November 11, 2025 At Work What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?: A Conversation with Lance Richardson By Dan Piepenbring Peter Matthiessen in New York City, 1961. Photograph by Ben Martin/Getty Images. When Peter Matthiessen’s name comes up in conjunction with The Paris Review, two facts are sure to emerge. The first is that Matthiessen was one of the magazine’s founders, and that his enchantingly shabby Paris apartment provided a bumptious gathering place in its earliest days. The second is that he was, at the time, an undercover CIA operative, and that the creation of the magazine was somehow wrapped up in his spycraft. The New York Times revealed Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation in a bombshell 1977 story with the headline “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” which examined dozens of publications and cultural organizations that had been secretly “owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A. over the past three decades.” Matthiessen’s connection rated only three brief sentences buried at the center of what he called a “long gray article”; the reporter, John Crewdson, noted that there was no evidence the CIA had used the writer “to influence the Paris Review.” Even so, Matthiessen spent the rest of his life facing questions about his role. He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization, which remain unclear even now, eleven years after his death. Some have speculated that the Review itself received CIA support as part of the agency’s broader effort to prop up pro-Western art and literature. At the peak of its influence, in the fifties and sixties, the CIA fronted money to support a broad array of cultural production, from the seemingly innocuous to the expressly anti-communist. Among many other ventures, it had its hand in abstract-expressionist painting, jazz, Radio Free Asia, literary magazines, academic books on Finland and East Germany, a Roman newspaper, and an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm. While some artists were aware of the source of their funding, many were not. Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies. Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is the first biography of the writer. Matthiessen, born in New York in 1927, was the author of ten novels, two collections of stories, and nearly two dozen works of nonfiction; he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction (for Shadow Country, in 2008) and nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, in 1980). A keen observer of the natural world, he traveled widely in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in search of remote places where one could find a “glimpse of the earth’s morning,” as he described it. True Nature offers a deft assessment of his work and a capacious telling of the forces that shaped his interest in everything from Zen Buddhism to environmentalism to cryptozoology to labor rights. Richardson conducted hundreds of interviews over seven and a half years, and his archival research yielded, among many other insights, a clearer picture of The Paris Review’s first years, when Matthiessen was doing double duty as a fiction editor and a secret agent. I spoke to Richardson by phone to ask what he’d discovered about Matthiessen’s years in Paris. INTERVIEWER What do we know about why Peter Matthiessen decided to join the CIA—the decision that led, eventually, to the founding of The Paris Review? LANCE RICHARDSON Before he died, in anticipation of a possible memoir, Matthiessen wrote out a series of narratives about what he’d been doing in Paris. The title of one of them is “THE PARIS REVIEW V. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog.” They were incomplete, and I had to be careful about assuming everything was one hundred percent accurate—not because Peter was necessarily trying to leave a trail of lies or anything, but because he was writing this decades after it happened, and he had his own agenda. In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records. As Matthiessen tells it, he had finished Yale in 1950 and wanted to be a writer, but how do you just become a writer? His English professor Norman Holmes Pearson tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to do something for his country. This was happening quite a lot at Yale at the time. One of Matthiessen’s contemporaries estimated that two dozen of their classmates were recruited for the CIA through various professors. The agency called them the “P source,” for “professor.” Matthiessen wrote that Pearson opened him “like an oyster.” Not because he was ideologically driven—his politics at that point were unformed and chaotic—but because he wanted a stipend and an excuse to go to Paris, which was a city that he and his first wife, Patsy Southgate, really loved. The CIA then was reputationally much more benign, at least domestically. It hadn’t yet become known by most Americans for its involvement in coups and things like that. Read More
