Hannah Zeavin
‘We Took Care of the Network’

The Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles imagined an asylum that could cure not only individual patients but society itself.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Lights, Camera, Royals

Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

Colm Tóibín
The Pitch of Passion

“James Baldwin’s style could be high and grave and reflect his glittering mind; his thought was embodied in his style. His thought was subtle, ironic, but also engaged and passionate. When he needed to, he could write a plain, sharp sentence, or he could produce a high-toned effect, or he could end a long sentence with a ringing sound.”

Gordon F. Sander
Ready for War in Sweden

“If neutrality was a façade, it was one most Swedes ardently believed in prior to the Ukraine war.”

Free from the Archives

In the interregnum between the 2024 Olympics and the 2024 Paralympics (which open on August 28), it might be a good time to remember a routine that the French synchronized swim team almost performed at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta: per a Newsday article, “they would reenact the arrival of Jewish women in the death camps, selection by Nazi doctors and their march to the gas chambers.”

When this routine was ultimately scrapped, Prudence Crowther and James Taibi wrote for the Review’s August 8, 1996, issue some ideas “to see the team put this rebuff behind it and get on with something that still redounds to the glory of French culture without necessarily giving audiences the willies.”

Prudence Crowther and James Taibi
Olympic Notes

“5. ‘J’Accuzzi’: The Dreyfus Affair.

Finesses the painful opera libretto. In severe terry cloth robes, the team marches onto the diving board in French military style. One by one, they cannonball off, miming the discovery by a French spy in the German Embassy of a secret list of French documents received by Major Max von Schwartzkoppen, military attaché in Paris. Next, suspicion falls on Dreyfus, followed by the acquittal of Esterhazy, Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, Dreyfus’s trip to Devil’s Island, and the eventual unification and bringing to power of France’s political left wing. In the shallow end, Dreyfus is exonerated and given the gold medal of the Legion of Honor. Just under four minutes.”

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