audio version

Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 22:00

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance […]

The post Forced Amnesia appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Created
Wed, 19/02/2025 - 02:00

In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement from NASA: A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will […]

The post From Comedy to Brutality appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Created
Fri, 29/12/2023 - 00:00

For a long time, two of the great gerontocracies were the Roman Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist Party. It is quite a thought that if Joe Biden were a Catholic bishop, he would have been required to submit his resignation to the pope five years ago. If he were a cardinal, he would, when […]

The post Eldest Statesmen appeared first on The New York Review of Books.