The New York Review of Books | May 2025 Issue

Fintan O’Toole: Making Capitalism Brutal Again Volume LXXII, Number 9 May 29, 2025 Sue Halpern: How Facebook Corrupts Politics Alice Kaplan: The Promised Land in Texas Chris Ware: Olivier Schrauwen’s Ulysses Andrew Delbanco: The Longings of F. Scott Fitzgerald Hari Kunzru: Conspiracists in the White House Anna Della Subin: Dunya Mikhail’s Iraqi Secrets Christopher Browning: It’s Happening Here Books for a Better World ART ON MY MIND by bell hooks With a foreword by Mickalene Thomas BACKROOM DEALS IN OUR BACKYARDS by Miranda S. Spivack BAD LAW by Elie Mystal “Erudite and sophisticated.” —Booklist “An enraging exposé of a nationwide culture of corruption.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges.” —Kirkus Reviews COPAGANDA by Alec Karakatsanis DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE AND OTHER REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS HOW TO TEACH COLLEGE by James W. Loewen, edited by Nicholas Loewen and Michael Dawson “After Copaganda, you’ll never read the news the same way again.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow by NgǊgƭ wa Thiong’o “Unearths the hidden connections between language and power.” —Publishers Weekly “Reminds us that ‘learning how to learn' is the most important lesson.” —Donzell Lee, PhD, president, Tougaloo College IF WE DON’T GET IT by Stefan M. Bradley KING OF THE NORTH by Jeanne Theoharis THE PRISON INDUSTRY by Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises “Champion[s] the young Black activists who forged the Ferguson Uprising’s thunderous call for racial justice.” —Ibram X. Kendi “A powerful must-read that sheds new light on King and the Civil Rights Movement.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “An essential resource for those working to dismantle the prison industrial complex.” —Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing thenewpress.org SAVE 30% WITH CODE TNP30 Contents May 29, 2025 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rachel Nolan ‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’ Motherland: The Disintegration of a Family in a Collapsed Venezuela by Paula Ramón, with translations by Julia Sanches and Jennifer Shyue Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela by William Neuman 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher R. Browning Surely Not? 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nina Siegal The Spy in the Jeu de Paume The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hari Kunzru Doing Their Own Research Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home 16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alice Kaplan Zionism Without Zion Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fintan O’Toole Forced Amnesia 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jane Yeh Poem 21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna Della Subin ‘Her Own Cuneiform’ Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sue Halpern For the Love of Money Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams 31 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Ware Pure Thought on Paper Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linda Greenhouse How Brown Came North and Failed The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams 36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Boris Dralyuk Poem 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher de Bellaigue Iran: A Grand Bargain? 40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Horowitz Grand Opera’s Tribulations Aida an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Michael Mayer, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adam Hochschild One Brief Shining Moment The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 by Manisha Sinha 44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Delbanco The Connoisseur of Desire The Annotated Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III, with an introduction by Amor Towles THE RISE OF THE REST A MI TAV A C H A R YA THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD ORDER Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West “The world order is changing irreversibly and there is no better guide to what will happen next than Amitav Acharya. This is a deeply informed vision of how nations will draw on their pasts to relate to one another in the future.” —R ANA MIT TER, author of Forgotten Ally “Fear not! The end of Western domination is not the end of human civilization. Instead, it will mark a return of many glorious civilizations which have thrived at different points of history. A rich, multicivilizational world is heading our way....To get a glimpse of the real future that humanity is heading towards, read this book carefully. It will dazzle and excite you and give you great hope for the future.” —KISHORE MAHBUBANI, author of Living the Asian Century nybooks.com/ online ONE HUNDRED DAYS OF TRUMP Nic Johnson: His Trade Chaos David Cole: His Showdown with the Courts Joshua Leifer: His Obscene Vision for Gaza PLUS Edna Bonhomme: Psychiatry at the Barricades Sean Wilentz: J. D. Vance Versus History Darryl Pinckney: Remembering Murray Kempton Sarah Haque: My Grandfather & the Struggle for Bangladesh “In The Once and Future World Order, Amitav Acharya subjects the presuppositions of the quintessentially colonial discipline of international relations to rigorous scrutiny from a decolonial perspective. This book should serve as a model for many other academic disciplines that were founded on similarly colonialist assumptions.” — A M I TAV G H O S H , author of Smoke and Ashes basicbooks.com Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at nybooks.com/issues. 3 The 2025 – 2026 Fellows IN BIOGRAPHY DISSERTATION FELLOW LEVY/SLOAN FELLOW Peter Maass Deborah Solomon Alex Traub Vanessa Troiana Autumn Womack J. Arvid Ågren Warburgs and Schiffs Jasper Johns Robert Silvers Dissertation on Susan Weil Toni Morrison Richard Dawkins Cynthia Carr Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for the biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar Call for 2026 – 2027 Fellows 4 Biography Fellows | 1 Levy/Sloan Science Biography $72k stipend + research assistance + writing space + library privileges. Fellows also participate in seminars and the intellectual life of the Graduate Center. Apply by January 5, 2026 | llcb.ws.gc.cuny.edu 4 The New York Review Contributors Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King, the second book in his trilogy about Suleyman the Magnificent, was published in the UK earlier this year. Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia and the President of the Teagle Foundation. Boris Dralyuk is a translator and the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa, a Tulsa Artist Fellow, and the Editor in Chief of Nimrod International Journal. Linda Greenhouse is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. She is the author of a foreword to the forthcoming reissue of James Mohr’s Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, originally published in 1978. Editor Emily Greenhouse Deputy Editor Michael Shae Executive Editor Jana Prikryl Senior Editor Eve Bowen Contributing Editors Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Art Editor Leanne Shapton Managing Editor Lauren Kane Online Editor Max Nelson Associate Editor Daniel Drake Assistant Editors Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman, Sam Needleman Sue Halpern is a regular contributor to The New York Review and a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury. Her novel What We Leave Behind will be published in June. Copyeditors Brian Ransom, Maggie McGowan Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. Editorial Interns Mia Euceda, Stephanie Pisarevskiy Joseph Horowitz’s books include Wagner Nights: An American History, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, and the novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Alice Kaplan is a Sterling Professor of French at Yale. Her book Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris was published last year. Hari Kunzru’s latest novel is Blue Ruin. He teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. Rachel Nolan teaches Latin American history at Boston University. Her book Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala was published last year. Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued last year. Nina Siegal is the author of three novels and The Diary Keepers: World War II Written by the People Who Lived Through It. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times from Amsterdam. Anna Della Subin is the author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. Chris Ware is an artist and writer. His books include Rusty Brown and Building Stories. A traveling retrospective of his work, which began at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2022, will close at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona at the end of this year. Jane Yeh’s most recent book of poems is Discipline. HANNAH ARENDT Fact-Checker Dahlia Krutkovich Special Projects Merve Emre Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn Publisher Rea S. 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Advertising Associate Michael Knapp Fulfillment Director Janis Harden Circulation Manager Andrea Moore Publicity Nicholas During Design Director Nancy Ng Special Projects Angela Hederman Office Manager Diane R. Seltzer Comptroller Max Margenau Cover art A page from Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Colorama/Fantagraphics) Series art Debbie Millman: Crowns, 2025 Assistant Accountant Vanity Luciano “The result of a consistent and total substuon of lies for fac tual truth is not that lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. false hood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” Office Associate Dianne Nora Founding Editors Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) Library of America loa.org May 29, 2025 5 ‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’ A man carrying a drum of water, Caracas, Venezuela, January 2025 Motherland: The Disintegration of a Family in a Collapsed Venezuela by Paula Ramón, with translations by Julia Sanches and Jennifer Shyue. Amazon Crossing, 237 pp., $28.99; $16.99 (paper) Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela by William Neuman. St. Martin’s, 337 pp., $29.99 One in four Venezuelans has left their country. Seven years ago the number of those who had left—migrated, fled, been forced out—was still one in ten. For most North Americans it seemed hardly to register, except as a faraway confirmation that socialism “didn’t work” or that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had been some kind of leftist dictator driving the country into the ground. In 2023 more people from Venezuela crossed the US–Mexico border than from any country other than Mexico or Guatemala. In 2024 the official tally was 261,000 Venezuelans, but that’s just the people who were apprehended. One in ten is mass migration. One in four is an exodus. Almost eight million souls. More people have been displaced from Venezuela than from countries where war and mass slaughter rage, such as Syria and Ukraine. Venezuela is at peace. But it is a peace with galloping inflation, a peace in which people are unable to get their hands on cash, food, or medicine. When they could no longer buy even cornmeal for their families, the farmers put all their belongings up for sale, then gave away the rest, and when all that remained fit in one backpack, they left. Then the teachers did the same. Then the lawyers and doctors, the entrepreneurs, the anti-chavistas and then even the 6 most fervent chavistas. Paula Ramón, a Venezuelan journalist, was one of those who left, along with her two brothers. But her mother stayed behind. In her memoir Motherland, Ramón tells the story of Venezuela’s implosion as so many families have lived it. Those who departed have frantically tried to ensure basic livelihood and dignity for those who stayed. It is a scramble of bank transfers and packaged food sent by container ship from Miami, an almost cartoonish supersizing of the usual worries of watching a parent age from a distance. The popular political movement known as the Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to break down class barriers beginning in the 1990s, but the recent crisis has shaken up hierarchies in Venezuelan society as much as Chávez ever did. A working-class family with one son in Chile sending back remittances was suddenly better off than a middle-class family with everyone home in Venezuela. Ramón’s middle- class family in Maracaibo, the sun-drenched oil city that is Venezuela’s second largest, split over chavismo. Her mother grew up impoverished but clawed herself up into the middle class by talking her way into a spot at the public university in Maracaibo and working as a teacher. She became an enthusiastic chavista, then turned against Chávez just as vehemently when the economy spiraled downward in 2014. (Ramón’s father was a Spaniard who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, volunteered to fight the Nazis on the western front, and was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp before moving to Caracas. He died a year after Chávez’s first attempted coup in 1992.) Ramón, a tepid supporter at first, also became disenchanted. Some of her cousins and siblings remained believers. Ramón left the country earlier than many of her compatriots, in 2010. She had studied journalism and was working as a reporter covering chavista politics and rallies—“People’s emotions rode high, to the point of tears,” she recalled—when she married a Brazilian journalist. She later followed him to China when he was reassigned. (Many moves later, she is currently a correspondent for Agence France-Presse based in Los Angeles.) Ramón’s two brothers left Venezuela several years after she did, when the country was in full collapse. The elder, after running his own small grocery store and working as a bank teller and then as a baker, finally gave it all up to find a job as a waiter in Chile. The younger, an ardent chavista to the end, tried to stay but found he was making the equivalent of $3.40 per month as a police officer. Police were in charge of repressing opposition marches. “There’s nothing for me here,” he told his sister before he packed his backpack in 2017. T he basics of what happened and who is responsible are sharply contested both inside and outside the country. Switch on US talk radio, and the cause is clear: socialism is hell. Chávez and his handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, drove Venezuela to ruin. Vote socialist, and you will no longer be able to buy toilet paper. The specter of castrochavismo has helped Donald Trump in Florida—in 2020 Trump’s campaign ran an ad in the state falsely claiming that Maduro had backed Joe Biden. Turn on state television in Venezuela for a completely different story: a hostile empire wouldn’t allow Venezuela to flourish; Venezuelans can’t buy basic goods because of the economic war waged by the US. So which is it? The answer—setting aside for a moment that Chávez’s major commitment was to redistribution rather than any rigid socialist ideology—is a bit of both, compounded by the inherent instability of an economy entirely based on oil extraction. Prospectors drilled Venezuela’s first oil well in 1914. The country turned out to have the world’s largest proven oil reserves—in the second major discovery, in a town called Cabimas, it rained oil for nine days. Oil money built long boulevards in Caracas, and the rich went on shopping trips to Paris for the latest fashions. In the 1970s, and especially after the nationalization of the oil industry in 1976, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. No government ever made a serious move to diversify the economy. Why should they, when the country was called la Venezuela saudita (“Saudi Venezuela”) and awash in petrodollars? People flew to Miami to shop for electronics, furniture, anything their hearts desired. Venezuelans were so wealthy that the catchphrase of the 1970s for those who traveled abroad was ’Tá barato, dame dos! (“It’s cheap, give me two!”) In a fair-minded book on the most recent collapse that also chronicles earlier crises, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, the former New York Times correspondent William Neuman writes that the unwavering focus on oil “accentuated an existing tendency toward a highly centralized government with a powerful executive.” Venezuela has a long tradition of dictatorship, though it also has a tradition of democratic openings, such as the brief 1948 presidency of Rómulo Gallegos, one of the most famous Latin American novelists of his day. Neuman quotes the first oil minister of Venezuela’s democracy, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who helped create OPEC, warning in the 1970s that the country’s wealth would be its ruin and calling oil “the devil’s excrement.” In her classic book The Paradox of Plenty (1997), the political scientist Terry Karl shows how countries that discover large reserves of oil, such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Algeria, and Indonesia, tend to first experience the illusion of prosperity, then become petrostates destabilized by the increasing dominance of those who have grown rich from oil. In Venezuela the benefits were coming hard and fast, and crucially, the rich got bigger handouts than the poor. Labor unions got deals with state companies, which agreed to hire more workers than they needed; private businesses got lowinterest loans, state contracts, and low taxes. Poor people got housing, old people got pensions, everyone got nearly free gasoline. “While governments in every country offer some or all of these benefits and pork directed at preferred constituencies,” Neuman writes, “Venezuelans came to view them as essential attributes of citizenship—regardless of whether oil prices were high or low.” The wealthy and powerful took extra— corruption in the country is legendary. “In the eyes of its citizens,” he writes, “the Venezuelan state is little more than an ATM.” Ramón writes that “Venezuelans had come to believe in a false reality: that discovering oil had made them rich forever. . . . As a country, they’d won the lottery, and the government was in charge of administering the prize.” Ramón’s family, like many others, rode The New York Review J UAN BARR ETO/AFP/ GE TTY IMAGE S Rachel Nolan May 29, 2025 7 the oil wave to become middle class. Her mother got herself a college degree and a mortgage for a house in Maracaibo through determination and government subsidies. When she became chronically ill with severe arthritis and Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disorder, the government paid a pension equivalent to her full teacher’s salary for her to stay home. Even before the country’s socialist turn, it provided some of the most generous social welfare policies in the region, aside from Cuba. Ramón’s family also suffered from the oil economy’s crashes, with jobs lost and pensions slashed. Inflation began to surge for the first time in the late 1970s, up to 20 percent in 1979. Foreign debt ballooned. In 1983—on a day that became known as Black Friday—the government devalued the currency and imposed exchange controls to rein in inflation. The economy recovered somewhat after the crash, but all the oil money in the world could not blind middle-class and poor Venezuelans to the way that the richest were continually lining their pockets through blatant corruption. Money flowed, then ebbed, but the poor were still poor. Trickle-down economics wasn’t trickling. Popular mobilizations had been successful before: a series of uprisings by leftists and student organizers brought down a dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in 1958. But even under democratic governance, persistent racism and classism were sources of frustration and anger. A friend of mine who grew up in Venezuela recalls constant gibes throughout her childhood from her light-skinned mother’s family about her mother’s decision to marry a charming, funny, and dark-skinned man from Maracaibo (not to mention the comments about my friend’s own appearance, which favors her father’s side). B eginning in the 1990s many leftist governments were elected throughout Latin America in the so-called Pink Tide, buoyed by promises of better social programs for the poor paid for by high commodity prices. Enter Chávez stage left. He attempted a military coup in 1992, a frankly ridiculous bid to take over from a democratically elected government that was imposing austerity measures—he sent a tank to ram through the door of the presidential palace when he had the