Nawal K. Arjini

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Nawal K. Arjini |Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger’s article from the April 10 issue of The New York Review, about the millennia-long relationship humans have with horses, appears thirty-one years after her first essay for us, about the history of idolatry.

4 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Nawal K. Arjini

It has been the curse of many New York City mayors to see themselves as viable presidential candidates, indeed with one foot already in the White House. If Eric Adams nurtured similar ambitions—as some commentators speculated early in his mayoralty—the difference was that his presidency of the mind was unusually focused on foreign policy. “If you are a mayor that only stands on your block, you are not going to solve the problems of the globe,” he said to reporters in 2022.

2 months ago | nybooks.com | Nawal K. Arjini |Blair McClendon

In our February 13 issue, Blair McClendon reviews “Edges of Ailey,” the Whitney Museum’s show about the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey, curated by Adrienne Edwards. “If Ailey’s dances come across as pleasurable rather than noxiously pandering to a received idea of blackness, it is not solely because we recognize the motions and situations,” he writes. “It’s Technicolor again.

Jan 18, 2025 | nybooks.com | Nawal K. Arjini

“Even the best spies have their time in the cold,” an old secret agent tells his grandson. They’re sitting by the fire in an episode of Apple TV’s Slow Horses, adapted from Mick Herron’s best-selling novels. The agent is alluding to John le Carré’s novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), to reassure the younger man about his recent failure at work, but—like the audience—his grandson finds it difficult to believe his own career will ever recover.

Nov 30, 2024 | nybooks.com | Nawal K. Arjini |Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham’s poem in our December 5, 2024, issue begins:whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefieddeath, it was here to stay, it actuallyhad nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to berevelation, longed to be part ofnature making itswhistling sounds above, itsscreamingbelow. The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay aboutin the dust-filled amnesia. . . . In her decades-long career, Graham has written many such poems examining the devastating conditions of the world.