridled celebration. But this was 2021, and the volume’s introduction takes pains to chronicle the Book Review’s past sins: the sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia on display in the output by its mostly white, mostly male, almost exclusively cisgender reviewers....
