Appointment
Johnny Lyons writes: I am thrilled to take up the role of managing editor with the drb, a journal of which I have long been an avid reader and to which, in more recent times, I have been a proud contributor. The drb has made an incalculable contribution to Irish intellectual life and I intend to continue in this tradition while attracting a new wave of contributors and readers to its pages.
In that spirit, I will publish essays, book reviews and blogs that exemplify the values readers have come to expect from the drb, such as a commitment to...
The publishers are delighted to announce that Johnny Lyons has been appointed managing editor of the drb. The first number under his stewardship will be issue 160, Spring 2026. In response to his appointment, Johnny, who has a background in philosophy and business, said: ‘The drb has made an incalculable contribution to Irish intellectual life and I intend to continue in this tradition while attracting a new wave of contributors and readers to its pages.’ Click the heading to read a statement from Johnny.
The Thing with Rivers
Robert Macfarlane, an internationally renowned and prolific writer on nature, has turned his attention to rivers. At Ennore Creek, in a poor district of Chennai in southern India, ‘the air is violent with pollution’, so dirty Macfarlane's group must wear face masks. When asked what the locals would like for the future, a woman replies: ‘We’re all getting cancer. It would be nice if we just got asthma.’ The river at this point is so chemically polluted that it blisters human skin.
A Fruitful Reticence
For Colm Tóibín, as also for his poetic influences – Derek Mahon, Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn – a wish to be faithful to the self is both reflective of and in tension with a natural inhibition. They’re wary of insincerity and self-deception. But they’re also guarded, even evasive, especially about their losses and traumas. In more than one sense, they keep to themselves. This conflict between transparency and reserve, sincerity and remoteness, informs their plain, disciplined styles.
Twice Blest
Joan Silber’s touch is light, but her subjects couldn’t be more weighty: love and sex, illness and death, money and happiness, betrayal and forgiveness. Her manipulation of fictive time and space is artfully simple yet magically deep and her books are always a sheer pleasure, her illusory artlessness and narrative prowess making her both easy to read and well worth revisiting. Her deftness and mastery have led Nick Hornby to call her a ‘guiding star’ to other writers.
Honey, I’m home!
A woman speaks to camera about how to serve your husband. She says, ‘submission has become a dirty word’. She details her journey from ‘hardcore feminist’ to proponent of traditional femininity – softness, bread, being a helpmeet. The woman talking is my sister; I have watched this video maybe ten times. My sister is one of the growing number of women who identify as tradwives – a movement so big that recently the Cambridge Dictionary announced ‘tradwife’ as one of their new words of the year. At the time of writing there are 62.1 million posts on TikTok alone...
Even if you accept the 1950s as the zenith of the nuclear family, the economic context was wildly different from our own, it being generally an age of government subsidy, wage growth, tighter corporation regulation, expansion of welfare and a housing market in which veterans in the US could put down a deposit of one American dollar for a house. Even under these extremely favourable conditions, which propelled the picket fence family to new cultural heights, only 60 per cent of working age women were housewives and one in three US marriages ended in divorce.
Aschenbach’s Last Journey
In May 1911, a few months before Gustav von Aschenbach first became a figment of his pen, Thomas Mann was staying with his wife and brother Heinrich on the wooded island of Brioni on the Istrian peninsula, holiday haunt of the Habsburg monarchy. Moving the holiday across to the other side of the Adriatic was not yet in prospect, but a disrespectful countess was disturbing dinner with her late arrivals and early departures. The irritable Manns had to stand up to defer to her grandeur and when enough was enough they took the ferry to Venice instead.
Mann insisted that...
I think if Thomas Mann were here today he would want to retain some high-minded beliefs and plead that not all high culture be deconstructed as manipulation in pursuit of power. But his great translator into English, Helen Lowe-Porter, thought him politically naive. She wrote to him: ‘I wondered if you do not move in too rarified an air … for the necessary ingredient of cynicism to find enough place in your political outlook.’ She added, in a letter to a friend in 1942: ‘He has such a good heart … I do wish he knew more.’
Making It, Faking It
A century has now elapsed since F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. Its author had had high hopes for it, especially after the embarrassing failure of his play The Vegetable. Not only did he want this new book to be a commercial success, he also hoped it would lead to his being taken seriously as a writer, an artist like Eliot or Joyce, not just a hack who could turn out slick short fictions for the Saturday Evening Post. In the event, most American critics were polite but underwhelmed. (Less restrained was Fitzgerald’s UK publisher, Collins, who...
The American Dream, by suggesting that upward social mobility is relatively straightforward and commonplace, was a kind of inversion of the noble lie in Plato’s ‘Republic’. The noble lie is required, Plato advises, because social mobility is so uncommon a phenomenon that people’s expectations need to be managed down. They need to be told that the elite is elite because the people who comprise it are innately fitted for the role and that that innateness is almost always passed down, from parent to child. The Dream, on the other hand, tells us we can all make it, but it’s very much down to us.