following of less than 10 percent of the army—and was arrested. At that time he was not the leader of a popular movement but a barely known brown-skinned army cadet in fatigues and a red beret who led a small secret cell within the military. But his capture was broadcast on live television, and people were struck by his cool ease. “First, I want to say good morning to the people of Venezuela,” he said, as if he were making a nice little speech rather than getting arrested for leading a coup. “Unfortunately, for now, the objectives that we laid out for ourselves were not achieved in the capital.” For now. “New possibilities will arise again.” Some Venezuelans were appalled. Others welcomed the coup, seeing it as an attempt to address ferocious inequality and corruption. Chávez’s humble upbringing, his mixed African and Indigenous heritage plain on his face, was not lost on anyone. On live television Chávez thanked his follow- 8 ers for their bravery, told them to lay down their arms, and said his inspiration was the Liberator of Venezuela, the nineteenth-century independence leader Simón Bolívar. After he was released from prison, Chávez assumed that he would have to resort to military action to take power. But he was wrong. In 1998 he won a free election with 56.2 percent of the vote. A short time later Gabriel García Márquez shared a flight from Havana to Caracas with Chávez and, Ramón notes, wrote an article called “The Enigma of the Two Chávezes.” He wrote that he felt he’d spent time with two different men: “One, to whom luck had offered the opportunity to save his country. And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just one more despot.” In the US, Chávez is often thought of purely as a dictator. But it is worth remembering that his message—condemning corruption and calling for more equitable distribution of goods, economic sovereignty, and social rights for Venezuelans of all backgrounds— was, at least at first, extremely popular. He entered office on a wave of democratic support. Chávez is also thought of purely as a socialist, though he began as a social democrat and started pursuing avowedly socialist policies only after six years in power. Chávez soon deeply polarized the country. You were either part of el pueblo (“the people”) or the enemy—usurpers, the rich, oligarchs who had held back Venezuela and who would lose their privileges. He used public referenda to dismantle the legislature and the judiciary and to beef up the army’s presence in the government. He convened a new constituent assembly that gave itself the right to dismiss any member of government it deemed corrupt, and he pushed through a new constitution in 1999 that extended the presidential term to six years and allowed a second term. This was the beginning of a slide away from democracy, though Chávez was once again duly elected in 2000. He took over the state-run oil company and plowed its profits into literacy and antihunger programs, and in 2005 he proclaimed for the first time that Venezuela was headed to “socialism of the twenty-first century.” He was elected again the following year, in a free and fair election, but opposition was rising, especially after he shut down an independent news channel, which, along with his close relationship with Fidel Castro, spooked many Venezuelans. In 2009 he won a referendum to remove term limits altogether. Chávez’s popularity and repeated electoral success were in part due to the social programs that were generously funded by the state-run oil company. From when Chávez was first elected in 1999 to his death in 2013, Venezuela saw an oil bonanza far bigger than that of the 1970s. By June 2014 oil was close to one hundred dollars a barrel. Then came the bust. In part thanks to booming US shale oil production, by January 2015 the price had fallen to less than half that, at which point it was discovered that the government had spent all the country’s money, and there was no more. Corruption, price exchange controls, and a crazy import system were also involved, but the most basic explanation for what happened is, as Neuman writes, that “there was a law that said the government had to put money in a rainy day fund. Chávez repealed it and spent the money that had been set aside.” C hávez, already stricken by cancer, won a final election in 2012. He named Nicolás Maduro, a loyalist and charisma-free former bus driver, as his successor, and after his death, Maduro took over the presidency on an interim basis—though legally Chávez’s replacement should have been the head of the National Assembly. Faced with a crisis, Maduro by all accounts acted as if frozen. Inept and fatalistic, he didn’t know what to do and so did nothing, except to ever more violently repress his opposition. After a series of elections marked by less and less convincing claims of freedom and impartiality, Maduro remains president. His most flagrantly stolen election was last July, against a popular opposition candidate.1 Since 2005, supposedly in response to Chávez’s lack of cooperation in the war on drugs, the US has imposed a wide range of sanctions on Venezuela, blocking access to the US financial system and exports of Venezuelan oil. In 2017 President Donald Trump ramped up sanctions with the explicit aim of regime change. (Venezuela cut off diplomatic relations in 2019 after the US recognized an opposition leader, rather than Maduro, as the winner of an election.) Anyone still convinced of the efficacy of economic sanctions, currently the US’s foreign policy tool of choice (with penalties that affect one third of the nations in the world), would do well to consult Jeff Stein and Federica Cocco’s reporting 2 and a new book, How Sanctions Work, by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez.3 Their writing on the perverse incentives created by economic sanctions shows obvious parallels between Iran’s and Venezuela’s reactions to economic isolation: a pervasive culture of blaming US imperialism for domestic problems and a resulting militarization of everyday life. In neither country, obviously, have sanctions prompted regime change—not to mention in Cuba, where sixty years of sanctions have achieved nothing other than the immiseration of the Cuban people. Did sanctions accelerate migration and cause the absolute breakdown of Venezuela around 2019? Or was it, as some researchers at the Brookings Institution have argued,4 economic mismanagement, hyperinflation, and what economists call a “collapse in living standards,” by which they mean the inability to buy a bag of black beans without a whole paper bag full of cash? While both external restrictions and internal instability contributed to the crisis, the idea that the sanctions weren’t a major part of the problem is untenable. Even the US Government 1 See William Neuman, “Chavismo’s Chokehold,” The New York Review, September 19, 2024. 2 “How Four US Presidents Unleashed Economic Warfare Across the Globe,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2024; and, with Peter Whoriskey, “A New Washington Influence Industry Is Making Millions from Sanctions,” The Washington Post, October 24, 2024. 3 4 Stanford University Press, 2024. See Dany Bahar, Ted Piccone, and Harold Trinkunas, “Venezuela: A Path Out of Misery,” Brookings Institution, October 2018. Accountability Office—something like the government’s own internal auditing service—found that the sanctions placed on the Venezuelan state oil company “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy.” One way to stem the flow of Venezuelan migrants to the US border would be to lift sanctions. For several years Democrats from border states have requested that the US government relax sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. They know it would immediately result in fewer people crossing the border—the US’s myopic desire in all this. Afraid of seeming soft on a geopolitical enemy, former president Joe Biden waffled, at first maintaining tightened sanctions and then loosening them, ostensibly to facilitate free elections but also likely for another reason: as long as Russian oil is out of the question, the US is more in need of Venezuelan oil than ever. Paradoxically, in some ways it might have been more politically feasible for the Trump administration, which cares little for diplomatic convention, to ease sanctions on Venezuela. During his first term Trump heavily criticized the Maduro regime, but after he took office for the second time, there was a brief opening when Trump and the Venezuelan dictator seemed open to striking a deal in which the US would lift restrictions on oil exports if Venezuela accepted deportation flights. (Deportees cannot be removed to countries that refuse to accept them, a reality that suddenly has more significance since the new administration canceled Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the US.) The détente didn’t last, and the US has once again made wielding the economic weapon a top priority. In February Trump canceled Chevron’s license to pump in the country, which had enabled exports of crude to the US and buoyed the Venezuelan economy. The next month, amid threats of further sanctions and after Trump sent 238 Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, Venezuela agreed to accept deportation flights, a move Maduro announced was intended “to continue rescuing and freeing migrants from prisons in the United States.” That didn’t stop Trump from announcing a 25 percent tariff on any country that imports Venezuelan oil soon after, or from continuing to attempt to deport Venezuelans under the act, presumably to El Salvador. On April 19 the Supreme Court issued an emergency order pausing the deportation of Venezuelans being held at a detention center in Texas; some days later a Reuters drone observed men there spelling out “SOS ” with their bodies. W hat would have to change in order for Venezuelans to stay in Venezuela? The IMF estimated that between 2013 and 2019 two thirds of economic activity ceased in Venezuela. That’s a 65 percent drop in GDP . By comparison, during the Great Depression the US GDP fell by 27 percent. Maduro’s government stopped publishing most economic data for several years. Then in 2018 it revealed that inflation was at 130,000 percent. Stores raised prices several times a day. Ramón urged her mother to spend the money she wired right away, because it would be worthless tomorrow. Her mother, a habitual saver, always The New York Review on STREAMING NOW GREAT PERFORMANCES: NEXT TO NORMAL thirteen.org/broadway May 29, 2025 Photo: Marc Brenner YOUR FRONT ROW SEAT FOR THE BEST IN THEATER AND ARTS PROGRAMMING. 9 “RIVETING… Borger’s haunting, revelatory book exists in the shadow of a parent who, like many survivors, spoke little about his past. Part of Borger’s task is to illuminate that anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering.” —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW left a bit in the account, to Ramón’s great frustration. People stopped eating meat, then ate only lentils three times a day, then ate only one meal of lentils a day. A friend who was a correspondent in Caracas at this time was forced to fly out of the country regularly to pick up suitcases of cash to pay for basics. (Lucky him.) There are different kinds of violence—at the point of a gun (fast) or through environmental degradation or hunger (slow). The effect, mass migration, is unstoppable in either case. There is a reality beyond the legal distinction between the supposedly voluntary economic migrant and the fleeing asylum seeker. Ramón’s relatives, like so many Venezuelans, weren’t persecuted by the state in any meaningful sense. Her brother was a chavista police officer, after all. But neither did they leave their home in a manner that could be described as voluntary—not when runaway inflation means that a fulltime salary is never enough to buy food. North Americans are sometimes subject to the delusion that everyone, especially Latin Americans, wants to come here. Neuman writes straight against this idea: No one wanted to leave Venezuela. Your people were here—your family, your parents, your friends. It was the life you knew. There was a kind of light in Venezuela that you didn’t find anywhere else: the honeyed light of a Caracas evening, filtered through the dark green leaves of the mango trees, against the eternal backdrop of the forested Ávila mountain that stood like a guardian between the city and the sea; the intense white light of the Caribbean littoral, which makes you squint and washes the world clean of color. “MOVING...A family memoir, a collective biography, and a gripping detective story rolled into one.” —THE GUARDIAN “POWERFUL...COMPELLING …a gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma.” —THE OBSERVER “THIS REMARKABLE BOOK in itself exemplifies the significance of facing up to and finding ways of living with an almost unbearable past.” —FINANCIAL TIMES OTHER PRESS 10 www.otherpress.com Neuman writes that when he interviewed people in Maracaibo, hit harder by power outages and looting than any other city in Venezuela, what he was really covering was “the ripping apart of families.” He said it was men, “always older men,” who would weep when they told him about children forced to leave the country. Like most migration stories, Ramón’s is also a story of family separation. The focus tends to be on those who go, but it is an unusually small family in which no one is left behind. Some people are too stubborn, too sick, too immobile to migrate. Ramón’s mother at first clung fiercely to her house in Maracaibo, and then as the crisis deepened she was pinned in place by a worsening chronic illness. Her children calculated that they could not afford health insurance if they relocated her to live with one of them in either Brazil or Chile. At first, maintaining her from abroad seemed the only option. The strongest parts of Motherland are detailed descriptions of how Ramón managed this increasingly difficult financial and logistical dance. She had to arrange to send her mother nearly everything. On visits, she writes, “the only products you’d regularly see on the supermarket shelves were nonessential, random items like plastic cups or shoe polish.” Her apartment in Brazil was full of Post-it notes with bank account numbers to send money in different ways to Venezuela. Then her mother lost mobility and was confined to a wheelchair that had been nearly impossible to procure. They needed home help, and after cycling through various caretakers they found a woman named Luz from La Guajira, a region on the border with Colombia. I would have liked to know a lot more about Luz, who is Wayuu, belonging to an Indigenous community that has long suffered vicious discrimination and high levels of malnutrition. If Ramón’s family was struggling without access to resources, how and what did Luz eat? Ramón’s mother kept her food under lock and key in the bedroom, and to prepare even a coffee Luz had to open the pantry under her supervision before taking supplies down to the kitchen. But Ramón provides few details, except that Luz’s home had no electricity or running water. She does share this image, which is both striking and strikingly uncurious about the perspective of its more vulnerable figure: Luz was slight, but her arms were so strong, you could see the veins. They installed an umbrella on the back of the wheelchair to shield them from the white-hot sun in the city Mamá was determined to live in. Just five years earlier, she had moved around Maracaibo in a sedan with leather seats and a satellite phone. Now, wearing oversized sunglasses and a panama hat I had gotten for her, Mamá was being wheeled along nearly deserted streets in a metallic contraption by the ever-silent Luz. It was like something out of a dystopian colonial painting. Even though the family had enough money in the bank to pay her, wild inflation meant no one could easily get their hands on the cash. Luz would have had to go to an ATM every day for forty-eight days straight just to withdraw enough for a month’s bus fare to work. Eventually, Luz decided to follow her sister to Colombia, where she found work as a domestic servant earning wages in a more stable currency. Ramón’s mother commented, “She’s tired, and she has a point.” In 2018 Ramón’s mother died. The anticipated event came in nightmare form: a call, a phone dropped to the ground, aunt and caretaker both screaming. Ramón returned home for the burial. Her local family members fought over who would inherit her mother’s cell phone and iPad, and they looted the house for her remaining food. The bereaved daughter tried without success to swallow her anger, knowing that they were forced into the position of vultures, since they had nothing. With her mother’s death, Ramón writes, “the umbilical cord tethering me to her and to the terra-cotta floor of our house was suddenly severed.” It is impossible to remain unmoved by Ramón’s cry of mourning, her “letter of farewell to my parents and my country.” She entered her mother’s home for one final visit four months after the wake, in 2019. Maracaibo was wracked by food shortages and blackouts: This was my first time walking into that space without her there. There were no snacks, no coffee, no “Hi, sweetie.” My mother’s home was just an empty house in a country that was slowly emptying out. . The New York Review Surely Not? GRAE ME S L OAN/ S IPA USA/AP I MAGE S Christopher R. Browning Imagine that the president of the United States was a “Manchurian candidate,” an embedded foreign agent determined to wreak maximum damage on the country and limited only by the need not to act so outrageously and preposterously as to blow his cover. What are some of the things that even a Manchurian candidate would hesitate to do? What would be the limit of the self-inflicted wounds that he would dare to attempt? In foreign affairs he might hesitate to openly undermine the world order established by the US after World War II, of which it has been the major beneficiary. Surely he would not declare Canada—a country with which we have the longest nonmilitarized frontier in the world and that has been our best trading partner—a threat to national security and target it for absorption through economic extortion as our fifty-first state. Surely he would not openly hope for and encourage the dissolution of the EU. Surely he would not disparage our NATO allies and threaten one member that has been extremely supportive of the US—Denmark— with the military seizure of its overseas territory of Greenland. Surely he would not consistently denigrate the leadership of our democratic allies as weak and stupid while praising our authoritarian rivals as smart and tough, thus revealing his own political role models and authoritarian aspirations. Surely he would not cut off aid to Ukraine—which without the loss of a single American service member’s life has so taxed the military strength of Russia that it had to abandon a dictator it supported in Syria and has depleted its military stockpile to the extent that it is taking Cold War–era tanks out of mothballs—all to save a minuscule percentage of our defense budget (with most of this Ukrainian allotment spent on procuring weapons in the US in any case). Surely he would not seize the Panama Canal, where one homemade rocket fired from beyond the American reoccupation zone could take out just one lock and effectively close the canal to all traffic, thereby inflicting immense economic and strategic damage on the US. Surely he would not openly advocate the ethnic cleansing and American occupation of Gaza—policies that were prosecuted as violations of international law at Nuremberg. More likely, he might attempt to dismantle USAID, precisely because it is an extremely effective but underappreciated institution of American soft power that presents a favorable face of American expertise and compassion to the rest of the world. Having inherited by far the strongest economy in the world, how far would he dare to go in squandering American prosperity and dissipating America’s leadership in the world economy? With the historic example of the Smoot–Hawley tariffs that aggravated the Great Depression, would he dare to launch a broad and untargeted tariff war on the entire world? And then would those tariffs be announced, suspended, and reimposed in a whiplash fashion for the triple effect of raising prices due to taxing imports, discouraging domes- May 29, 2025 A helicopter taking off from the South Lawn of the White House, April 2025 tic investment due to uncertainty, and inviting widespread, systemic corruption as various companies scramble to obtain waivers? On top of that, would our Manchurian candidate threaten to politicize the Federal Reserve by firing its chairman, thereby also tanking the stock market, fanning inflation with lowered interest rates, triggering