November 7, 2025 Letters Postcards from Virginia Woolf By Sarah Bochicchio Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, March 26, 1930. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by biographical writing, even though she considered it something of a doomed genre. She wrote traditional and imagined biographies, of people and dogs, that experiment with how to recount a life. Her novels ask if, when, and how her characters’ innermost selves could be expressed externally. But she knew that sometimes we cannot access the details of our own lives. In one autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf lamented that her own memories produced a misleading account of her life because “the things one does not remember are … important; perhaps they are more important.” These things fell under the category of “non-being,” Woolf’s term for the parts of life not consciously lived. Woolf believed it was essential to capture the oblique, woolly moments that, inevitably, take up most of our lives, but by the time she was at her desk, writing “A Sketch of the Past,” she had already forgotten what she had discussed with her husband, Leonard, over lunch and tea. To recover some fragments of Woolf’s own non-being, we can look at what she barely remembered writing: her postcards. Scholars have paid little attention to these dashed-off missives. In fact, her editors intentionally left them out of the six-volume set of her collected letters, published between 1975 and 1980. As they explain in volume 5, nearly fifty postcards—which can be found in archives across the U.S. and the UK—were deemed unsuitable for publication because they “concern social arrangements or small business affairs which are often mentioned again in another context, and throw no new light on her character or life.” Read More
November 5, 2025 History The Long March of Basic Trust By Alexander Kluge Film stills from Die Macht der Gefühle (The power of emotion), final sequence: “Undoing of a crime by means of cooperation,” 1983. All images courtesy of Alexander Kluge. ARRIVAL OF SUNDAY’S CHILD Things went on until three in the morning. The child, arriving in the world at 11:55 P.M., bathed, photographed, placed in the young mother’s arms, still counts as a Sunday child. At this point the servant girls are in their rooms, too. All the drunk well-wishers have sunk down onto the sofas and across the floor of the salons and are fast asleep. The day following the excitement is a Monday. The girls clean up the remains of the feast. The head doctor is already in his office. Patients are coming up the stairs to the waiting room. The female doctor is asleep. The child in the room next to the female doctor has been “forgotten” for a few hours. Although all carry the “news of the happy event” in their excited hearts, the basket with the child itself has been put away and it will be noon before anyone thinks to ask about the new arrival’s regularities. First, the flowers in the winter garden need to be stowed away. Stocks from the pantry brought to the cleaning woman’s family. They are considered to have been “used yesterday.” The young doctor can hardly believe that, at all of twenty-four years of age, she managed a birth. She’s got earplugs in, is fast asleep. Were visitors not expected to come to congratulate the “Sunday child” during the afternoon, you could easily forget that piece of meat in the basket, even if it screamed. Read More
November 4, 2025 Bookmarks Rotten Tomatoes By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte), a daily bulletin of movie news: April 28, 2024 Selling point of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it doesn’t require any “Marvel homework” WBD and Amazon “may have unknowingly” used North Korean companies for animation work on two of their TV series Studios have begun hiring some directors based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores of their recent movies Kalshi, a financial exchange and predictive-market company, offers a betting product for Rotten Tomatoes scores. “Now anyone can make money by being a movie critic,” is how they sell it WBD CEO David Zaslav’s $49.7 million salary is more than the entire operating budget of WBD’s Turner Classic Movies, flagship channel of American film history Instead of reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix will use a new metric they call “Fandom,” which is based on how many people watch trailers or parts of trailers on their platform. “Over six billion impressions every month,” they claim, as if that means anything Comedian–Unfrosted director Jerry Seinfeld says “the movie business is over,” replaced by “depression, malaise, confusion—disorientation.” This succinct, not untrue statement has got him mocked on social media Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, completed the day before he died, will debut at Cannes, then be distributed and sold by an NFT company, Roadstead Rapper-director Kanye West launching adult entertainment studio, Yeezy Porn Writer-director Aaron Sorkin is planning an antidisinformation J6 movie that is also a sequel to The Social Network Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom star Chris Pratt and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, author of the book The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable, have torn down the architecturally