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You’ve Got to Let This Razor Blade into Your Life
Tim Riley reviews Robert Hilburn’s “A Few Words In Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman.”
Biography & Autobiography
"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn
More Than an Object of Vardolatry
Conor Williams reviews Carrie Rickey’s “A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda.”
The Story of a Generation
Michele Willens reviews Connie Chung’s memoir, which recalls her barrier-shattering career in TV news journalism.
Back Seat Witness-Bearing
Anna Marie Cain interviews Sarah Gerard about “Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable.”
The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts
Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.
John E. Mack and the Unbelievable UFO Truth
Michael J. Socolow looks back at the controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.
A Gospel of Violence
Andrew DeCort reviews Tom Gardner’s “The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia.”
Gathering Intelligence: Chelsea Manning, the War on Terror, and the Trans Internet
Charlie Markbreiter analyzes Chelsea Manning as era-defining symbol, internet darling, and enemy of the state, in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”
Meteor, Star, Galaxy, Caven
LARB presents a new essay by Erika Balsom, excerpted from Fireflies Press’s edited collection “Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction,” publishing this September.
A Singular Man
Jim Berg reviews Katherine Bucknell’s “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.”
The Worst Sect of People
Sheila McClear reviews “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” a supposed tell-all memoir by Anna Marie Tendler.
TrimSpa, Baby
Emmeline Clein recounts an “American Icarus story” spelled out in diet pills and rhinestones in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”
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