flight from the dollar, and ultimately threatening the dollar’s position as the reserve currency of the world economy and all the advantages of that position? Would he proclaim eighteenth-century mercantilism as his economic philosophy, viewing all international economic relations as bilateral, win-lose scenarios determined by who has a favorable balance of payments (based on the exchange of goods but not services)? Would he threaten foreign students, revoke their visas, and arrest and deport them arbitrarily, even though the large foreign student population attending American universities both brings foreign payments into the US and provides the opportunity to skim off the world’s top talent to energize our future economy? Would he cripple American economic vitality by attacking the remarkable synergy of the university–government– philanthropy partnership that makes the US a world leader in research? And would he simultaneously cut both taxes and much of the IRS personnel, assuring a twofold drop in tax revenues and a soaring national debt? Would he actually have us behave like Greece, Argentina, and Turkey at their economically most disastrous and foolish? Faced with the existential threat of a rapidly heating world, would he denounce all efforts to slow climate change as an alleged hoax perpetrated by elite, radical left Democrats/Communists to hinder economic growth and competitiveness? Would he defund and discourage solar and wind energy production while exhorting an economically dubious but climatically ruinous return to coal? Would he dismantle the governmentfunded institutions that both track and warn about extreme weather threats and produce the models that predict future climate developments, so that “inconvenient truths” remain ignored and we march blindly toward the inferno? W ith the Covid-19 pandemic hardly behind us and the bird flu virus rapidly mutating and infecting other animal species, would he dare to dismantle the public health system by decimating its personnel? Would he dismiss an entire cohort of experienced doctors, scientists, and other experts who work for agencies such as the CDC and FDA? Would he appoint a health and human services secretary who grasps at every discredited quack remedy (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for Covid; cod-liver oil and antibiotics for measles) while rejecting recent vaccines because they always need more testing and older vaccines (polio) because they allegedly killed more people than they saved? Would he really dare to undertake unilateral medical disarmament? Would he proclaim a campaign of retribution and extend his populist attack targeting allegedly disloyal former employees and so-called elites to include the medical, scientific, and academic professions and institutions, precisely when our country’s competitiveness in the knowledge economy is crucial? Would he, in effect, propose performing a lobotomy on the country’s capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge? And would he extend this attack even to the legal profession, not just barring law firms that have ever opposed him in past court cases from government contracts but going so far as to ban their lawyers from entering federal buildings? (Would this include washrooms in national parks?) Wouldn’t he fear appearing totally petty and ridiculous? Would he attempt quite blatantly and openly to undermine American democratic political culture? In particular, would he dispense with the rule of law and due process, even in defiance of Supreme Court decisions? Would he presume to follow the model of the Third Reich’s “protective custody” decree and allow the government to arrest and incarcerate anyone indefinitely without indictment, trial, and sentence, starting with noncitizens but then moving on to the homegrown? Would he be cynical enough to justify his actions under a rarely used wartime emergency provision of the law, though there is no war? Would he add the innovation of incarcerating the victims of such detention not in domestic concentration camps but in rent-a-cell prisons in El Salvador for life? Despite the Clinton/Gore model of a successful downsizing of the federal bureaucracy through incremental and targeted measures, would he instead empower the richest man in the world to simply close entire agencies—especially those that combine expertise with a mission to improve people’s lives—and indiscriminately fire swaths of employees from other agencies with the totally undocumented and obviously false claim that each and every one had performed poorly? Would he appoint to his cabinet and other important positions people so clearly unfit for them that he had to exert considerable political pressure on his Senate majority just to get them confirmed and then face immediate blowback from their incompetence (exhibit one being his defense secretary using insecure communications to reveal military attack plans to his wife, his brother, and a journalist)? No. Surely in a democracy that has survived for 240 years, no foreign embedded Manchurian candidate would dare risk exposing himself by dropping such a cluster bomb of obviously and predictably damaging actions and policies all at once. However, what if our Manchurian candidate president was not in fact an agent of an enemy power at all but acting entirely for his own reasons? And what if his base and his party continued to support him, no matter how disastrous his presidency was proving to be? Then we would be in very big trouble indeed. . 11 The Spy in the Jeu de Paume The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel. Laurel, 370 pp., $45.00 The word “resistance” is in heavy rotation these days, but it’s difficult to pin down its meaning in the current political landscape. For Americans of the last generation, however, it generally referred to the heroic French Resistance, which fought fascism during World War II by means of espionage and sabotage. This Resistance was not a single unified movement. It was more often the work of small cells and in some cases individuals, doing what they could to blunt the effects of authoritarianism for as long as they could. The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945, a new English translation of a postwar memoir by the French Resistance hero Rose Valland, gives us an opportunity to consider the power that an individual can have in the face of great evil. Valland, a curator and collections manager at the Jeu de Paume in Paris when the German occupiers requisitioned the museum in late 1940, practiced a quiet form of resistance. She managed to avoid being dismissed from her job, and she was thus able to observe the Nazis’ artlooting operation, surreptitiously taking notes and holding on to her secrets until the time was right. Her weapons were eavesdropping, cataloging skills, and attention to detail, and her information later aided in the recovery of tens of thousands of artworks. In the forty-five years since her death in 1980, Valland’s story has been featured in at least a dozen nonfiction books, many of them in French, and her fictionalized likeness has appeared in a few novels in English. She’s been depicted in two Hollywood films, The Train (1964), starring Burt Lancaster, with a character based on her played by Suzanne Flon,1 and The Monuments Men (2014), directed by George Clooney, in which a character based on her was portrayed by Cate Blanchett.2 By most accounts, Valland was unremarkable enough to fade into the background—a trait that served her particularly well when she began to act as a spy. Robert M. Edsel described her as “an unassuming but determined single woman with a forgettable bland style and manner” in The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (2009). He credited her with providing crucial information that led the The French curator and army captain Rose Valland, right, and the American curator and army captain Edith Standen at the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point, Germany, with recovered artworks to be returned to France, May 1946 members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the US Army—known as the Monuments Men—to the caves, salt mines, and castles where the Germans had stored looted art.3 After the war Valland waited more than a decade before recording her recollections of that period in her memoir, Le Front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945 (1961). It received scant attention at the time, but it has since been used as crucial source material for historians like Lynn H. Nicholas, the author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994). The publication of Valland’s memoir in an English translation by Ophélie Jouan may help to restore the littleknown curator to her rightful place in the history of art looting during World War II. Captain James J. Rorimer, a leading figure in the Monuments Men, wrote in 1950: The movie is based on a passage in The Art Front in which Valland describes how she worked with the Resistance to stop a trainload of looted artworks from leaving France during the Liberation. 1 A new nonfiction book about her, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, by Michelle Young, will be published by HarperOne in May. The one person who above all others enabled us to track down the official Nazi art looters and to engage intelligently in that aspect of the whole picture was Made- 2 12 Edsel is the founder of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supported the publication of Valland’s memoir. 3 moiselle Rose Valland, a rugged, painstaking and deliberate scholar. All those attributes are on display in The Art Front, which provides a thoroughgoing record of the Nazi looting operation in France. Valland’s unassuming nature and extreme modesty are also evident, however, and they seem to hinder her ability to describe, much less trumpet, her important work. She never indulges in descriptions of her feelings and rarely explains how she conducted her espionage work, rendering her account unfortunately rather dry. he Art Front begins in 1938, when the first convoy of art treasures from the Louvre departed for the Château de Chambord, one of many shipments of art from the national museums to the French countryside to protect them against a potential German air attack. But the real danger to France’s treasures, as it turned out, was not bombardment. After Germany’s invasion in May 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the head of the German Foreign Office, ordered the seizure of artworks from the homes and businesses of French Jewish collectors such as the Rothschilds and the art galleries of top dealers such as Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg, declaring them “ownerless.” At first the T artworks were taken to an annex of the German embassy in the rue de Lille in Paris, where they came under the jurisdiction of Hitler’s special task force assigned to select artworks to remove to Germany for “safekeeping”: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR ), led by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ chief ideologist. When the quantities of art arriving at the embassy far exceeded expectations, the ERR ’s representative in France, Kurt von Behr, was allotted three empty rooms at the Louvre, which also proved insufficient. Works of art “continued to pile up” at the Louvre until October 26, 1940, writes Valland. And “when an eighth convoy dropped off another load of furniture, rugs, statues, and paintings, von Behr realized the hitherto unsuspected importance of such an avalanche of riches and demanded more space.” The Jeu de Paume, which had been built in 1862 as a sporting facility for a court game similar to tennis but converted into a museum in 1909, was just the kind of location the ERR was seeking. Valland, born in 1898, had been working there as a volunteer assistant curator for nearly a decade by that point. (Although she had graduated from the École du Louvre, as a woman she was not eligible for a paid position.) Von Behr, whom Valland describes as “tall and good-looking,” arrived in full dress uniform and a cap tipped sideways to throw a shadow over his face and hide a glass eye. The Germans immediately attempted to dismiss the museum’s French staff, but, Valland writes, “I did not think that this order applied to me. My intention was set; I decided to try to stay.” Unbeknownst to many of her contacts among the occupiers, she understood German. The Art Front describes the arrival of German trucks laden with art, accompanied by military escorts, that “quickly transformed the atmosphere” of the museum: “Troops from the Luftwaffe carried in the crates and banged them around bluntly.” The unpacking of four hundred crates proceeded at such a pace that “inevitably, some were dropped on the floor. Soldiers stepped on others, but the order was to go as fast as possible! A magnificent portrait of a woman by Santerre sustained a long tear.” It had been stolen from the gallery of André Seligmann, who had fled to New York with his family some months earlier. This striking historical moment passes all too quickly in Valland’s telling. What was she thinking as she watched all these seized artworks fill the Jeu de Paume’s halls? Which pictures did she see pass by? Was she afraid? She says she doesn’t know exactly why she was allowed to remain: Probably because of some mundane conversation that followed, authorization was granted to me by this warlord [von Behr] to stay on at my former museum, which had now become his fiefdom. Quickly Valland realized that there was to be an exhibition: Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, The New York Review NAT IONAL GAL LE RY OF A RT ARCHI V ES , WAS HI NGTON, D.C. Nina Siegal was coming from Berlin to survey the spoils. Soon he also assumed authority over the ERR from Rosenberg and von Behr, in order to enrich himself and decorate his country estate, Carinhall, with his favorite artworks. It is at this point that Valland’s espionage work must have begun, although she doesn’t specify in her memoir. As one of the few French civil servants with access to the Jeu de Paume, she was uniquely positioned to observe the Nazi theft of art from Jewish collections and attempts to rob national collections, and to notate when and where the works were shipped. Before von Behr requisitioned the Jeu de Paume, the director of the French National Museums, Jacques Jaujard, had tried to negotiate with German officials to create “dual inventories,” one in German and one in French, as a record of all the works that moved through the ERR depot. Unsurprisingly, once installed, the Germans allowed no one from the French side to make an inventory. Valland kept hers in secret: “In the meantime, the circle closed so tightly around the Jeu de Paume that I did not appear to be anything other than a hostage.” illuminate through footnotes. These do aid the reader to some degree, but not entirely; on many occasions, Valland’s summaries of ostensibly dramatic moments are frustratingly meager. She mentions, for example, that the Germans “caught me in the act once, when I was in the process of deciphering addresses,” without providing any context or details about the addresses in question. In the next sentence, all is resolved: “During the altercation that followed, I was able to convince them that it was not what it looked like.” On the same page, Valland notes that the German authorities were planning to liquidate her. “I was supposed to be taken to Germany and then killed as soon as we crossed the border,” she writes again without giving any indication of how this affected her. The footnote explains that she learned this “during a legal confrontation” with the ERR member and Nazi art dealer Bruno Lohse in 1950. Valland records Jaujard’s efforts to prevent the loss of art from French museums when Göring proposed art “exchanges.” According to Valland, Jaujard handled a tense conflict admirably and “managed to cap the number of exchanges requested by the Germans at ten.” In a particularly exhaustive section, she describes the wrangling over Gregor Erhart’s sixteenth-century wooden sculpture Saint Mary Magdalene from the Louvre. It eventually slipped through Jaujard’s hands and ended up in Germany. The Art Front picks up its pace as the Germans become increasingly nervous about Allied advances. In July 1943 Val- land witnessed a bonfire of some five or six hundred modernist paintings that the Nazis had deemed “degenerate” and not valuable enough to sell: The fire was easily spotted in the interior garden of the Jeu de Paume Museum, where a jagged pyramid of frames and stretchers crackled in the flames. One could see by the light of the flames images that then disappeared in the fire. One craves more information about the “images” Valland saw flickering in the smoke, or at least the names of some of the paintings by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró that were lost that day. A mere ten pages describe Valland’s intrepid postwar work recovering looted R eading her account, I wanted to find out when, where, and how she operated as a spy. Did she hide in corners or broom closets to jot down her notes? How did she present herself to Nazi officials in order to secure their trust? Did she slip out to deliver her valuable information to Jaujard at the Louvre? She doesn’t answer these questions in her book. Given its dispassionate objectivity, one wonders if it even makes sense to apply the term “memoir” to it. Valland shares nothing about her private life; it’s as if she lived only in the Jeu de Paume. (In her 2016 book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation, Anne Sebba writes that after the war Valland lived with Joyce Helen Heer, a British translator and academic who worked at the US embassy in Paris.) For a memoir, her use of the pronoun “I” is very scant. In a translator’s note, Jouan acknowledges that one of the complexities of conveying Valland’s meaning in English is this self-effacing quality. Valland adopted a “neutral and factual writing style” as a strategy “to limit the backlash” she may have anticipated while writing her memoir in the 1950s—a time when many of the major figures in the story were still alive—and she knew she was writing for “an informed public.” Jouan describes that era as a “time of Franco-German reconciliation,” suggesting that Valland’s depictions of German activities would be scrutinized by “both her museum colleagues and the former Nazis whom she had spied on.” Many of those figures, even by the 1950s, had faced few legal consequences for their actions during the war; some had been required to go through denazification procedures, and some had returned to the art trade. Thus Valland’s focus was on objectivity. She positioned herself, Jouan writes, “not only as a witness but also as a historian of the 1938 to 1945 period,” reporting on events she did not experience firsthand but amply documented. The original French text was “filled with innuendos and figures of speech,” explains Jouan, which she attempted to May 29, 2025 The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers bids fond farewell to the Class of 2024–2025 Oleg Budnitskii Heather Clark Joseph Giovannini James Goodman Isabella Hammad Jochen Hellbeck Leslie Jamison Iman Mersal Jennifer L. Morgan Eric Orner Tracey Rose Peyton Patricio Pron Sara Roy Abigail Santamaria Emma Tarlo ͽ …and welcomes with pleasure the Class of 2025–2026 Dan Bouk Vajra Chandrasekera Brad Fox M. Leona Godin Gregg Hecimovich Colin Jones Aparna Kapadia Rowena Kennedy-Epstein Jordan Kisner Katie Kitamura Raven Leilani David Mills Benjamin Moser Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk Krithika Varagur The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows. 13 art. She was appointed secretary to the hastily formed French Commission de Récupération Artistique, and she managed to convince Rorimer and his Monuments Men to track the stolen treasures into Bavaria, using a list of depots she had meticulously collected. She then joined the French First Army, quickly rising to the rank of captain. Valland led missions to recover troves of art piled high at Buxheim monastery, Neuschwanstein castle, and Kurt von Behr’s castle at Benz, where the former ERR chief had committed suicide amid his spoils. (“His last dandy gesture was to drink the poison with 1918 vintage champagne,” Valland notes.) By the end of 1945 more than 1,400 crates filled with art were returned to the Jeu de Paume, in large part due to Valland’s espionage. She is credited with saving somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 artworks. For her work, France named her an officer of the Légion d’honneur and awarded her the Médaille de la Résistance. “I felt a sense of responsibility to these collections,” she writes. “During the war, I had devoted myself entirely to gathering information regarding their fate that—I hoped—would enable their recovery and facilitate their restitution.” Her report from the front lines of the art battle helps us understand the debt of gratitude that art lovers and historians owe her—even if she may have been too modest. . Doing Their Own Research Hari Kunzru Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. PublicAffairs, 368 pp., $30.00 Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home. Pluto, 212 pp., $19.95 (paper; to be published in July) In August 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested that Covid-19 could be a “plandemic,” “part of a sinister scheme.” In July 2023 he was recorded telling dinner companions that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” whereas “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Vaccine research, he said at a panel discussion, could well be responsible for many major pathogens, including HIV and the Spanish flu of 1918. Kennedy is part of a cohort of medical influencers who gained prominence early in the pandemic, peddling miracle cures such as bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and the livestock dewormer ivermectin, or offering “natural” or “alternative” ways to beat the virus, through diet or exercise or competitively priced supplements. The “antivaxxer” subculture that made him a celebrity grew powerful in the late 1990s, following a panic about the MMR vaccine and autism initiated by a subsequently retracted paper in The Lancet. Participants came to consider themselves freedom fighters, freethinkers opposing tyranny. When the pandemic started, many people, scared by the news and already suspicious of the medical establishment, found the threat to freedom of Covid-19 mitigation policies even more alarming than Covid-19. The pandemic appeared to them a kind of epidemiological Reichstag fire, an emergency fabricated as a pretext for an intensification of government control, on either a national or a global scale. Fears of a “world government” or “new world order” have been bubbling under the American cultural surface for a very long time, at least since the growth of the system of international organizations that followed World War I. Villains such as the UN or the Trilateral Commission are sometimes “revealed” as vehicles for a global totalitarianism identified with the reign of the Antichrist prophesied in the book of Revelation. 