Adam Gopnik

3 days ago | newyorker.com | Adam Gopnik

Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt.

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Adam Gopnik

For instance, François Boucher’s eighteenth-century paintings of toddlers engaged in the work of scientists, artists, and philosophers previously formed an odd parenthetical downstairs. Now they are back where they began, as boudoir paintings (perhaps originally intended for Madame de Pompadour’s circle), reinstalled in Adelaide Frick’s sitting room. Art cycles in and out of fashion, and nothing could have been less suited to twentieth-century taste than Boucher’s chocolate-box cherubs.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Adam Gopnik

Given the daily degradation of our democracy—not merely its practice but its symbols and forms, which matter, too—it seems merely worth a baleful look that more of the so-called Kennedy files, which the National Archives released last week, on Donald Trump’s order, turn out, so far, to contain what is technically called bupkes: nothing of consequence or revelation. Whispers about such obvious hoaxes as an alleged letter written by John F.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Adam Gopnik

The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever more elaborate resurrection narratives, serves, Pagels suggests, both to address the practical difficulties of reclaiming the bodies of the executed and to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. Stories of resurrection and rebirth, after all, recur throughout history.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Adam Gopnik

When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess.