Culture

Book Review: ‘On Air,’ by Steve Oney

Published

1 year ago

March 11, 2025

But even before NPR’s first decade was over, its lack of political, socioeconomic and racial diversity was apparent. “Young, brainy, upper-middle-class, politically liberal, artistically adventurous and typically white, the NPR archetype was taking shape,” Oney writes. In cramped edit booths, staffers cut lines of cocaine and engaged in trysts.

Oney celebrates the culture of free-spiritedness, but as NPR matured, that culture’s blind spots became painfully evident. Most prominent is race. “On Air” devotes many pages to recounting the resentment Black and Hispanic journalists faced from white colleagues who considered them incompetent, unlikable or a poor fit — notably Adam Clayton Powell III, who was hired as director of NPR News in 1987 and fired less than three years later, and Juan Williams, an iconoclastic Black commentator whose ouster from NPR in 2010 precipitated another crisis.

Williams had told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he felt “nervous” seeing airplane passengers in traditional Muslim attire while flying, remarks that stoked liberal outrage. But his haphazard dismissal only fanned the flames. An investigation by an outside law firm found that Williams was given little rationale for being let go, and prompted the resignation of NPR’s top news executive at the time, Ellen Weiss. Then, as the scandal seemed to be blowing over, the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe released hidden-camera video showing NPR’s chief fund-raiser slamming conservatives. The C.E.O., Vivian Schiller, formerly a digital executive at The New York Times, was forced out.

The Juan Williams debacle, Oney writes, was “arguably the opening battle of the conflict that would define America during the early decades of the 21st century — the culture wars.” By 2011, NPR was being roasted even by allies like Barack Obama — at a now notorious White House Correspondents’ Dinner where he also mocked Trump.

A second blind spot is age. Although the word “boomer” appears only once in the book, NPR’s ongoing struggles stem in part from its singular identification with its founding cohort. A “collectivist mentality” and college radio sensibility, as Oney describes it, have made the network particularly difficult to manage, “less a business than a dysfunctional family,” plagued by leadership turnover. Oney likens NPR in its early days to a “troubled kid” with “a chip on its shoulder.” That may once have been charming, but now the kid is a senior citizen who won’t get out of the way.

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Culture

Can You Name These Novels Based on Their Characters?

Published

6 days ago

April 6, 2026

Press Room

Can You Name These Novels Based on Their Characters?

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge asks you to identify a novel’s title based on the characters in the text. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

Culture

Do You Know Where These Famous Authors Are Buried?

Published

2 weeks ago

March 30, 2026

Press Room

Do You Know Where These Famous Authors Are Buried?

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — or have a lasting influence on an author. With that in mind, this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the final stops for five authors after a life of writing. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

Culture

What Happens When We Die? This Wallace Stevens Poem Has Thoughts.

Published

3 weeks ago

March 25, 2026

Press Room

What Happens When We Die? This Wallace Stevens Poem Has Thoughts.

By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. Aliza Aufrichtig is a visual journalist.

March 25, 2026

Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.

Now&colon; What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?

Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.

Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.

Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.

Wallace Stevens in 1950.

Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock

As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.

Are those worlds real?

Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.

Until then, we find consolation in fangles.