14 Illustration by Paul Sahre During the first year of the pandemic this long-standing complex of conspiratorial thinking was reactivated by powerful images of authoritarianism in the news—Chinese government workers in hazmat suits transporting the infected to isolation centers, police drones hovering above English hill walkers. The mask was seen as a symbol of compliance, a muzzle worn by “sheeple” who had already surrendered and were possibly even under a sinister form of mind control, robbed of their autonomy by some ingredient in the experimental drugs the authorities were so keen to pump into the populace. In Kennedy’s opinion, the development of a Covid-19 vaccine was “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” With his elevation, conspiracy—which usually presents the government as a distant object of obsession or fantasy—has become governmental logic. I f you have ever found your way to the part of the Internet where people “do their own research,” you may have encountered the art of David Dees. He once freelanced as a commercial illustrator for clients including Dis- ney and Sesame Street, but his career faltered in the mid-Aughts after he contracted a serious illness that he attributed to cadmium poisoning from paint. After a spell in Sweden, during which he came to believe he was being targeted by sinister forces he identified as “Zionists,” the CIA , or agents of the agrochemical company Monsanto, he became a recluse in rural Oregon, treating his ailment with meditation and Reichian electrical “frequencies” as he produced a wildly popular body of baroque and frankly paranoid “political art” (his own term). Dees’s instantly familiar Photoshop aesthetic is lurid and hectic to the point of absurdity. Politicians become bulging-eyed grotesques. State storm troopers menace crying children. Black helicopters hover in the air. Each frame is busy with visual violence, batteries of jabbing needles, rivers of glowing radioactive sludge. Dees died of cancer in May 2020, just as the pandemic was getting underway. Consequently he made very few images of what surely must have felt like the end of days, the sum of all his fears. His work defines what might be called the New Weird Fusionism, a successor ideology to the old Fusionism that powered the Republican revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. That Fusionism, which emerged from William F. Buck- ley Jr.’s circle at the National Review, was a union of social conservatism with political and economic libertarianism, and it proved to be a recipe for electoral success. The New Weird Fusionism combines ideas from the conspiracy cultures of the Christian right and the countercultural left, and it too has forged an electoral coalition, fueling the populism that has brought Donald Trump to power for a second time. One Dees image, probably produced in the 2010s, can serve as a key to the New Weird Fusionist worldview. Like most of his work, it is a collage made with digital editing tools. It shows a kind of split screen. On the left side is a dystopia, a gray hellscape of brutalist tower blocks overlooking a tax preparer’s office and a pharmacy studded with security cameras, offering “ F DA A P P R OV E D DR UG S . . . P S YC H MEDS, PAIN KILLERS, MMR VACCINES .” Outside are a woman who may be a prostitute, an obese man on a mobility scooter, and a middle-aged gender nonconformist with a male-coded mustache, conservative glasses, a skirt, and heels. Overhead the sky is gridded by chemtrails, a surveillance drone, and choppers. Dominating the frame is a threatening black-clad figure, a police officer in riot gear, carrying a Taser. On his body armor he has a patch saying “BAPHOMET ,” which is the name of the deity that the Knights Templar were accused of worshiping when they faced the Inquisition in 1307. Baphomet figures prominently in contemporary Western occultism, notably in the iconography of the Satanic Temple, an organization that campaigns against the encroachment of Christian ideas into civic life and has petitioned for the erection of Baphomet statues on the grounds of several state capitols. The tallest tower on the skyline is marked “FEDERAL RESERVE .” On its flank is the Star of David. The right side of the image depicts a contrastingly colorful utopia. Its store has a sign saying “ORGANICS ,” and instead of a pill and a syringe, there’s a picture of an ear of corn. There are no looming towers, only trees and a single groovy parametric building, its biomorphic shape topped by a flourishing roof garden. Cats sun themselves. Sunflowers bloom. In the blue sky are a paraglider and a distant contrail. The store, with its baskets of nutritious fruit and its sign promising “SUPER HEALTH FOODS ,” is surrounded by a park where children are playing in a tree house. The scene is dominated by a family: a man, a woman, and a little girl. They’re dressed casually. The dad is squarejawed and clean-shaven, the mom mildly The New York Review crunchy, wearing a scoop-neck T-shirt and a turquoise necklace—a pair of unthreateningly attractive white Americans joined together to procreate across the old culture war divide. The message is hardly subtle. In the bad world “the Jews” are controlling the money, using satanic RoboCop enforcers to promote ill health, immorality, alienation, and gender confusion. In the good world a natural balance of vitamins and herbs promotes community, harmony, and leisured prosperity, with the (presumably goyish) nuclear family at its center. Dees combines established antisemitic tropes most often associated with the Christian right with two other elements, both central to the 1960s counterculture: a libertarian distrust of government and an aestheticized vision of natural harmony. I t may seem surprising that organic food would feature so centrally as a counterforce to the emergence of a totalitarian world government, but the “health and wellness” scene is now a major feeder for conspiracy culture. In 2011, in a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the now widely used term “conspirituality,” which they identified as a synthesis of “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the maledominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).” The resulting ideology has two core tenets: “A secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and . . . humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness.” According to Ward and Voas, the New Agers and the conspiracists share three common beliefs: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. For New Agers the stars control our destiny, there is an occult or hidden world populated by hard-tosense entities like spirits or aliens— and of course, we’re all one, if only we would realize it. For the conspiracists the hidden hand of the Illuminati is everywhere, the truth is being kept from us by sinister forces, and every image on the pinboard is linked by red thread. Interconnectivity may be a holistic nostrum, but it’s also constitutive of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” of American politics. Whether you believe the agents of the hidden power whose presence you sense are angels or men wearing black suits and earpieces may largely be a question of disposition. In early 2020 a group of researchers was preparing a podcast and reached out to Ward and Voas. As Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker relate in Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, they discovered that while Voas was a conventional scholar of religion, the core of the paper was written by Ward, whose “aim in studying conspirituality was not academic.” Indeed, she was a believer in what she called “conscious conspiracy” and wanted to foster what she considered to be a “global awakening.” By 2014 Ward had become a central promoter of what came to be known as the Hampstead hoax, a moral panic that led to 175 people in the leafy North London suburb being falsely accused of satanic abuse. A social media May 29, 2025 profile suggested she was now living in Suriname, though the writers were unable to secure an interview. Ward’s radicalization demonstrates the subterranean relationship between mindfulness and paranoia, which facilitates traffic across some unlikely borders. She and Voas date the emergence of conspirituality as an Internet phenomenon to the mid-1990s, but the links between America’s conspiratorial right and the left-coded New Age and health and wellness cultures go back much further. In a new book called, bluntly, Fascist Yoga, the British artist and writer Stewart Home argues that postural yoga (the exercise practice familiar in the West) owes as much to Western physical culture—and the Western esotericism out of which so much modern conspiracism flows—as it does to any Indian tradition. What is usually called “yoga” has its philosophical roots in a kind of ersatz Hinduism peddled by mystics such as Madame Blavatsky and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and in forms of exercise promoted by the European physical culture movement. Home is a veteran of antifascist cultural struggles in Britain. Since the early 1980s he has been involved in many underground movements, and he has often made a point of confronting right-wing infiltration of subcultural music and art scenes—producing, for instance, meticulously detailed blogs analyzing the mainstreaming of fascist tropes in industrial and neofolk music. His writing about yoga is intended less as an academic study than as an attempt to educate practitioners about the influence of fascism on their culture. He tells a series of biographical stories showing how at various points, from the early twentieth century to the 1970s, which he takes as an arbitrary cutoff point, Western yoga existed in uncomfortably close proximity to various strands of extreme right-wing thought. When yoga became popular in the United States after World War I, legislation was in force that prevented Indians from immigrating to the US on eugenic grounds; American practitioners appear to have been at pains to defend the ancient wisdom they taught against any association with racial backwardness. In a 1933 book, Eastern Philosophy for Western Minds, the journalist and yoga popularizer Hamish McLaurin found it necessary to reassure his readers: One reason why the truths contained in the old Sanskrit writings are not more widely known and highly regarded in the West is that they have so long been identified with a people who differ from us in color. Because the Indo-Aryan texts were treasured and preserved in India, it has been taken for granted that they were the product of a dark-skinned race. This, of course, is not true. They are, and always have been—from a racial standpoint—the legitimate heritage of the peoples now in the ascendancy throughout Europe and the New World. Yoga, in other words, has nothing to do with present-day Indians: The millions of futile, irrational, child-like beings observed by the modern traveller in India must resemble the people who compiled the Vedic texts about as much as a group of colored stevedores resembles the teaching staff of Carnegie Institute of Technology. The mystical cult of Aryanism that emerged out of the fascist avant-garde in this period had, of course, as its chief antagonist the rootless cosmopolitan Jew. McLaurin lamented that “Europeans of Aryan descent” had been “governing their conduct according to a formula originally intended for the Semitic peoples of the Near East.” M uch of the faddish fitness culture promoted by the contemporary right-wing “manosphere” is recognizably indebted to the antimodernist Völkisch movement of the early twentieth century. Today’s raw-meat-eating, perineum-tanning, sperm-retaining “high-T” influencers frequently cross the line into far-right politics, whether it’s the clownish Nordic chest-beating of Marcus “the Golden One” Follin (“Honor the Gods, Love your Woman, Defend your Country”) or the babyoiled Nietzschean flexing of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonym of a Romanian American political scientist who exhorts his followers to revolt against the modern world in favor of an aristocratic lifestyle of “sun and steel” and Darwinian sexual competition. The obvious question poses itself: If the way of the warrior is so superior, why did alpha males fall away from it? Jews, migrants, soy, seed oils, bossy women, and low-testosterone “bugmen” are to blame. The Männerbund is, as ever, encircled by the mob. Perhaps the affinity between a purity-obsessed physical culture and right-wing traditionalism would be less politically significant were it not for America’s long-standing belief in the transformational power of the mind. The New Thought movement of the nineteenth century was founded on the proposition that sickness was caused by negative mental states, and correcting them could bring about a cure. Through Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, Spiritualism, and other branches of what William James called the “mind-cure movement,” the notion that human biology and perhaps even the entire physical world exist downstream of an individual’s mental state grew in popularity and gradually became attached to a variety of projects, notably moneymaking. From Napoleon Hill’s 1937 best seller Think and Grow Rich to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), generations of Americans were encouraged to believe that the acquisition of wealth was primarily a matter of adopting the correct mental attitude. One young man who took heed of this was Donald Trump, who attended Marble Collegiate Church in Midtown Manhattan, where Peale was the pastor. Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding, and his influence can be felt in Trump’s relentless exaggeration (or “affirmation,” if you prefer) of everything from his personal wealth to the size of the crowds at his rallies. This is perhaps not simple mendacity but a product of the belief that fact-checking, as a form of “negativity,” will actively bring about bad outcomes. There is no such thing as constructive criticism: it’s always an attack. Trump feels like a billionaire, so he is one. He feels that whatever he’s currently pitching is the best, the greatest, like you’ve never seen before, not just because he’s a good salesman but because asserting the greatness of something is a way of making it so. Inheritors of Peale, like Rhonda Byrne, the author of the self-help manual The Secret (2006), promote the biblical notion that “whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive,” advice that sent Byrne’s book to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and kept it there for two hundred weeks. Denizens of 4Chan’s /pol/ message board believed in 2016 that they had “memed” Trump into the presidency. Evangelical pastors believe more or less the same thing, with different theological justification. New Age liberals are known for manifesting their intentions and trying to be the change they want to see in the world. Crypto investors “hodl” (hold) for dear life and hope to send their favorite token to the moon. The traffic between belief and reality has never been so heavy, and in the case of new financial phenomena like crypto and so-called meme stocks, fundamentals are irrelevant in the face of sentiment. In the markets at least, the mind-cure movement can do what it claims, drawing reality toward itself. T ake this pervasive culture of magical thinking, add in fears of an enemy’s hidden hand, dissolve the mixture in the radically flattened media environment of today’s Internet, which rewards provocation and reinforces bias, and a phenomenon like QA non becomes not just comprehensible but almost inevitable. Its promise that the evil child abusers of the deep state will imminently be brought to justice is legible as a version of the “paradigm shift” of conspirituality. This is a mode common to Christian millenarianism (the empire is satanic, Jesus is coming), New Age spirituality (this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius), and believers in the transhumanist “singularity,” the point of technical acceleration beyond which the future is impossible to predict or control. The New Weird Fusionism mobilizes all these beliefs, allowing participants to role-play through our polarized present as superior spirits experiencing the thrill of the collapse of the established order of things. Becoming “aware” or “awakened” or merely “woke” is a motor for fundamental transformation, a shift in personal consciousness that is also a shift in objective reality. If you “follow the white rabbit,” as QA non urges, you will find a hidden truth so fiendishly concealed that it cannot be understood without a huge common effort. Now you are part of something. Something big. Of course, you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you. What is the reasonable reaction to pervasive surveillance, a degraded media environment rife with bad actors, a predatory for-profit medical system, Gilded Age levels of wealth inequality, and a government that has a history of covert experimentation on unwitting subjects? We’re more than half a century past the Kennedy assassination and the revelations of the Church Committee, and we have no reason to believe that anything has seriously been reformed. Conspiracy theories are ridiculous not because they don’t respond to real problems but because they naively reduce complexity 15 to a personal scale. To see the world in conspiratorial terms is to refuse to acknowledge that agency is often diffuse and that intractable problems are usually so not because sinister figures in a boardroom are preventing us from seeing the truth but because those problems have causes that don’t easily offer up simple solutions like busting in and arresting the bad guys. Perhaps the weirdest thing about the New Weird Fusionism, the aspect that may be hardest for the rationally inclined to accept, is that it’s not an aberration, easily dismissible as a popular delusion. It’s the epistemological foundation of the new administration. Under Kennedy pseudoscience is in the ascendant. We have measles outbreaks in eight states and a CDC that hesitates to promote vaccination. The development of a promising pancreatic cancer treatment is under threat because it is based on mRNA technology. Measures are being taken to remove fluoride from drinking water, and researchers are being directed to look again at the debunked link between