April 29, 2026 First Person All My Dad’s Sons By Joe Bond The boys with their van. Photograph courtesy of the author. My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming. I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing. Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it. Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride. There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen. Read More
April 28, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame By Hal Foster Henri Matisse, View of Notre Dame, 1914, oil on canvas, 58 x 37 ⅛ in, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here. The next three installments will appear weekly throughout May. As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right. Read More
April 27, 2026 Events Edward P. Jones’s Hadada Acceptance Speech By Edward P. Jones Edward P. Jones photographed by Jill Krementz at the Paris Review Revel on April 14, 2026. Last week, at The Paris Review’s 2026 Revel, the writer Edward P. Jones accepted the Hadada Award, a prize presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Jones, whose 2004 novel The Known World won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has been a beloved contributor to the Review since 1992, when his short story “Marie” appeared in the Spring issue. Among the editors’ initial reactions to that story, we found a handwritten note (whose chicken scratch strongly resembles that of George Plimpton) which reads: “a formidable character … well-plotted … very well controlled … Hooray!” The note accompanies a letter from Jones, dated October 1991, in which he told the former editor James Linville that “it seems that I have been creating the people in the stories all my adult life.” This speech, however, takes us back to before that adult life, to when Jones was first falling in love with, as he puts it, “this fiction stuff.” We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. Read More
April 24, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction By Hal Foster Grahamdubya, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the introduction to a four-part series by the art critic and historian Hal Foster, resulting from a kind of ritual he devised with a friend during their regular visits to museums. Here, he explains the premise of this game and its parameters. The next four installments are short studies, each centered around a single artwork. The first will be published next week, with the other three to follow over the course of May. Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. Read More
April 23, 2026 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Nilo Cruz By Sophie Haigney Photograph courtesy of Zenith Richards / Met Opera. In May, the opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego will open at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera centers on the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—but not exactly as themselves. On the Day of the Dead, after Rivera prays for Kahlo’s return, she travels back from the underworld to visit the land of the living. There she finds Rivera, about whom she feels ambivalent; in life, their relationship had been characterized by his infidelity and emotional turmoil. The one rule: she can’t touch anyone, not even him. What happens between them when she exists only in spirit form? And what is it like for one of the great painters of the body to be back in the world without one? This opera explores mortality, pain, and the afterlife of a difficult love. It also manages to be sometimes funny and surprising, with a dynamic cast of other characters, including a feisty keeper of the underworld named Catrina and a young actor named Leonardo, who is enamored with Greta Garbo. Read More
April 21, 2026 On Architecture Empire Plaza State of Mind By Charlie Dulik The Egg under construction circa 1976., via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Entering Albany by highway from the south, as a fleet of buses did in late February, requires weaving through a nest of interchanges between the city and its waterfront, then shuttling west along a series of dingy arteries, before emerging onto a plaza the New York Times once said looked more like “the planet Krypton than the capital of the state of New York.” The Empire State Plaza, as it’s called, does indeed seem like something from another world, or perhaps from several others. The Capitol building, a hulking castle of rough, gray stone capped with ruddy terra-cotta, sits at the north end of the square; the other three sides are lined with eleven anonymous, modern structures, a mix of squat blocks and slim vertical slabs, all sheathed in shining white marble, over forty thousand tons in total. This odd assemblage of vaguely sinister buildings looks down on three reflecting pools and one enormous oblong entity—a bizarre, six-story Brutalist construction known simply as the Egg, which officially serves as a performing arts center but resembles nothing so much as a newly landed UFO. Read More