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Who’s Fighting Putin’s War?
Ada Wordsworth
Uzbek Uncertainties
Uzbekistan is divided between nostalgia for the Soviet past and patriotic hope for an independent future.
Dilara O’Neil
Dancing Laser Beams
George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.
Christine Smallwood, interviewed by Merve Emre
Why Do You Do It This Way?
Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”
Helen DeWitt
“Scribbling”: A Story
“The FedEx chap did not live locally; he went to the front gate, last unlocked in 1972, failed to make entry, and retreated disconsolate to the depot in Alfreton. A telephone call was necessary to induce the herald poursuivant to essay anew using the back road from the village, whereupon the poor lamb got lost in the woods for hours. Drove the van manfully down a disused track onto tennis courts of yore, where the thing got bogged down.”
Free from the Archives
Before James David Vance was a nominee for vice president or a senator from Ohio, he was an investment banker and a partner at Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital who rose to national prominence with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of his impoverished childhood in Ohio that doubled as an attempted diagnosis of the problems faced by poor white people.
In the Review’s June 28, 2018, issue, Nancy Isenberg read Vance’s book alongside Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll—“a theorist of the ‘American peasantry’”—to evaluate two “quite different theories of economic dislocation and family survival.”
Nancy Isenberg
Left Behind
“For Vance, ‘hillbilly’ is a term of endearment, a state of mind, a group moniker, a source of chaos and anger, but it is more often than not disconnected from real economic conditions that shaped his family’s class identity. The ‘hillbilly’ that he invokes is both a composite of his memories and a literary device; yet for him to escape his troubled past, it must be shed, redrawn, tamed, and perhaps buried nostalgically with Vance’s grandparents.”
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