vaccines and autism. Under Trump, government agencies are destroying or rendering inaccessible data sets vital to climate and public health research. State lawmakers are seeking to ban nonexistent “chemtrails.” The political push to bring sources of “objective” information under explicit ideological control may itself be part of a broader cultural change in the way we approach the already quaint notion of consensus reality. As the world becomes ever more technologically mediated, we experience it as labile, untrustworthy. Some of us are old enough to remember when the camera never lied. Now we approach each image with suspicion. Up until around 2016 social media feeds, where a majority of Americans now find at least some of their news, were relatively un- complicated chronological affairs. Now they are governed by opaque and mutable algorithms, and the experience of being online increasingly induces paranoia. Why am I being shown this? Why aren’t my posts being seen by others? One of the less appealing promises of AI is the production of disinformation at scale: fake people, with fake faces and voices, offering up fake opinions and arguing with one another. You could be the only real human in the chat room. As we try to make sense of the world through the new digital fog, paranoia might actually be the beginning of an adaptive strategy. . Zionism Without Zion Alice Kaplan resists hierarchy, so that a speech by Herzl might be followed by a headline from the Huntington Long Islander or a cameo appearance by Stefan Zweig or John Dos Passos. Some of the quotations are only a line long, others a halfpage. It takes a while to get used to a text in which there is a wide gutter of white space in the left or right margin of every page, with only a title or a proper name to remind us that the perspective of the story never stops shifting: Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $32.00 Theodor Herzl, the “founding dreamer” of a Jewish homeland, once wrote that if his conception of Zion were never translated into reality, at least it might inspire a novel with the title The Promised Land. The Broken Promised Land might be a more fitting title for Melting Point, Rachel Cockerell’s jigsaw puzzle of a family history and her discovery of its roots in the Zionist experiment. She didn’t set out to write about early Zionism and its discontents. As she explains in her brief preface, the book was originally planned as a memoir focused on the sprawling Edwardian mansion at 22 Mapesbury Road in North London, acquired at the start of World War I by her greatgrandfather David Jochelman, about whom she knew little beyond his name and the gloomy oil portrait of him still hanging in the living room. There her grandmother Fanny, married to the very British Hugh Cockerell, and her great-aunt Sonia, married to the very Zionist Yehuda “Leva” Benari, raised their children in charming bohemian chaos, until in 1951 the Benaris traded the chilblains of London winters for the warmth of the Israeli sun. That separation accounts for the “melting point” in the family’s Jewish identity, Cockerell writes: I am always aware of a road that forked when Sonia left for Israel and Fanny stayed in England, or perhaps earlier, when Fanny married an Englishman and Sonia married a Russian Jew, creating two paths that have been inching further and further apart ever since. But before that fateful separation, there was the man in the oil portrait. All Cockerell’s family could tell her about him was that he had been some kind of businessman. It didn’t take much more than a Google search to find thousands of references to David Jochelman in the international press. He was born near Vilna, abandoned his Hasidic practice and an unhappy first 16 C. H. Abbott: Dressed in the picturesque garb of the land from which they came, they marched down the gangplank, faced the authorities, opened their baggage for inspection, and were assembled. B’nai B’rith Messenger: Nearly all were Russian Jews and their homes ranged from the southern boundaries of the empire to the dreary frozen wastes of Siberia. Houston Daily Post: To a stranger the landing of a load of immigrants is a strange sight. Rachel Cockerell; illustration by Sophia Martineck marriage, and pursued a doctorate in philosophy in Switzerland. He began to move in Zionist intellectual circles and befriended Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish playwright famous for his American drama of happy assimilation, The Melting Pot (1908)—another inspiration for Cockerell’s title. And so the subject of her book pivoted, with Mapesbury Road becoming a tangent to the story of Jochelman’s work as an assistant to Zangwill, who left the mainstream Zionist fold to promote the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO ). The territorialists recognized that a homeland for the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe couldn’t come too soon. If Eretz Israel wasn’t an option, they’d look elsewhere—in Africa, in Australia, in the Americas. Cockerell had uncovered a fantastic story, yet she was dissatisfied as she began to write. It felt as if her twentyfirst-century perspective was warping her observations. Her editor agreed. He pointed out after reading an early draft that she’d used “said” 764 times and “wrote” 471 times. Might there be another way to shape her material? In her preface, she acknowledges turning to George Saunders, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a novel organized as a compendium of quotations. She was inspired by the way Saunders described his process: he would type up every description he could find of the scene or event he wanted to convey. Then he’d cut up the passages and rearrange them until he discovered “which combination gave off the most energy.” He ended up inventing many of the quotations, but he doesn’t say which ones. Cockerell, adapting this procedure, invents nothing. Her own search for energy takes on a world of real people—including her family—as they turn around and around the question of a Jewish homeland. Cockerell, like Saunders, quotes, and like Saunders she doesn’t tell her reader what she thinks of the quotes. She channels grand speeches and on-the-ground reporting, she favors outrageous voices, and she The beauty of the method is that authority remains plural and the tensions and alliances among the voices are visible at every step along the way. There is an ethics to Cockerell’s decision to withhold her own opinion, to reveal the disagreements, and, as the saying goes, to “let history unfold.” There is also, inevitably, a dodge. But what a relief, where such a complicated story is concerned, to have a break from the tyranny of opinion, to be transported into a world of sheer potential. Still, I couldn’t help but read Melting Point with burning questions. What does she think about what happened? What went right or wrong? I ’ve rarely read a book’s acknowledgments with so much pent-up curiosity about the author and her intentions. Cockerell thanks her parents, “both documentary makers, whose strong opinions on the correct and incorrect ways of telling a story have seeped into this book.” Melting Point has been praised for its original approach to nonfiction, but Cockerell might be the first to say that she was working in the time-honored tradition The New York Review of documentary film and television. A filmmaker asks the questions, but the final cut often retains only the answers, so that people appear to be speaking completely of their own volition. That technique gives Melting Point its evocative powers: the author/director remains backstage, cutting and pasting, seeking the most vivid descriptions, restoring the grain of voices. The result is a book that sings with narrative energy. The World Zionist Congresses at Basel are recreated in dramatic detail, down to the top hats and morning suits, until the fateful gathering of 1903 when Herzl is booed off the stage for suggesting that there might be an alternative to resettlement in Palestine. He wins a Pyrrhic victory with a vote authorizing an exploration of Uganda (actually Kenya) as a transitional homeland. The Russian Jews, fervent opponents of the plan, roll on the floor to mourn the forgotten Holy Land. The passages on the search for a Zion that isn’t Palestine—in Angola and Libya, in Mexico and Paraguay—filled me with a strange kind of wishfulness: What if they had gone there instead? Michael Chabon explored this fantasy to great comic effect in his speculative fiction The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), about a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska after the Jews are kicked out of Palestine in the war of 1948. Already in the first decade of the twentieth century there were many reasons to object to resettlement in Palestine. The Ottomans carefully controlled Jewish migration there—they were contemptuous of Europeans, and to them Russian Jews were still Europeans. Zangwill thought it would be impossible for the Jews ever to live in peace in Palestine. Some religious Jews thought it was blasphemy to return to Zion before the arrival of the Messiah. But it was clear after the pogrom in 1903 at Kishinev in the southwestern Russian Empire that there needed to be an immediate escape route. Territorialism, the movement led by Zangwill and Jochelman after Herzl’s death, wanted Zionism without Zion. These leaders never gave up on the idea that Jews needed a homeland—in Zangwill’s words, “Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land”— but they were willing to look beyond the small strip of land nestled between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. In the search for that other place, however, geopolitical reality rushed in with a vengeance. The scholar of Jewish history Derek Penslar’s formulation is helpful here: Zionism was both a colonial project of occupation and a liberation movement demanding a national home for an oppressed people who had no home of their own.* The British government, in the guise of a good deed but with the intention of defending its empire against the Boers to the south, offered up a slice of East Africa, which The Jewish Chronicle in 1905 described in full Tarzan mode: Here we have an equatorial land with European features. It is a white man’s land set in the heart of the tropics. It is a quaint country, too, where a jam-pot is a favourite form of ear-ring, where a lion *See his Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers University Press, 2023). May 29, 2025 calmly lifts a first-class passenger out of his carriage and walks off with him; and where telegraph wires are in danger of being stolen by vain native ladies for purposes of fashionable decorations, or of being injured by monkeys who persist in swinging on the wires and by giraffes, who will cross the line without making allowance for the length of their necks. But these are only minor troubles. Not the least of those troubles was opposition to the plan from the English colonists in Nairobi, who wanted colonists of their own race—i.e., not Jews. The territorialists looked as far as Mesopotamia, which turned out to be a no-longer-fertile crescent. In every place they considered there was too much wind, or not enough water, or too much political strife. Zangwill lost hope: “I believe less and less that the required territory will be found. We have knocked on all the most promising doors and everywhere we received the answer: ‘too late, too late, ye cannot enter now.’” A ssisted by Jochelman and with considerable funding from the German American banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, Zangwill finally settled on a most unlikely place: Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas. Its port already welcomed a shipping line straight from the German port of Bremen, the point of departure since the 1880s for Jews fleeing the Russian Empire. Galveston had no large Jewish elite who might be hostile to impoverished newcomers, but it did have an enthusiastic rabbi willing to help. And it was rebuilding from a devastating hurricane in 1900; opportunities abounded. Jochelman was charged with cajoling the Jews of Russia to make the trip, and Henry Cohen, the local rabbi, met them as they disembarked. Some 10,000 immigrants were channeled through Galveston and either remained there or continued on to more distant points, from Minnesota to Nebraska. In the fall of 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Galveston immigration bureau closed. Jochelman, after his years of wandering, settled in England. Melting Point might have succumbed to Victorian rhetorical excess if it weren’t for an unexpected member of the Jochelman family whose voice lends the book a refreshing intimacy. It’s a bit of a shaggy-dog story but essential to understanding Mapesbury Road. Jo Atkinson is the daughter of Emmanuel Joseph Jochelman, David Jochelman’s son from his first marriage in Lithuania. David escorted Emmanuel Joseph across the ocean and left him in New York at age fourteen—a fact difficult for a modern parent to digest—while he continued his activism as the territorialists’ Russian representative in the US and England. Emmanuel Joseph grew up to make a name for himself in the New York theater with an artsy nom de plume, Emjo Basshe, and married Doris Elisa Troutman, an actress from North Carolina. Basshe died when Jo was only nine. After growing up in the South with her mother’s family, she made her own life in New York, forever curious about the world of the father she had lost and the grandfather she’d never known. After World War II, as families were making contact with lost relatives, Jo wrote to Mapesbury Road. David Jochelman had been dead for nearly a decade, but his second wife, Tamara Bach, was alive. The cousins sent her a steamship ticket and made room for her in the rambling house. She stayed in England for two years. Fifty years later it was Rachel Cockerell’s turn to find her half-aunt Jo Atkinson, alive and vigorous in Canada at eighty-nine. Before Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted, they spent every Sunday morning on the phone. Cockerell taped the conversations and edited them with great skill. In a book with so many distinct voices, I was captivated above all by Jo’s. Given the absence of a central narrator in Melting Point, she’s the closest we come to omniscience, explaining the absolute incompatibility of her parents—the bohemian New York Jewish intellectual and the southern belle— and sharing her observations about the various characters and relationships in the house on Mapesbury Road. The rhythm of cut-and-pasted newspaper clippings fades away; what’s conveyed instead is the extraordinary friendship of the author and her long-lost relative. elting Point is a disarming book. Cockerell may be absent from the body of the text, but in her preface and her acknowledgments she reveals more than most authors about the challenges she faced and the surprises she encountered in its making. We imagine her during the Covid years, confined to her couch and surfing for hours through digitized newspapers, as David Jochelman, the ITO , and Emjo Basshe all come into focus. In the end, she identified most of all with a man to whom she had no family relation whatsoever—Jochelman’s closest associate, the charismatic, elegantly homely Israel Zangwill. Cockerell began to see herself physically in him, sloppy and badly dressed, something always falling out of his pockets. With Zangwill in particular, she met her stated goal: to create “something that [feels] more like a novel than a history.” Melting Point was published in England in February 2024, four months after the Hamas attack of October 7 and the subsequent Israeli retaliation— the start of a cycle of horror that has put Israel at the boiling point of controversy. Cockerell avoids the question that will likely occur to most of her readers today: What if Zion had been established somewhere else? And because it was established in Palestine, what next? Can the liberation movement be salvaged from the colonial project? With an ear for the absurd, Cockerell is drawn to sources scrambling to find the right analogy. For example, the Labour Party politician Henry Norman Smith wrote in the Nottingham Journal in September 1948, “It must, they say, be Palestine, ‘for historical reasons.’ Red Indians might, with equal energy, demand the title deeds of all Manhattan!” Was this an important point of view and a recurring analogy, or an eccentric one? When quotations are chosen for narrative excitement (Saunders’s “energy”) rather than for exemplarity, there’s no way of knowing. We delight in the story without fully understanding the history. While Cockerell offers sympathetic time travel, the tone shifts in the final pages of the book. She might have stopped with the death of David Jo- M chelman or even the end of the Galveston experiment. Instead she follows her great-aunt Sonia as she leaves Mapesbury Road for Jerusalem with her husband, Leva Benari. In Israel, Benari was the director of an institute named for his hero Vladimir Jabotinsky, the proponent of so-called Revisionist Zionism, which endorsed maximal expansionism—an Israel on both sides of the Jordan River, walled off from its neighbors. His credo was the very opposite of Jochelman and Zangwill’s territorialism. Melting Point ends with a description of the Nakba, though none of the book’s characters use the word. The descriptions from newspapers in Manchester and Coventry and London and from The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore are every bit as horrendous as the press accounts of the pogrom at Kishinev that Cockerell quotes three hundred pages earlier: “For six months a host of 800,000 strong has been trudging, starving and dying, across the sands of the Middle East.” “Jews should understand better than anybody what it means to be a refugee: and that they should remain passive in face of the tragedy ought to be unthinkable.” “Bewildered and beaten, the Palestine Arabs are asking: ‘Where can we go? What can we do?’” She quotes her cousin Judy, one of the Benari daughters, who saw the abandoned houses but didn’t understand their meaning: I was eleven years old, I’d just come to this strange country, and I was learning another language. I never gave them much thought. . . . But it’s obvious that the Palestinians didn’t leave, they were thrown out. Who would want to leave their home? This is Judy’s voice but also, by inference, a critique of the Zionist project from within Israel. Cockerell gives the last word to her father, Michael, who never quite accepted the departure of his cousins: “They belonged with us in Mapesbury Road, not in this exotic place called Israel. So they’d be back. We knew they’d be back.” The right of return to London NW 2. Melting Point is a deeply satisfying book, and a sorrowful one. Cockerell has pulled the threads of her family story together, restoring forgotten histories and measuring losses. Everywhere in her story are crises of transmission. It’s astonishing how easily David Jochelman’s Galveston adventure was forgotten. And although we learn that her grandmother Fanny loved to run the Seder on Mapesbury Road, her Zionist great-uncle Leva was indifferent to the rituals. Seventy years later Cockerell celebrates her first Passover and her first Hanukkah with her Israeli cousins, but she feels alien from the practice. Family politics shift: a territorial Zionist in one generation, a Revisionist Zionist in the next, and in Cockerell’s own a reckoning with all the decisions that came before. Rachel Cockerell shows us that the creation of a Jewish homeland was never a foregone conclusion or a sure thing. And she makes us hear how the yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history, is mirrored in Palestinian suffering. “Where can we go? What can we do?” Even the words are the same. . 17 Forced Amnesia Fintan O’Toole hard for you. I will wake up every morning thinking about you. I will fight and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move up. But you have got to do the heavy lifting your own selves. The proletarians cheer Stanton to the very rafters of their hollowed-out industrial space. T In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J. D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance encapsulates the self-respect and sense of purpose that came from working there: My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steelbodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride. Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant: “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream re1 See Nancy Isenberg, “Left Behind,” The New York Review, June 28, 2018. 18 quired forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J. D.: America had to do something different. Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he over- came lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency. The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious: I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth. . . . No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be, because we’re living in a new world now, a world without economic borders. . . . And in that world muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap—and that is not here. So if you wanna compete, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles—the one between your ears. The workers are really listening to him now, precisely because he’s not just another politician telling them what he thinks they want to hear. He delivers both a warning and a promise: Now this whole country’s gonna have to go back to school. . . . And I will make you this deal: I will work What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. The end of history was not an abstract academic concept. It was happening in Middletown. And the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy is OK with it. He dismisses the anti-Japanese sentiment in the city as “mostly a bunch of noise.” He and Papaw are equally realistic about the necessity of adapting to the relentless “forward momentum” of capital: The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization The New York Review SCOT T OLS ON/ G ETT Y IM AGE S Middletown, Ohio, where J. D. Vance was raised, 2024 he idea of “moving up” echoes from Primary Colors to Hillbilly Elegy. It is the program for those who toiled in Portsmouth’s shipyard and Middletown’s steelworks. But as Vance voices the message through Papaw, in order to move up, these communities must first move on. Moving on means getting over it—“it” being history, identity, belonging. It means swallowing their pride. What industrial workers have to get over is not just the sense of selfesteem that comes from looking at a great ship or a handsome car and knowing that you had a hand in making it. It is also faith in America’s innate superiority, both industrial and military, over the rest of the world. In 1989—around the time that Donald Trump was railing against Japan for “taking advantage of the United States”—Middletown’s steel company was partially acquired by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Kawasaki and would soon be renamed Armco Kawasaki. As Vance records in Hillbilly Elegy, “Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced.” In order to survive in the America Reagan had made, the workers of Middletown had to forget Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It is striking that 1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama published, in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, one of the defining political essays of the period, entitled “The End of History?” He postulated: world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it. In Vance’s telling the industrial working class realizes that economic nationalism is a temptation it must resist. Globalization is an established fact. If the money and the technology are coming from a country that many of Middletown’s older residents fought a war against, such is life. Papaw, who used to threaten to disown his children if they bought a Japanese car, shrugs and says, “The Japanese are our friends now.” He presumably ignores the “bunch of noise” that came from the TV , where Trump, contemplating a run for the presidency in 1988, told Oprah Winfrey that the Japanese “think the United States is made up of a bunch of fools. They’re laughing at us.” H ere are not just two different stories but two conflicting ways of understanding American capitalism, rooted in sharply divergent conceptions of history. In the Vance version, time moves in a straight line: both the glory days of all-American steel and the bitter conflict with Japan are over. Move up and move on—if the Japanese know how to run industries more profitably, it is best to embrace their investment and learn from their knowhow. Wallowing in a warm bath of past American greatness is a luxury neither workers nor bosses can afford. In the Trump version, history is circular. The default condition of American capitalism is global superiority—if it has been lost, it can be restored by sheer political will. As the historian Jennifer M. Miller summarizes Trump’s position in an illuminating essay on his obsession with Japan: If Japanese businesses were booming while American ones were declining, this was not because they designed superior products or because their workers had better education and training. The fault lay squarely with incompetent leadership; Japan’s success only could come from gaming the system. Rather than long-term investments in American education or a focus on growing economic inequality, the United States needed assertive leaders, who could confront Japan, return it to its “natural” place as the junior economic partner, and thus lead the United States to an economic revival.2 Neither of these stories has much to say about inequality, exploitation, or the rapacity that drives environmental destruction and climate breakdown. The Vance of 2016 could write affectingly about the symptoms of these diseases—poverty, drug dependency, alienation—but was no more interested than Trump was in their structural economic causes. Neither man presented any real critique of the Reaganite neoliberal revolution 2 See “Let’s Not Be Laughed at Anymore: Donald Trump and Japan from the 1980s to the Present,” Journal of American–East Asian Relations, Vol. 25, No. 2 (July 2018). May 29, 2025 of the 1980s. Yet their visions of the nature of American capitalism itself were radically distinct. Vance’s was orthodox conservatism: market forces are inexorable, and the wise course is to adapt to them as best one can. The burden of this adaptation must be borne by workers themselves. Just as Stanton/Clinton tells the proletarians that they must do the heavy lifting, Vance concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that the denizens of the Appalachian Rust Belt need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Government is impotent and essentially irrelevant: “No politician can make it be the way it used to be.” For Trump, on the other hand, everything was political. The Rust Belt could be resurrected, and the time could return when men like Papaw might look through the skin of a Ford or a Chevy and see the solid skeleton of Middletown steel inside—but only if America had a leader mighty enough to bring the Japanese and all the other foreigners to heel. What was not yet expressly articulated in this early Trump messaging was that while no democratic politician could return things to the way they used to be, an uninhibited strongman could do so by forcing foreigners to obey the natural law of American supremacy. T here was no doubt about which of these ways of thinking appealed most to the very rich—and it was not Trump’s. Depoliticizing economics in the way the Clinton character does in Primary Colors and Vance does in Hillbilly Elegy was a recipe for the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority of Americans. If government is powerless to control the operation of market forces, its real job is to get out of their way. Most of the fruits of the new economy would naturally appear at the top of the tree. Adjusted for inflation, the wealth held by families in the United States almost quadrupled between 1989 and 2022, but the share of it held by the bottom half of the population remained static at just 6 percent. Last year alone the nineteen richest households added $1 trillion to their accumulated assets, and the top 0.00001 percent now control a larger share of America’s wealth than ever before. The story Vance told in 2016 was a very good one for the richest Americans: it suited their purposes that the Middletown folk should understand capitalism as essentially impersonal and apolitical and accept that the best they could do was to “make things better” for themselves without blaming either government or “faceless companies” for their struggles. Now, however, the vice-president has ditched, along with most of his other political positions, his moral tale of realistic adaptation to the relentless change inherent in capitalism. It has been replaced by the president’s fable of a politically driven restoration of the past. Trump’s economic agenda is doubly recursive: it repeats almost exactly his messaging from the 1980s, which in turn imagines a recovery of the heroic age of American industrial might. The end of history has ended. Trump has built an imaginary time machine in which “the way it used to be” is also the way it must and will be. And in this radical revision of the ideology of American capitalism, Fukuyama’s “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is not merely obsolete; it must be confronted. Universalism, liberalism, and democracy are the enemies of American exceptionalism, of national greatness, and above all of the triumph of the will that must be embodied in the leader who declares, “I alone can fix it.” As it happens, this replacement of one hegemonic idea with another is now playing out in a particularly ironic way in Middletown itself. In Hillbilly Elegy the steel plant is saved because Kawasaki comes in to “retool” its machinery. But more recently another kind of retooling was envisaged. Cleveland-Cliffs, the company that owns the plant now, declares on its website an intention to shift “away from manufacturing commodity steel in favor of higher-margin, specialty products.” To this end the Biden administration had allotted a $500 million grant to help the Middletown plant upgrade its aging blast furnaces, powered by coal, to ones fueled by hydrogen and electricity. But according to CNN the Trump–Vance administration—under the influence of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—intends to ax that grant. This is OK because adaptation to economic change is out and political will is in. The future does not have to be planned for or funded because the past is returning. The Middletown plant does not need to shift to the production of high-value sustainable steel because Trump will use tariffs to ensure that it does not have to compete with cutting-edge global companies. King Coal will reign again, and the good old dirty jobs will be filled by men doing men’s work, all thanks to the great leader who made the foreigners bend the knee. L eaving aside for the moment the viability of this new way of imagining American capitalism, we must ask why most of the oligarchy thought, when it swung behind Trump’s bid for reelection in 2024, that it could do without the old ideological model. The myth of a depoliticized and impersonal economy, in which essentially the same assumptions would apply whether the president was a Clinton or a Bush, served the superrich extremely well. Not only was wealth redistributed upward, but new forms of lucrative exploitation—the appropriation on a staggering scale of personal “He should have had three Pulitzer prizes.... One reads him with wonder and admiration.”—Guy Davenport. Oscar Mandel OTHERWISE POEMS 1. Places; 2.Busy Eros; 3. Names; 4. Poems with animals; 5. Tenebrae; 6. Torpors and diminutions; 7. The Poet; 8.Poems in French. After running five minutes I lie on the grass panting And listen angry to my heart. I want to call down the well of my body “Organs, organs! Do you hear me? Discipline!” Lord, to be dependent on a pancreas! If it turns off I’m dead. Do I choose to die? Not much! Yet this fat machinery dares run me. Salivating with indignation I demand to be pure spirit, I want to boss this heart, these kidneys, this tripe. Did you, Plato, yes or no call them slaves? Then why does that heart keep thumping When I shout “At ease”? ✳ When you bring flowers to my grave it won’t occur to you, needless to say, how degrading it is to be dead — forced to accept “a loving tribute” from my betters, you, mournful, erect. You’ll think, no doubt, “how grateful he would be if he could speak,” and hell I retch thinking of me down there mouth shut and mousy meek six feet under a stupid violet. Turner Publishing, 137 pages, $16. Please consult Amazon for the author’s books of drama, fiction, essays, and translations. 19 data for private profit—were allowed to flourish virtually unimpeded. Information technology, too, was construed as an unstoppable force to which everyone would have to adapt. The problem for the very rich, however, is that as a political project neoliberalism hit the buffers in 2008. The great banking collapse exposed the idea that market forces operate outside politics as a convenient and no longer credible fiction. It became unavoidably obvious that the system of finance capitalism that replaced the old industrial complex is entirely dependent on public institutions. The moral basis for neoliberalism’s radically unequal distribution of the spoils of the new globalized economy had been a sense of rough justice: those who took the risks deserved the rewards. Yet it turned out that these were not the rules after all—the risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized. For the rich, the bet had always been “heads I win, tails you lose.” It also became obvious that “moving up,” the working class’s recompense for “moving on,” was not so easy. Both Vance’s Papaw and Clinton/Stanton had pledged that muscle jobs would be replaced by brain jobs. This was not just a political proposition; it was what most manual workers wanted for their children. But for far too many families it was a false promise. Democratic and Republican administrations did invest in training schemes, and many workers were indeed enabled to transition to new kinds of work. Overall, though, the social mobility that was supposed to be boosted in fact diminished. Ninety percent of the children of the New Deal order—those born in 1940—went on to earn more than their parents did. But the children of the neoliberal order—those born in 1980—had a fifty-fifty chance of earning less than their parents. Instead of receiving the lifelong reeducation that working families were promised, many of them were excluded by ever-rising college fees or cheated by scams like Trump University. Yet as Gary Gerstle puts it, “A reigning political order does not release its grip easily. . . . Its decline is marked by contradiction, contestation, and even chaos.” During Trump’s first term those forces were at play almost as much within the regime as in American society as a whole. The old ideological order was still represented by figures like Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who came from one of the great temples of neoliberal globalization, Goldman Sachs. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for businesses sustained a Reaganite economic agenda. But that old order could not fully impose itself—Cohn resigned in March 2018 when Trump moved to impose tariffs on foreign steel. Neither, however, could Trump himself, with his freedom of action limited by the Covid-19 pandemic, quite follow his own impulses. In the contest of economic ideologies, the result of Trump’s first term was inconclusive. Where Trump had nonetheless succeeded, though, was in creating a mass base for an idea of capitalism that is entirely at odds with the neoliberal imagination. Against the insistence that no politician could reopen a Rust Belt factory, he established the notion that this was true only of the weak and foolish leaders that democracy had 20 foisted on the American people. And against the image of inhuman market forces, anonymous as the weather, he made capitalism personal again. Under neoliberalism, industrial workers had been told they must learn not to take capitalism personally. Successful adaptation required self-suppression. One must not allow oneself to feel humiliated when the vanquished of World War II turn up as the co-owners of the steel plant. One must relinquish the pride of having one’s own labor infused in powerful and beautiful machines. One must forget the generations of struggle embodied in the local histories of labor unions. One must, indeed, disremember the whole New Deal order and its transformative benefits for working people, their families, and their communities. Market forces cannot accommodate those emotions. This is tough, but it’s nothing personal. Trump, however, personifies American capitalism. He performed in fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as a figure deeply embedded in its mindset—the magnate, the mogul, the tycoon, the titan of commerce. His act was, of course, more impersonation than personification. But this made it all the more effective: for mass consumption, an invented and exaggerated character sends a clearer signal than a real person. No less importantly, Trump allows his fans to take possession (albeit in phony forms) of all the feelings that they were not supposed to express or indulge while their world was being taken from them. He presses hard on the raw nerve that Vance was so careful to avoid in Hillbilly Elegy: exploitation. In the neoliberal order, it was the vice that dared not speak its name. In his economic discourse, Trump speaks no other language. But he also displaces exploitation from economic reality—instead of labor being taken advantage of by capital, America as a whole is continually abused and despoiled by foreign countries that laugh at the weakness of its leaders. Instead of moving on, as the steelworkers of Middletown had to do when they accepted their former Japanese enemies as saviors, there can be endless return to grievance, humiliation, and outrage. In place of forced amnesia, Trump offers a seductive dream time in which American history is sanitized into nostalgia. (The dark sides of the pre-Reagan industrial past are either suppressed—in the case of racism—or, in the case of its organized sexism, effectively celebrated as a golden age of manliness.) F or the superrich, this personalization of capitalism has two superficial upsides. One is that it seems to provide some kind of answer to the knotty question of what comes after the fall of the neoliberal order. The working class can be given the political agency it was previously denied; its pent-up emotions are unleashed and turned against all those who insist on a regulated and redistributive form of capitalism. The other is that it appears much easier to deal with political power when the complexity of democracy is reduced to a single individual. These delusions are possible only because so many of the rich believe their Self-Portrait as Psychology after two paintings by Soheila Sokhanvari The straps on my shoes make an X across my feet. My eyes snap open and shut like a purse. Plink plink. The way we depart from ourselves when the moon comes out. The way a cat shows its claws when picked up and held. If this is the slow kind of hell, I’m used to it— My hands are folded the wrong way, the cat sits on the bed Like a limpet, the sun drops out of the sky, inexorable As a chandelier earring. I don’t believe in forgiveness Or holding hands or the kind of people who keep treasured Figurines. Sometimes the truth is impossible as a bodice Spilling over with boobs, it just can’t be contained. What do you have to do to get arrested around here? The pictures on the wall look back with no pity. Sometimes The truth is as unpalatable as a stain. Even the cactus Judges me from its corner, arms raised like it’s giving up. —Jane Yeh own propaganda. As Gerstle puts it, “Cultivating ‘entrepreneurs’ of the self has long been a cardinal feature of the neoliberal order, and it shows no sign of waning” in the continuing half-life of that era. The tech oligarchs who facilitated Trump’s second coming know very well that he is a fake tycoon. But they can see and admire his astounding abilities as an entrepreneur of the self. He is not just an exploiter of social media technologies—he is one of the great exemplars of their governing ethic of endless self-invention. The built-in flaw of this cult of the self-made man is that it leads those who have created vast fortunes to believe that they did it all themselves. They are subject to the same amnesia that neoliberalism demanded of the working class. They lose touch with all the things that made liberal democracy so essential to the development of capitalism: the rule of law; the relative stability that comes from allowing different sections of society to feel they have a share of power; public investment in education, health care, and science; the creation and maintenance of physical and digital infrastructures; predictable government informed by an expert bureaucracy. They build their own rockets and go into orbit far above the social and political conditions that have made their wealth possible. In ditching democracy for autocracy, they also underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon—a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports—will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization? But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidencebased decision-making. If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth—and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it. . The New York Review ‘Her Own Cuneiform’ Anna Della Subin policemen, who forced us/to stay the entire time.”) With the onset of the Gulf War, Mikhail started to attract suspicion for the tone of her reportage and the quiet dissidence of her verse, especially when the first half of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was published in Arabic in 1995. She was interrogated at her office, and she and other journalists were called to a meeting at Baghdad’s Celebrations Hall, where they had previously watched Shakespeare plays. Two journalists were brought onstage, as if for a panel discussion. Suddenly they were beaten up in front of the audience, then taken behind the curtain to an unknown fate. One passage in particular from Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea provoked attention: Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail. New Directions, 133 pp., $16.95 (paper) The earliest trace of the concept of freedom appears on a Sumerian stone tablet unearthed in Iraq and now displayed in the Louvre. Dating to about 2400 BCE , it commemorates how a king, Enmetena, liberated the people of his city-state, Lagash. In ancient Mesopotamia slavery, particularly of prisoners of war or families in debt, was a common practice. The word for freedom, ama-ar-gi, was at once a legal term and a metaphor. Formed from ama, “mother,” and gi, “return, restore, put back,” it had the literal meaning of “returning to the mother.” Freedom was the return of an enslaved child to their parent and also “the restoration of persons and property to their original status,” according to The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, including the release from incarceration, debt, or punishment. As a “reversion to a previous state,” in the definition of a Sumerian dictionary, freedom looked to the past rather than the future, drawing time into a circle. In her poem “Ama-ar-gi,” from the collection In Her Feminine Sign (2019), the Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail reproduces the Sumerian word on the page. The cuneiform resembles arrows pointing the way home. In 2009 Mikhail’s twenty-year-old niece was kidnapped in Baghdad by masked men while she was walking down the street with her mother. She was pulled into a car, “leaving her mother’s hand stretched after her,” Mikhail recounted in an interview, and never seen again. Freedom, Mikhail writes in the poem, might be “what seeps out/from the dead into our dreams.” Ama-ar-gi— that’s how we return to the mother, strangers from strangers . . . . JH AV ER I CONT EM PORARY, MU MBAI and before we shed our first tears Ama-ar-gi is what we weep. Over the past four decades, Mikhail has written of Iraq, its histories of invasion and loss, and the experience of exile in a voice so disarmingly direct it seems to become oracular. Her poetry first appeared in Arabic in the mid-1980s; in 2005, when New Directions brought out her collection The War Works Hard, translated by Elizabeth Winslow and short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, she became the first female Iraqi poet to have a book published in the United States. Since then Mikhail has published six other books, often self-translated or written bilingually in Arabic and English, including the memoir in verse Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009); a novel, The Bird Tattoo (2022); and three more poetry collections, most recently Tablets: Secrets of the Clay. Her first book of prose, The Beekeeper (2017), is a harrowing oral history of the Yazidi genocide in Iraq and Syria, told through phone calls with women who escaped from ISIS captivity. In Mikhail’s work the journalistic, the mythic, and the poetic meet. She May 29, 2025 In his spare time Zeus kept himself busy cutting the stars from the sky and sticking them onto chests and shoulders. He busied himself with this hobby so much that eventually the sky lost all of its stars. Yamini Nayar: After Enheduana, 2024 is preoccupied with our urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past, to be deciphered and preserved; like the arrows, they might show us the way toward political rebirth. She searches the wreckage for archetypes and symbols that testify to our shared humanity, finding the idiosyncrasies—the jokes and absurdities, the surreal questions children ask—that can demolish the logic of tyranny. Freedom, for Mikhail, is what binds people together in kinship and solidarity across the ruptures of unending war. “I believe that poetry is useless but effective,” she has said. She is writing toward a miracle: for places besieged by ongoing violence, “every moment/something ordinary/ will happen/under the sun.” A spiral coiled deep in the ear, a telephone line to the sea: the shell is Mikhail’s recurring symbol for poetry. It can also be an artillery shell—children gather fragments from the sand—or the Shell oil corporation, which originated as a family business selling “oriental seashells” to the West. In Basra in the eighth century CE , the grammarian al-Farahidi established the laws of classical Arabic meter, defining poetry in the language. The word for “meter,” bahr, is the same as the word for “sea,” and al-Farahidi and a disciple enshrined sixteen different types. These conventions remained largely in place until the late 1940s, when poets in Iraq such as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Malaika started experimenting with free verse as a way to speak to modern political realities, provoking fierce condemnation from traditionalists. Mikhail sees herself in this antinomian lineage: “A wave breaking outside the sea./In this way I go on.” Mikhail was born in Baghdad in 1965 to a Chaldean Catholic family. War, she would recall, “was so familiar . . . it had a room in our home.” Each time it returned “the war came with a different name (the Iraq-Iran War, Desert Storm, Mother of All Battles).” In war’s bedroom, the windows were sealed with tape, the keyhole was covered, and the shelves were stocked with water, canned food, and batteries for the radio. On summer nights her family would sleep on the roof under the stars, when it was safe to do so, and her grandmother, who spoke to her in Aramaic, would recount fables that had been passed down through generations. Mikhail preserved the myths in her notebook. In high school she buried herself in her bedroom composing verse. Her mother explained to visitors that her daughter was busy writing her “feelings,” a play on the closeness in Arabic between shi’r (“poetry”) and shu’ur (“emotions”). After studying English literature at the University of Baghdad, in the late 1980s she took a job at The Baghdad Observer, the daily English newspaper of the Ba’athist regime. As a state employee, Mikhail was obliged to attend government-sponsored poetry readings organized by the Ministry of Culture. (“The exits were guarded by Once forming a constellation of literary and cultural life, now the stars appear on officers’ epaulets as emblems of Iraq’s transformation into a police state under Saddam Hussein. Air strikes resemble meteors at night. A phrase often repeated by American war hawks and peaceniks was that Iraq might be “bombed back to the Stone Age”—as if violence caused time travel. “When I moved the time machine’s lever to the year 1991,/it began to shake severely and seemed as if on fire,” Mikhail writes, recalling the terror of living through Operation Desert Storm. She buys a bouquet for her own funeral: “Death and I—/we both like flowers.” I f Mikhail had tried to leave Iraq as a journalist, she would have needed exit papers from her state employer. Instead she managed to persuade an immigration officer to change the occupation listed on her passport to “poet” and slipped out unnoticed, arriving first in Amman. Her friend the novelist Lutfiya al-Dulaimi sent her letters in code: “The flowers are withering” meant it was still not safe for Mikhail to return. In Jordan a contact at the American embassy granted Mikhail a rare tourist visa, and in the spring of 1996 she flew to Detroit. She applied for asylum and settled in Michigan, taking a job teaching Arabic at a public school. Mikhail writes that she left the hundreds of books from her library in Baghdad in storage with a cousin. Living under the UN sanctions, which led to the deaths of an estimated two million Iraqis from famine, her cousin ripped out pages to wrap the falafel sandwiches he distributed from his shop. “Reading is the most luxurious activity at the front,” a fellow writer, Mazin Hana, had once told her. Like all men of age in Iraq, Hana was required to do military service. In the second 21 GLASS DOME MAGNIFIER All the essential features of an ideal reading tool have been brought together in this exceptional magnifier. The optical glass provides 4x magnification without distortion (400% is considered the most comfortable magnification for reading small print). 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TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call 646-215-2500, or email rcorders@nybooks.com. 22 part of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, written from exile, Mikhail describes him reciting al-Sayyab poems to her as they were falling in love. When Hana witnessed a close friend being killed, he decided to flee the army by getting smuggled out of Iraq via Turkey. He asked Mikhail to accompany him, and she demurred, yet soon she regretted it. She lost contact with him, and for ten years she didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. In the poem “The War Works Hard,” written in Arabic in 1994 and appearing in the collection of the same name, war has become a person—a busy, type A professional who rises early and goes about their day, dispatching ambulances, slinging stretchers, and entertaining the gods with fireworks: “How magnificent the war is!/How eager/and efficient!” In the brisk, cheery tone of an op-ed that has been run past the censors, the poem lists war’s productive achievements: sowing land mines and reaping wounds, filling papers with a harvest of content. The war continues working, day and night. It inspires tyrants to deliver long speeches, awards medals to generals and themes to poets. It contributes to the industry of artificial limbs, provides food for flies, adds pages to the history books, achieves equality between killer and killed Mikhail’s poetry often plays with the conjuring powers of political rhetoric; “equality” here emerges as a lethal figment. As she writes in Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, “This world believes in democracy,/therefore it grants the dead/the freedom to wander the city.” In “America,” written in response to the US invasion in 2003, the stars that went missing over Iraq—plucked by Zeus/Hussein as ornaments for his generals—become the questionnaires left blank by refugees. Mikhail calls upon her adopted home to let in immigrants and cease subjecting them to interrogation. She captures an impasse: to escape violence and qualify for shelter, the refugee needs to turn what happened to her into a plausible narrative even as trauma creates holes in memory. How many died, how long they walked, what flag, which airport, how many suitcases—the poet cannot remember. The poem begins to form its own cross-examination, of the bureaucratic rituals that mask the daily work of turning away those in desperate need: “Who said that the sky/would lose all of its stars/if night passed without answers?” As the poem unfolds, the addressee shifts: Mikhail is speaking to America—“People are grass—/they grow everywhere, America”—but at the same time to an unnamed lover, in a romance with a promised future. Forgotten details come flooding back (“every kiss a country/with a history/a geography/and a language”). Yet when the poet passes across the secured border, her arrival in America is good for nothing because she is alone: So I will toy with the freedom like teasing a pet cat. I wouldn’t know what else to do with it. O ne night in Michigan in 2015, Mikhail met the Sumerian priestess Enheduana in a dream. The earliest writer whose name we know, Enheduana wrote hymns of war around 2300 BCE in what is now southern Iraq. In The Beekeeper, Mikhail recalls how she caught sight of the priestess, who was ritually married to the moon, floating on the edge of the Milky Way. They chatted briefly about poetry and Iraq—but then the scene swerved, and Mikhail found herself speaking instead with Siri: “She emerged suddenly from my phone, like a djinn who would grant me all of my wishes.” Siri told her how she longed for the simple routines of daily life, such as the ability to comb her hair, and Mikhail took down her story. “She dreamed of getting out of that prison— going to the gym or having a nice meal,” Mikhail writes. “She dreamed of having her questions answered as well.” Mikhail had begun to grow delirious: still working by day as an Arabic teacher, she would set her alarm for 3:55 AM to speak across time zones with women who had escaped the genocide unfolding in Iraq and Syria. Beginning in 2014, as the Islamic State rapidly gained territory, the Yazidis, followers of an ancient monotheistic faith, were brutally persecuted, kidnapped into sexual slavery, forced to manufacture explosives, and killed in mass graves. Mikhail’s Chaldean community and other Iraqi Christians were also targeted: she learned that her family’s ancestral village of Telkaif had fallen under the black flags of Daesh and that her grandmother’s tomb, with its Aramaic inscription, had been destroyed. From exile, Mikhail resolved to do what she could to bring to light the stories of Yazidi survivors, and she used her journalistic contacts to locate sources. Often the voice on the other end was weeping so hard it was impossible to understand. A nineteen-year-old named Badia was among the Yazidi villagers of Kocho who hadn’t yet fled when Daesh arrived in early August 2014. “We heard that they were coming toward us,” she tells Mikhail. “We didn’t believe it. We traded these stories as if they were straight out of The Thousand and One Nights.” Twelve hundred villagers were herded onto trucks at gunpoint and taken to a school; their mobile phones and valuables were confiscated, and the men were separated from the women and children. The men were lined up in a ditch and executed, as some of their families watched helplessly from the windows. The young boys were escorted to a military training camp for reeducation, while the elderly women, including Badia’s mother, were killed or buried alive in a fishpond. The younger women and children were shuttled between slave markets; eventually Badia was sold in Raqqa to a convert known only as “the American Emir.” Badia’s story was just one of thousands of accounts of abduction, trafficking, and rape used as weapons of war. When Mikhail telephoned a young Yazidi mother named Nadia, the woman spoke only Kurdish and passed the phone to her cousin who could translate—a beekeeper, Abdullah Shrem. Based in Sinjar, Abdullah used to trade his honey between Iraq and Syria. After his sister, nieces, and cousins were taken captive by ISIS and sold into slavery in Raqqa, he became determined to rescue them. Among the kidnapped was his nephew’s wife, Nidal, a mother of two young children, who became pregnant from rape and was routinely beaten by her Daeshi captor. On the day she gave birth, her captor took the newborn away and forbade her from breastfeeding, maintaining that the infant could drink only “from the milk of the Islamic State.” Nidal and her children were then sold for $250 to another family, who threw her two-year-old son off a balcony when he wouldn’t stop crying. Before long, Abdullah’s life’s work had shifted from tending bees to emancipating women, at grave personal risk. He began to collaborate with the wellforged networks that dealt cigarettes, banned under the Islamic State, and with a newly established Office of Kidnapped Affairs in the Kurdistan Region. “I cultivated a hive of transporters and smugglers from both sexes to save our queens, the ones Daeshis call sabaya, sex slaves,” Abdullah tells Mikhail. “We worked like in a beehive, with extreme care and well-planned initiatives.” Soon hundreds of distraught families were sharing his phone number: “Can you hear that ringing? Someone’s calling right now.” Over the course of a year Mikhail and Abdullah spoke nearly every day, as Mikhail followed the progress of his rescue missions. He became her Scheherazade, telling an ongoing story—a fable to skirt death—over the nights and time zones, constantly interrupted by his phone. Abdullah would give Mikhail the numbers of the women he had liberated, such as Badia and Nidal, and she would call them, hearing their terrifying accounts firsthand. In The Beekeeper, cotranslated with Max Weiss, Mikhail has invented a new form of writing about war. It preserves the urgent immediacy of phone calls, texts, and bad cell reception, and foregrounds the voices of survivors on the other end of the line. Yet Mikhail imbues these stories with a mythic depth, each one like a riddle of the problem of evil. Testimony, reportage, and photographs are occasionally punctuated by Mikhail’s own poetry, at moments of sorrow so deep only a different mode of language can stand. In 2016 Mikhail returned to Iraq for the first time in twenty years, to meet the beekeeper and the women she had spoken with, many of whom were now in refugee camps. With Abdullah she visited the temple at Lalish, the epicenter of the Yazidi faith, on a site said to date to the Sumerian period. In The Beekeeper, Mikhail describes crossing the thresholds of the shrine, deep in the Sinjar Mountains: “You pass from one cave into another, as if history is sleeping and you are inside its eyelid.” Yazidis were making a pilgrimage to Lalish for a new sacrament of the “second baptism,” invented by religious leaders the previous year. It is a rite of freedom as a form of rebirth, a return to oneself. A tablet can be a slab of stone, wood, or clay, or a pill to kill pain. It is also a headstone marking a burial The New York Review SPRIN G 202 5 NEW BOOKS FRO M U N IV ERSIT Y PRE S S E S Almost Nothing The Bard in the Borderlands Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth Nora Wendl An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 2 Edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos and Kathryn Vomero Santos The iconic Edith Farnsworth House is a singular glass home designed by Mies van der Rohe. But the oft-told history of the house overwrites Farnsworth’s role as Mies’s collaborator and antagonist while falsely portraying her as the architect’s angry ex-lover. Wendl’s audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sexand-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. May 20, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 152 pp. University of Illinois Press 9780252088766 Paper, $19.95 This collection features new works that repurpose the plays of William Shakespeare to reflect the lived realities of the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands. The Bard in the Borderlands brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume edition. This second volume continues to celebrate the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, situating geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives. August 1, 2024. 6 × 9 in. 526 pp. ACMRS Press 978-0-86698-848-3 Paper, $19.95 Dr. Koop The Many Lives of the Surgeon General Nigel M. de S. Cameron A Watershed Moment This first full biography of C. Everett Koop tells the story of “the only surgeon general [who was] a household name,” according to the Associated Press. A celebrated pediatric surgeon before he became a national leader of American public health, Koop openly defied Republican politicians and alienated New Right conservatives on issues of tobacco, abortion, and HIV/AIDS because his reading of the science did not support their ideologies. Koop remains a sterling example—to both left and right—of how public officials should conduct themselves. April 18, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 460 pp. University of Massachusetts Press 978-1-62534-853-1 Paper, $34.95 The American West in the Age of Limits Edited by Robert Frodeman, Evelyn Brister, and Luther Propst This collection of essays reveals tensions between a culture of economic growth and personal freedom and the ecological, economic, and social constraints set by community values and the land itself. This volume presents practical approaches to land use, land management, and community planning that are motivated by philosophical views on justice, quality of life, and sustainability in the American West. The contributors are policymakers, government employees, land and water managers, urban planners, biologists, tribal members, writers, and academics from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. October 3, 2024. 