significant modernist Zimmerman House in Brentwood, built 1950. The couple purchased the house for $12.5 million and will replace it with a 15,000-square-foot “modern farmhouse”-style mansion A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles. Using too much of it too quickly is causing an endemic zombielike look, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks Things Change writer-director David Mamet insists his two actor daughters, Zosia and Clara, are not nepo babies, because learning from being on set earned them a spot in the bigs. “They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” he says Writer-director-actor Ben Stiller announces he was shocked no one liked Zoolander 2. The comedy sequel came out in 2016 Lucasfilm has partnered with a dairy company to make and sell Star Wars Blue Milk. Formerly only available at Disney theme parks, the liquid food product will be sold in grocery stores and through DoorDash Tram derails at Universal Studios Hollywood as it passes too quickly through the Jurassic Park exhibit. Fifteen injured, some seriously. California Highway Patrol investigating. Read More
November 3, 2025 Car Crushes Car Talk By Cynthia Zarin 2005 Saab sedan. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC by 3.0. I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then called the A&P supermarket, which marked the turnoff to a house my family owned then, by a cove and across from a small harbor. The idea was that my father would teach me. During the summers I spent a good deal of time alone with my father on a nineteen-foot sailboat called the Nausicaa. In the Odyssey, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, is washing clothes by an inlet on the island of Phaeacia, near where Odysseus, after a shipwreck, has washed ashore. When he appears, roused from slumber by the splash in a tidepool engineered by the goddess Athena, Nausicaa’s startled handmaidens flee, but “Alcinous’ daughter held fast, for Athena planted courage within her heart.” Odysseus is naked. Nausicaa lends him some laundry to wear and takes him home to meet her parents, whom he entertains by telling stories: The Nausicaa episode is a frame for many of the tales of the Odyssey. Oddly, her name is often translated as “ship burner.” The boat had come with that moniker, and it didn’t occur to my father to change it. On calm days, I liked to lie prostrate on the prow, my cheek against the boat’s warm skin, which smelled of salt, sun, rubber, and seagull. When a storm blew, the boom swung around, lines cut into my fingers, and my father shouted imprecations. Decades later, he took one of my daughters out on a Sunfish on a nearby pond. The wind came up. We may not make it back, he said. She returned white-faced and never went sailing with him again. At her age, I did not have that prerogative. When it came time for me to obtain my learner’s permit, my father announced that since he’d taught me to sail, he’d teach me to drive. My mother was the much better driver, but no matter. Rather than Port! Starboard! my father yelled Left! Right! On the empty black tarmac of the shopping plaza, I clutched the wheel of our old Ford Country Squire station wagon as if we were tacking into the breakers. Read More
October 31, 2025 Home Improvements Weatherizing Salem By Nathan Dragon All photographs courtesy of the author. I usually tell people I don’t know well that my work is roofing and siding. I also tell people this when I, correctly or incorrectly, assume they don’t know what weatherization is. When I type out weatherization, a red line appears underneath the word, indicating that the program I use to write doesn’t know what it is either. I don’t explain that I’m usually crawling, crouching, and squirming around an attic, air-sealing; or a knee wall, air-sealing; or in a crawl space, air-sealing. In other words, blasting spray foam in a small, gross space. Sometimes I explain that I’m up on a ladder—anything from a sixteen-footer to a thirty-two- and, sometimes, but rarely, a forty-footer—drilling holes into the wall between each bay, from the outside, underneath siding that has been taken off to expose the home’s sheathing. Sometimes holes have to be drilled inside a house—interior drill and blow—because of asbestos or because there’s a dormer on a third or fourth floor sticking out from a too-steep roof. Sometimes I mix up the job’s jargon—strats, rafters, studs, strapping, joists. Something like foam could mean spray foam or foam board, it all depends on the context. I’m usually covered in dust, mold, and rat shit, squeezing through knee walls, attics, crawl spaces. This is all considered unskilled labor. After holes are drilled into the wall, or the attic’s prepped, the necessary spaces get filled with cellulose, a kind of insulation made of things like shredded newspaper. When I’m cutting open the bags to load it into the blower machine (versus into the truck to transport it), I think: What history or literature is being blown into these walls? Returns that got pulped? My book? My friends’ books, my foes’? Sometimes you can catch a few words from things like grocery-store flyers—FROZEN LASAGNA MEALS $6.99. Read More