August 21, 2025 Issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

Bodies by Joe

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy

by John Howard Steel

Hubertus Joseph Pilates

by Javier Pérez Pont and Esperanza Aparicio Romero

Love All Around: The Romana Kryzanowska Biography

by Cathy Strack and Carol J. Craig

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Jamaica Kincaid’s commanding, irreverent work immerses her readers in a black world without explaining or defining its blackness. This seems to be a major departure in the history of African American literature.

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Gentleman of Verona

The majesty, serenity, and opulence of Paolo Veronese’s paintings bolstered the myth of Venice’s vibrancy at a time of social, political, and religious decline.

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, May 27–September 21, 2025

Jorie Graham

When the End Starts

a poem

Frances Wilson

Tremendous Stickers

The Mitfords, a family of extremophiles, are characters that ultimately don’t translate to the screen.

Outrageous

a television series written by Sarah Williams and directed by Joss Agnew and Ellie Heydon

David Cole

Umpires No More

In several major cases in its 2024–2025 term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reached its desired results not by overturning precedent but by ignoring it.

Sue Halpern

The Twilight Zone

Laila Lalami’s prescient new novel follows a woman imprisoned by the government for her dreams.

The Dream Hotel

by Laila Lalami

Chloë Clifton-Wright

‘Posterity Is Vulgar’

Encounters with a forgotten genius.

Sean M. Carroll

A First Time for Everything

Scientific theories about the origin of the universe often involve a vigorous give-and-take between speculation and discovery.

A Little Book About the Big Bang

by Tony Rothman

An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe

by Will Kinney

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory

by Thomas Hertog

John Berryman

An Untitled Dream Song

a poem

Caroline Moorehead

After Resettlement

How has a group of Liberian refugees, resettled in the US nearly twenty-five years ago after fleeing civil war, fared in a country that has changed vastly since admitting them?

James Quandt

An Impulsive Master

Jacques Rozier’s films are free-wheeling and intermittently brilliant, but his importance in the French New Wave remains unsettled.

Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer

a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, August 16–22, 2024

Directed by Jacques Rozier

a film series streaming on the Criterion Channel

Jacques Rozier: Le Funambule [Jacques Rozier: The Tightrope Walker]

edited by Emmanuel Burdeau

Jacques Rozier: D’une vague à l’autre [Jacques Rozier: From One Wave to Another]

a documentary film by Emmanuel Barnault

Daphne Merkin

Elegy for the Shtetl

Chaim Grade became a writer in Lithuania but wrote his best novels in the Bronx after the Holocaust, recording in Yiddish the conflict between Jewish tradition and secular thinking that had characterized a whole world swept away.

Sons and Daughters

by Chaim Grade, translated from the Yiddish by Rose Waldman, with an introduction by Adam Kirsch

David S. Reynolds

The Contradictory Revolution

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of American Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795

by Edward J. Larson

Costică Brădăţan