Regina Marler
The Cuttlefish’s Play
Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.
Ange Mlinko
The Shoals of Prose
Recent books of prose by two of our best poets suggest the importance of criticism to the development of a poet’s work.
The New York Review of Books 2025 Wall Calendar
This beautifully produced, brand-new wall calendar features thirteen full-color reproductions of specially selected Review covers.
Katie Kadue
‘Let Them Eat War’
Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator draws on a long history of nostalgia for an idealized republican Rome.
Anahid Nersessian
Acts of Self-Erasure
A new exhibition of the conceptual artist Christine Kozlov shows how she worked by concealing her own tracks.
Study the Iliad with Daniel Mendelsohn!
Join Daniel Mendelsohn for a six-session webinar on Homer’s Iliad. Auditor memberships are still available!
Free from the Archives
The Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, born on this day in 1907, was one of the key figures in the development of the twentieth century’s High Modern urbanism. In our April 4, 2013, issue, published shortly after Niemeyer’s death, Martin Filler gives full appreciation to the impact of his work.
Martin Filler
The Sensual Vision of Oscar Niemeyer
Niemeyer’s extraordinary longevity allowed him to witness the cyclical ups and downs of artistic reputation come full circle within his own lifetime. The ecstatic reception that greeted Brasília’s inauguration on April 21, 1960, soon gave way to well-deserved dissections of its serious failings as socially imaginative planning. No critique has been more incisive than James Holston’s The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, which skewers the scheme’s humanitarian aspirations toward creating a classless society while in fact it abets further division between rich and poor… But as attitudes shifted yet again, the 1988 Pritzker Prize was jointly given to Niemeyer and Gordon Bunshaft—the first dual conferral of that award—in what was widely interpreted as a rebuke to Postmodernism after its adherents James Stirling and Hans Hollein had been thus honored. Accolades continued to mount as Niemeyer grew older and older; in 2003 he was asked to design that summer’s temporary pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, a sure index of contemporary architectural hipness.
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