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SHOTS FIRED!

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  Dispatch Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Gunshots Rang Out I thought a caterer might have dropped a stack of plates, but then I heard shouts of “Shots fired!” By  April 26, 2026 Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Save this story In the spring of 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton on his way out of a luncheon. Cabdrivers sometimes call it the Hinckley Hilton—a weird local homage to the shooter, John Hinckley, Jr. On Saturday evening, I walked by the hotel, in the rain, as antiwar protesters yelled through bullhorns at journalists streaming inside for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It was the War Crimes Correspondents’ dinner, they shouted. I was on my way to the White House to join the press pool, the small contingent of media that travels with the President wherever he goes. We loaded into vans in the motorcade and waited for Donald and Melania Trump to enter the Beast, the President’s bullet...
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A Wunderkind’s Best-Selling Nostalgia

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  Page-Turner A Wunderkind’s Best-Selling Nostalgia Nelio Biedermann’s “Lázár” is, for the most part, the well-rehearsed story of twentieth-century Europe. Why is it making such waves? By  April 23, 2026 Nelio Biedermann, a Swiss novelist, at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. Photograph by Clara Watt / NYT / Redux Save this story “Make it new,” proclaimed the poet Ezra Pound early in the twentieth century. It was his advice to fellow-modernists, and it became the de-facto slogan of a movement that sought to unsettle convention and reinvigorate language. The motto of our contemporary cultural apparatus might as well be “make it old.” Even before A.I. threatened us quite so acutely with the prospect of eternal recombination, a spate of period dramas, remakes, sequels, and adaptations had already paved the way for a future consisting of regurgitated scraps of the past. Take the past few years alone: 2024 brought “Nosferatu,” a remake of Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of...
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Simone Weil by Susan Sontag

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  Simone Weil Susan Sontag Each of our truths must have a martyr. June 6, 2013 issue Susan Sontag (1933–2004) contributed over fifty reviews, articles, and letters to  The New York Review  between 1963 and 2002. The following is an extract from her review of Simone Weil’s  Selected Essays , which appeared in the first issue in February 1963.  It can be read in full here . Simone Weil in Marseilles, early 1940s The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal...
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