April 15, 2026 Dispatch Between Wild West and Far East By Nastassja Martin Reindeer herders’ house in Bystrinsky Nature Park, Kamchatka. Photograph by NadezhdaKhaustova, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Snowflakes whirl in the white daylight, and we advance with difficulty beneath the dense canopy. Dasho and Clint in front, me behind. Sweat drips down our foreheads. The snow crunches under our feet. Keep within the tracks! I think, every time I sink once more up to my thighs. After an hour’s trudging, bent over and with our shoulders hunched up to our ears, the landscape changes; the black spruce woods become sparser. The wind picks up as we lose the trees’ protection, and I muffle my face with my shapka’s earflaps. “Will you tell me where we’re going?” I shout to Dasho, trying to reach him over the wind’s bluster. “Nearly there,” he replies. “A little more patience and you’ll soon see.” We come out into a clearing, Dasho and Clint stop, and I follow suit. I look to the right and the left, and my gaze at last picks out a shape that’s blurry but discernible through the snowfall. Something large and white; something that is neither a house nor a tree. “Come,” Dasho says. “We’re here.” We walk towards the object, the contours of which become clear as we approach. It is a white, multifaceted sphere of imposing scale, perched on a metal structure that holds it suspended in the air. The structure must be between eight and ten meters high. At its foot, a ladder extends up towards a hatch in the sphere’s underside. I catch my breath and the boys light cigarettes, visibly pleased with themselves. “What is that?” They’re expecting my question; we have come all the way here precisely so I can ask it. “That,” Dasho says, “is America making sure the Russians can’t take Alaska back off them!” Read More
April 10, 2026 Arts & Culture Among the Antigones By Rhoda Feng Alessandra Lopez in Antigone in Analysis, March 19, 2026. Photograph by Marina Levitskaya. For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. Read More
April 6, 2026 Dispatch A Month or So, Minneapolis By Jake Lancaster Courtesy of Jake Lancaster. When Alex Pretti was shot ten times in South Minneapolis on a cold but sunny Saturday morning in front of a doughnut shop, I was likely three or four miles away, speeding down I-94 to make it to the airport before my wife’s flight to Florida. She was surprising her sister, who was turning fifty. It was well below zero and we were all very cranky, and running late. My son and daughter were in the back seat. We passed the Basilica of Saint Mary on the left, the Walker Art Center on the right. From the freeway you can see Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. I told the kids to look, but the novelty had worn off over the years: it was just a big cherry in a spoon, decorative and somewhat obscene. We passed under a pedestrian bridge designed by an architect who commissioned John Ashbery to write a poem for it. The poem is called “untitled bridge poem” and is stenciled across the structure’s steel girders and ends with the line (in what I’ve always thought to be a satisfying anti-epiphany) “And then it got very cool.” There’s a tunnel after the bridge, and everyone holds their breath until we make it through. I know my way around Minneapolis. I’ve lived here for two decades, in North Minneapolis, in Uptown, Downtown, Northeast, and South Minneapolis, and now in a near north suburb, but I still use Google Maps because there’s more than one way to the airport and there’s always road construction and unforeseen traffic and, for the past couple of weeks, the possibility of a protest or march or ICE activity blocking a major thoroughfare. Machine learning can predict these things. Most human citizens who aren’t on Signal chats or ICE watch group text threads cannot. Read More
April 3, 2026 Document The World of Aramco By Krithika Varagur Aramco World, January–February 1980 cover, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. “I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for the pure-bred Arabian horses that gave any cavalry an enormous military advantage,” writes one high-spirited contributor to a 2001 issue of Aramco World, the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. The article, which has no discernible news peg, explains how nineteenth-century Poles—like Count Wacław Rzewuski, a Warsaw aristocrat-turned-sheik, who disappeared in battle at age fifty-four—contrived to bring Arabian horses to Eastern Europe. Following in the count’s footsteps, the reporter, also a Saudi airline employee, meets Poland’s state inspector of Arabian horse breeding, enumerates the most valuable Arabian mares to “set hoof on Polish soil”—their names were Gazella, Mlecha, and Sahara—and explains how the manuscript of the “count’s account,” Sur les chevaux orientaux et provenants des races orientales, can be viewed by special appointment in Warsaw. Read More
April 2, 2026 Bookmarks A Bubbly Ambivalence. . . By Tarpley Hitt 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. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Opera Fever (Wave Books), a new poetry collection by Chelsey Minnis: What should be said in poems. . A bubbly ambivalence. . . Or a mirror seen through bullet holes? Read More
April 1, 2026 Document The Wuthering Heights of Edna Clarke Hall By Sarah Hyde Edna Clarke Hall, aged sixteen, ca. 1895. Photograph courtesy of Abbott and Holder Ltd. The artwork of Edna Clarke Hall was born out of a kind of fixation more often associated with outsider artists, but Hall herself began as something of an insider. Accepted to London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art at just fourteen years old, she studied under the painter Philip Wilson Steer and became the favorite student of the school’s director, the renowned drawing instructor Henry Tonks. Many of her peers would go on to be celebrated artists—the stage designer Albert Rutherston, the painter Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, the sibling portraitists Gwen and Augustus John—and Hall seemed destined for similar success. But her fortunes changed six years later, with her marriage to William Clarke Hall, a lawyer thirteen years her senior with an affinity for young girls. (The poet Ernest Dowson once described him as a “devout follower of the most excellent cult of La Fillette.”) Read More