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
March 26, 2026 In Memoriam In the Ring with Frederick Wiseman By Lucas Schaefer Photograph by Antoine Yar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. So uninterested was I in coming out of the closet at the dawn of the twenty-first century that the thought of spending freshman year on death row seemed more appealing. This was September 2000, during my first semester at Duke. I was anxious about sex and awkward around other boys I thought might be gay. I avoided the one out guy in my hall, instead spending many a late night interrogating the evangelicals who dominated our dormitory. They were friendly but fervent and unfunny, and they wore their heterosexuality as proudly as the chunky wooden crosses around their necks. Read More
March 24, 2026 On Sports Sunday at La Bombonera By Juan Villoro Photograph by Hernán Piñera from Marbella, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Clásicos are like Christmas for football. In these high-tension matches between fierce rivals, expectation almost always outstrips results. For months, fans visualize goals with the unrealistic yearning of a child who hopes for a new PlayStation from Santa Claus in exchange for a few cookies left out for his tired reindeer. For me, the Superclásico between Buenos Aires’s Boca Juniors and River Plate on May 4, 2008, was preceded by thirty-four years of anticipation. In 1974 I went to the Estadio Monumental to see River–Boca, but I had never been to the reverse fixture in La Bombonera, that exceptional stadium that should have been examined by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. The wait had charged the occasion with so much emotion that it was almost a shame it actually had to take place. Friends from Mexico, Colombia, and Spain had all similarly circled the date of May 4—the Argentine derby appeals not only to those who sleep in shirts emblazoned with the Quilmes beer logo but to an entire global tribe. Like Everest or the Mona Lisa, the fame of Boca’s stadium is impossible to deny—look no further than the crowds of tourists who come to snap pictures. But does it really represent the pinnacle of footballing passion? I spoke about the Superclásico with the taxi driver who picked me up at the Ezeiza airport and he replied with indignation: “But we hate each other more!” He came from Rosario and was referring to the bad blood between his hometown clubs Newell’s Old Boys (“the Lepers”) and Rosario Central (“the Swine”). On the drive he told me about his family’s marvelous wrath and the betrayal of his aunt Teresita, the heretic who refused to support the Swine. At the core of his story was the issue of rancor: on its biggest days, football comes down to contempt, and nobody hates each other more than Swine hate Lepers. In his opinion, the lesser rivalry between Boca–River was inflated by the press. The driver summed up his argument with theological flair: “God is everywhere, but performs his tricks in Buenos Aires.” Read More
March 23, 2026 Triptych The One Thousand Blobcows Born Each Year By Morgan Day Photograph by Hans5400, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. A spotted creature is rolled across gravel. Another is placed on a dinner plate, then cradled in two palms. These were meant to be cows but emerged instead as balls of tissue and organs enclosed in hair coats. Their name, amorphous globosus, derives from the Greek and Latin for “formless sphere.” I watch videos of formless spheres for the same reason that I watch videos of miniature horses: I am in search of purity. Amorphous globosus is a nonviable creature, incapable of development or growth. It’s more easily understood by its missing parts: a head and limbs, a mouth and genitals. Occasionally, it’s given a useless heart. It’s continuous; a sphere at infinity with the weight of a water bottle. Within it are more ineffectual formless spheres, fluid-filled cysts in lieu of functioning organs. At a threshold of never having lived yet never having not, amorphous globosus is hard to categorize. Neither a tumor nor fetus, it’s relegated to an anomaly: a fetal monster. Amorphous globosus is often buried in the dirt like a dead animal. Read More