American Warfare: On Richard Beck’s Homeland

In the issue dated September 13, 2001, Newsweek magazine ran a photograph of a firefighter carrying a young girl to safety. “Horror at Home,” the caption read, a simple and stark evocation of the tragedy that had occurred two days earlier, when the Twin Towers were struck by two airplanes. The Towers collapsed entirely, blanketing Lower Manhattan in ash, smoke and dust. First responders from throughout the tri-state area raced to the scene, to assist in any way possible, answering the call when it was needed most. The photograph of the firefighter escorting the girl served as a synecdoche for the collective bravery displayed by all of the firefighters, medics and other rescue workers who showed up in droves on that Tuesday morning. There was one problem, though. The photograph wasn’t taken on 9/11. It wasn’t even taken in New York City. It was taken six years earlier, during the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Why the substitution? It’s not as if Newsweek lacked material. The site that would come to be known as Ground Zero was extensively photographed on the day of the attacks, and would continue to be for years afterward. Joel Meyerowitz, an award-winning photographer as well as a born-and-raised New Yorker, published a book called Aftermath in 2006, which collected his extensive coverage of the site. Such images were available, had Newsweek wanted them at the time. But it didn’t. Instead, it ran a six-year-old photograph of an entirely different act of terror because, according to Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, that allowed Newsweek to tell the story it felt it needed to tell. Or not a story — this was deeper than that. Primal. A myth. A myth assuring America that, as in the earliest days of its history, before it was even a country, when danger came to town, a strong man would appear to defend the life, and the honor, of a helpless young girl.

The Pain of Passing: On Mayukh Sen’s Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star

Mayukh Sen’s scrupulous and moving biography, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, considers the Golden Age actress’ ambivalence toward her white and Sinhalese ancestry through a decolonial lens. In 1936, Merle Oberon, then 24, became the first performer of color and Asian descent to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But Oberon never got to revel in her achievement’s historic importance. To succeed within a far more racist and xenophobic environment, Oberon took pains to pass for white. “This was less a choice than a necessity,” Sen writes, “and it came at great psychic cost to her.” Love, Queenie invites readers to give Oberon’s nomination, gumption, and filmography commensurate recognition. To those who fault Oberon for denying her maternal South Asian lineage, Sen offers context. As black-and-white cinematography gave way to technicolor and television and as Hollywood’s studio system disintegrated, Oberon’s few Asian contemporaries struggled to sustain acting careers. In keeping with anti-miscegenation laws in most of the United States, American film studios of Oberon’s era eschewed depictions of romance between white actors and performers of color. For Oberon, disclosing her identity would have forfeited her leading lady roles. She would have also lost advertising campaigns with Lux Toilet Soap and Max Factor selling her fair complexion. Given the Immigration Act of 1917 that barred South Asians from legal entry into the United States, Oberon would have also risked deportation. As the United States and Britain pushed colonial projects, Oberon overcame poverty, spousal abuse, and fickle industry standards to fulfill her childhood ambition to act. In attending to how Oberon exercised her agency within the constraints she faced, Sen celebrates Oberon’s craft, charting her artistic evolution and limitations and how all of that withholding must have created stores of emotion that informed Oberon’s expression before the camera.

The Gray Man Theory: On Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good

A terrible thing has recently happened to me. I have become obsessed with the golden era of American magazines. This grave affliction manifests itself in several symptoms. First, it causes one’s reading list to grow to enormous length. Just when you think you’ve discovered the last memoir about answering phones at the midcentury New Yorker, or cowering under the thumb of Anna Wintour at Vogue, or of late nights at Partisan Review in the hard-drinking glory days, or at the in the high-flying Sixties, several more rear their heads, like martini-soaked Whack-a-Moles. And because the whole thing involves the settling of long-simmering scores and the clashing of titanic egos, you’re almost obligated to read everything in order to form a full picture of the personalities involved. Was the New Yorker’s William Shawn a gnomic sage, or a doddering fool? Did Tina Brown destroy high-middlebrow literary culture in America, or save it? The same person might be painted as a saint in one memoir and a tyrant in the next, and the same incidents might recur across different books with totally different causes and effects, so hell, you might as well read them all.

Ross Douthat’s Sandbox Universe: On Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in his Catholicism, or even in Christianity. Instead, he aims at a wider target, arguing in favor of believing in God and joining a religion. Believe is not a treatise on why religion is good for you as a person, or good for society. Instead, Douthat writes that it is “especially important now to defend not just the spiritual but the religious — meaning not just the experience of the numinous but the attempt to think rationally about it, not just the personal pursuit of the mystical but faith’s structured and communal forms, not just ideas about how one might encounter something worthy of the name of God but ideas about what such a God might want from us.” Accordingly, the first three chapters argue for the factual truth of religious ideas like God, the soul, and spiritual experiences. The next three chapters make an argument that established, organized religion is the right response to these claims. A final, more personal chapter details Douthat’s own specifically Christian beliefs.

The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force. “In my view,” she writes, “bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives.” We’ll get back to this notion soon. But let me first briefly note what else might have got mentioned in that short elevator ride shared by Manne’s agent and publisher. It would surely have been clarified that the book is not about fatphobia in general, but about the intersectional experience of fatphobia on the part of women and girls. Eating disorders and harmful dieting will have been said, in that elevator, to be a feature of misogynist societies in particular. There are undoubtedly gendered dimensions of the problem. Yet too much emphasis on these can obscure from view just how varied judgments about the goodness or badness of fat can be in different times and places, and can also conceal from us many of the genuinely universal problems, philosophical and practical, of human embodiment. This latter point has considerable personal importance to me. When I was a young man, just 19 years old, I began a two-year bout of rather severe anorexia, constantly in and out of hospitals and psychiatrists’ offices, hooked up to IV’s, fretted over. I was six feet tall and I weighed 99 pounds. I purged myself with laxatives and diuretics every morning before my weigh-in. If the scale ever crept up past 100, I doubled down on my efforts at self-starvation.

Toward a Sordid Utopia?: On Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

Desperado Dadaism: On a New Biography of Terry Allen

Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Lights” sightings helped to kick off the UFO craze. In 1988, 12,000 pilgrims came to Lubbock to witness an alleged apparition of Mary. In between these two phenomena, a young man named Terry Allen left Lubbock for California. He wanted to become an artist, but he wound up becoming something more. Allen is perhaps the only person in history to achieve equal acclaim in the fields of conceptual art and country music. His work hangs in major museums and his public installations can be seen livening up the staid financial districts of major cities, while his weird, warped, and warm brand of outlaw country, to his devoted cult, stands shoulder to shoulder with Willie, Townes, and the rest. Brendan Greaves, who through his offbeat, literate “American vernacular” record label Paradise of Bachelors helped to rescue Allen’s music from defunct-label oblivion, spent five years talking to Allen, his friends, and his collaborators to produce Truckload of Art, the first major biography of him and his work. For anyone with an interest in any of the things I mentioned above, it’s essential reading: as a record of a truly underappreciated American artist, a narrative of a biographer coming to know his subject, and an exploration of the perils and joys of a creative life.