6 × 9 in. 368 pp. The University of Utah Press 978-1-64769-203-2 Paper, $27.95 Malcolm Before X Patrick Parr Malcolm Before X has been praised as “the definitive story of the youth and early adulthood of one of the most dazzling and controversial civil rights leaders in American history” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), an “ambitious, eye-opening . . . portrait of growth” (The Guardian), “a first-rate biography” (Library Journal, starred review), and “thoroughly researched and crisply written” ( Jacobin). In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. December 1, 2024. 6 × 9 in. 352 pp. University of Massachusetts Press 978-1-62534-816-6 Paper, $29.95 Forecasting the Ocean The 2025–2035 Decade of Ocean Science Committee for the 2025–2035 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences for the National Science Foundation; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Understanding and anticipating change in the ocean, and how it will affect marine ecosystems and humans, has never been more urgent. Forecasting the Ocean provides advice on how to meet national and global ocean challenges in the coming decade and beyond, and in doing so, enhance national security, scientific leadership, and economic competitiveness through a thriving blue economy. June 2025. 8.5 × 11 in. 172 pp. National Academies Press 978-0-309-72222-3 Paper, $25.00 May 29, 2025 23 Forest Under Siege Wildflowers of Maine Islands The Story of Old Growth After Gifford Pinchot Rand Schenck The Downeast and Acadia Coasts Glen H. Mittelhauser Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the United States Forest Service (USFS) from 1905 to 1910, once marveled at the Cascades’ ancient forests, but by 1990, relentless logging left less than thirteen percent of the Pacific Northwest’s original old growth, and projected USFS plans were to log most of the unprotected remainder by 2023. Schenk utilizes interviews and USFS reports to examine 100 years of Pacific Northwest forestry—revealing just how close the region’s forests came to extinction—and relaying efforts to restore the damage. This stunning book is a full-color identification guide to all the wildflowers on islands along the coast of Maine from the midcoast to the Canadian border. The cool marine environment coupled with the geomorphic characteristics of the islands have produced unique plants that often differ significantly from those in other parts of Maine. Species are grouped into sections based on features of leaves and flowers that are easily identifiable in the field, making this an invaluable guide for beginners and botanists alike. May 2024. 6 × 9 in. 258 pp. Washington State University Press 978-1-63864-025-7 Paper, $24.95 March 1, 2021. 6 × 9 in. 392 pp. University of Maine Press 978-0-89101-132-3 Paper, $28.00 Plants of Acadia National Park Glen H. Mittelhauser, Llnda L. Gregory, Sally C. Rooney, and Jill E. Weber Dreaming of a trip to Maine this summer? Don’t go without this comprehensive and best-selling field guide to the plants of Acadia National Park, one of Maine’s most beautiful natural treasures. With descriptions of 862 plant species—including wildflowers, ferns, grasses, sedges, rushes, trees, and shurbs—this beautiful book includes over 2,200 color photographs, an illustrated plantfamily section, a glossary of botanical terms, a full index of scientific and common names, and a helpful guide on how to use the book. January 1, 2010 / third reprinting, September 2021. 6 × 9 in. 542 pp. University of Maine Press 978-0-89101-120-0 Paper, $28.00 Obligations to the Wounded Mubanga Kalimamukwento Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, this critically acclaimed book’s stories are rooted in Zambian literary tradition. Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. Drue Heinz Literature Prize judge Angie Cruz praises it as “a graceful, touching, and generous collection.” October 8, 2024. 5.5 × 7 in. 200 pp. University of Pittsburgh Press 9780822948360 Hardcover, $24.00 Sustainable Capitalism Essential Work for the Anthropocene Edited by Inara Scott “Sustainability is too important to be treated with simplistic analyses and infeasible recommendations. This volume engages with the difficult issues that arise at the intersection of capitalism and sustainability, and it will be a valuable resource for experts and students alike.”—Michael Vandenbergh, David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law, Vanderbilt University “The question is: Do we have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done to confront the existential threats we now face?” —Stuart L. Hart, author of Beyond Shareholder Primacy September 9, 2024. 6 × 9 in. 280 pp. The University of Utah Press 978-1-64769-175-2 Paper, $29.95 The Trees Are Speaking Boundless Native American Abundance in Art and Literature Lisa A. Crossman and Heid E. Erdrich, editors Boundless is an interdisciplinary exploration of Native and Indigenous art and literature, centering Indigenous voices and curatorial practices. The project showcases work from Amherst College’s collections, highlighting kinship and collaboration among artists, writers, and scholars—especially from Northeastern tribes. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe). Through visual art and writing, Boundless connects generations and tribal communities, illustrating the continuity and vitality of Native creative expression to emphasize Indigenous presence, history, and futurity. May 13, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 161 pp. Amherst College Press 978-1-943208-84-5 Paper, $25.99; e-Book, Free/Open Access Dispatches from the Salmon Forests Lynda V. Mapes Ancient and carbon-rich, old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment. In a time of climate catastrophe, oldgrowth and other natural forests face existential threats caused by humans—and their survival is crucial to ours. With vibrant storytelling supported by science and traditional ecological knowledge, environmental journalist Lynda V. Mapes invites readers to understand the world where trees are kin, not commodities. The Trees Are Speaking is essential reading for those with a deep interest in environmental stewardship, Indigenous land rights, and the urgent challenges posed by climate change. April 22, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 272 pp. University of Washington Press 978-0-295-75367-6 Hardcover, $29.95 Seeing Race Before Race Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World Edited by Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey Winner of the 2024 Prose Awards in Humanities Art Exhibitions, Seeing Race Before Race is a capacious visual archive of materials curated by the Newberry Library. Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix” and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. The volume begins an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory. June 2023. 9 × 12 in. 300 pp. ACMRS Press 978-0-86698-842-1 Paper, $49.95 24 The New York Review Interstate ’85 The Royals, the Cardinals, and the Show-Me World Series Marshall Garvey Out Doing Science LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times Tom Waidzunas, Ethan Czuy Levine, and Brandon M. Fairchild Over the past 50 years, LGBTQ professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into STEM fields. In the 1970s, they sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and inclusion required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development. Out Doing Science interrogates why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from inclusion more than others and advocates for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms these institutions and workspaces. “Against the backdrop of perhaps the greatest year ever in American sports and entertainment, it was appropriately two teams from the country’s heartland that gave us a World Series for the ages. From the brilliance of George Brett, the wizardry of Ozzie Smith, and the genius of The White Rat, Marshall Garvey proves to be the perfect tour guide through that glorious season. A wonderful book.” —Erik Sherman, New York Times Bestselling Author of Daybreak at Chavez Ravine March 27, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 320 pp. University of Missouri Press 978-0-82622-327-2 Cloth and e-Book, $34.95 May 21, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 252 pp. University of Massachusetts Press 978-1-62534-880-7 Paper, $29.95 Wrecked Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific Coll Thrush Urban Women Life, Love, and Work in the Medieval Low Countries Jelle Haemers, Andrea Bardyn, Chanelle Delameillieure (eds) Urban Women presents a different and lesser-known image of the late Middle Ages, from 1250 to 1550. The authors trace the lives of women protesting, marrying, making love, working, and engaging in the daily life of Low Countries towns. In doing so, this book gives voice to wealthy businesswomen, laborers, religious women, criminals, and sex workers, spotlighting the remarkable figures who shaped a “women’s town” within a man’s world. The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Coll Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast. May 27, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 288 pp. University of Washington Press 978-0-29575-376-8 Hardcover, $29.95 April 2025. 6.12 × 9.19 in. 232 pp. Leuven University Press 978-9-46270-449-7 Paper, $35.00 The National Alliance of Black Feminists Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Committee on Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science; K. Viswanath, Tiffany E. Taylor, and Holly G. Rhodes, Editors Our current information ecosystem makes it easier for misinformation about science to spread and harder for people to figure out what is scientifically accurate. This book describes the nature, scope, and impacts of this phenomenon, and provides guidance for actions that individuals, communities and societies can take to counter misinformation. June 2025. 6 × 9 in. 408 pp. National Academies Press 978-0-309-72395-4 Paper, $34.00 A History Ileana Nachescu Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists played a critical role in the Black women’s liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization’s Black humanist feminism powered a singular dedication to building coalitions while influencing its historic set of comprehensive political, economic, and cultural demands. June 24, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 272 pp. University of Illinois Press 9780252088674 Paper, $24.95 The Kinky Renaissance American Populist Huey Long of Louisiana Thomas E. Patterson This monumental biography of Huey Long profoundly reevaluates his life and legacy, recognizing him as an inspirational progressive thinker, populist hero, and radical influence on the New Deal. Using previously untapped personal papers of Long and other new primary sources, Patterson analyzes the contours of Long’s career, deconstructs the elements of his success, undercuts several myths about his time in office, and explains the circumstances that led to his downfall. The result is the most comprehensive, balanced, and analytical study of the Kingfish to date. Edited by Gillian Knoll and Joseph Gamble The Kinky Renaissance is a groundbreaking collection of essays that explore kink as a theoretical analytic, a historical formation, and an aesthetic mode. The essays in this work expand the sexual archive and its lexicon by introducing new vocabularies to familiar sexual scenes in early modern literature and culture and by bringing lesser-known scenes to bear on the study of sexuality in the period. The collection boldly argues for a broader concept of a kinky Renaissance. July 2024. 6 × 9 in. 292 pp. ACMRS Press 978-0-86698-845-2 Paper, $19.95 February 2025. 6.12 × 9.25 in. 704 pp. LSU Press 978-0-80718-299-4 Hardcover, $49.95; e-Book, $19.95 May 29, 2025 25 Teaching Race in the European Renaissance A Classroom Guide Edited by Anna Wainwright and Matthieu Chapman Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide provides both educators and students the tools they need to discuss race in the European Renaissance both in its unique historical contexts and as part of a broader continuum with racial thinking today. This book is designed to help educators create more diverse and inclusive syllabi and curricula that engage and address a diverse, twenty-first century student body composed of students from a growing variety of cultural, national, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. April 2023. 6 × 9 in. 400 pp. ACMRS Press 978-0-86698-836-0 Paper, $19.95 The Next War Indications Intelligence in the Early Cold War Timothy Andrews Sayle Drawing on documents recently declassified in Canada—but still secret in the US and UK—The Next War is the first full account of the development of an allied indications network dedicated to assessing the threat of nuclear war. It widens our understanding of Cold War history through exemplary scholarship, providing deep insight into the national agendas, ideological positions, and everyday challenges of an intelligence network that underpins alliances still in place today. July 15, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 256 pp. University of Calgary Press 978-1-77385-623-0 Paper, $38.99 A Million Miles My Peace Corps Journey Jody Olsen When Jody Olsen enlisted as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia in 1966, she was fleeing familial tragedy and the stifling societal norms of her Salt Lake City upbringing. However, her service in Tunisia upended her religious and cultural beliefs and propelled her into a six-decade career with the Peace Corps, culminating in her directorship of the agency. This memoir is a sharp, vulnerable portrait, a testament to the transformative power of leadership and self-discovery. October 21, 2024. 6 × 9 in. 276 pp. The University of Utah Press 978-1-64769-197-4 Paper, $24.95 Ars Poeticas Juliana Spahr During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right, and when species extinction was ever increasing, Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht’s question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer was yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song’s possible liberation, and the love of comrades. February 4, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 72 pp. Wesleyan University Press 978-0-8195-0152-3 Hardcover, $26.00 Human/Animal A Bestiary in Essays Amie Souza Reilly Human/Animal is a book that spins outward from the years Amie Souza Reilly was trapped in the escalating violence of two brothers who lived next door. Reilly’s book wrestles with human/ animal relationships and American colonialism, horror films, and gender studies in an attempt to understand her neighbors’ behavior. Illustrated by the author. For “anyone who feels stumped at how to live alongside our wolves and remain deeply human.” —Motif April 22, 2025. 5.25 × 8 in. 216 pp. Wilfrid Laurier University Press 978-1-77112-680-9 Paper, $22.99 Meditations The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest Barbara Guest; edited & introduction by Joseph Shafer; Foreword by Marjorie Welish The first extensive collection of the prose work of Barbara Guest (1920–2006), one of the major voices of twentieth century American literature. Known primarily as a poet, Guest worked in many styles, all represented herein: essays, lectures, art criticism, literary and art reviews, as well as forms of fiction, biography, poetic prose, drama, comics, and other mixed-genre pieces. This collection illuminates Guest’s singular genius, highlighting her structural awareness of language and placing her within the vanguard of American poetry. Shafer’s introduction provides meaningful context. May 6, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 352 pp. 7 b&w halftones. Wesleyan University Press 978-08195-0173-8 Hardcover, $40.00 The Innermost House A Memoir Cynthia Blakeley “In this candid, emotionally nuanced, and meticulously researched memoir about growing up poor on the wind-swept shores of Cape Cod, Cynthia Blakeley brings both an academic’s intellectual rigor and a seeker’s openness to the interrogation of her family’s complicated and fragmented history, full of secrets and traumas. The Innermost House is a stunning book that will make you reassess everything you thought you knew about remembering, forgetting, and storytelling.” —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me December 1, 2024. 5.25 × 8.5 in. 256 pp. University of Massachusetts Press 978-1-62534-814-2 Paper, $22.95 The Museum of Unnatural Histories Annie Wenstrup This extraordinary debut collection by Dena’ina poet and Whiting Award-winner Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Raven) and The Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—and together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and disregard artifacts of their own mythos. March 25, 2025. 7 × 10in. 104 pp. 12 figures. Wesleyan University Press 978-08195-0187-5 Hardcover, $26.95 26 The New York Review The Sweating Sickness Poems Rebecca Lehmann Manual MLA Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means to be a woman in post-Roe America, and how private and public ghosts can come back to haunt us. Surrealist, maximalist, formal, and with an ear to the underworld, it spins the reader into an eco-fabulist wonderland, where anything can happen, and does. A moving collection that poet Oliver de la Paz praises as “breathtaking poems.” Novena edición adaptada al español Conxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié Generations of writers have relied on the MLA Handbook, published by the Modern Language Association, for guidance on writing and on documenting sources. This new Spanish adaptation of the handbook is a comprehensive resource for Spanishlanguage writers of research papers and anyone citing sources, from business writers, technical writers, and editors to student writers and the teachers and librarians working with them. It establishes uniform, easy-to-follow guidelines that help writers craft clear and engaging prose, evaluate sources and accurately cite and credit them, and format research papers. January 14, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 96 pp. University of Pittsburgh Press 978-0-82296-738-5 Paper, $20.00 April 2025. 6 × 9 in. 344 pp. Modern Language Association 978-1-60329-403-4 Paper, $25.00 Cod Coasts Cultural Landscapes of the Cod Fishery from Cape Cod to Labrador Stephen J. Hornsby This visually stunning volume takes you on a journey through the coastal communities that have been shaped by cod fishing. Explore the architectural heritage, traditional fishing practices, and resilient spirit of the people who have forged a unique way of life around the pursuit of cod. With breathtaking photographs and insightful narratives, this book offers a rare glimpse into a world where the rhythms of nature and human endeavor converge, leaving an indelible mark on the landscapes they inhabit. Find this listing at: www.nybooks.com/upress RQWKHZHE\RXōOOƓQGWKHHQWLUHFRQWHQWRI ZLWKOLQNVWRWKHSUHVVHVōLQGLYLGXDOZHEVLWHV January 1, 2025. 10.75 × 10.75 in. 103 pp. University of Maine Press 978-0-89101-138-5 Hardcover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ay 29, 2025 27 “AN ANXIOUS, UNCONVENTIONAL THRILLER BY MUÑOZ MOLINA, A LITERARY SUPERSTAR IN SPAIN …Reading this book, which has been elegantly translated by Curtis Bauer, feels like hearing a constant alarm ringing in a neighbor’s house. You’ll want to read the ending more than once.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW , Best Thrillers of the Month “[A] DISQUIETING PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE NOVEL …Anxiety and dread mount steadily, while elegiac prose and eccentric supporting characters amplify the story’s surrealism straight through to the sucker-punch ending. It’s a stunning blend of mystery and literary fever dream.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review) “THIS PSYCHOLOGICALLY INFORMED EXPLORATION OF LOSS will resonate with readers in our current tumultuous moment.” —B O O K L I S T “AN EFFECTIVE REFLECTION OF [THE NARRATOR’S] TRAGIC SELF-DECEIT —and also, perhaps, of a universal fear of abandonment.” —TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT O P 28 op.com site, or a digital genie’s cage. “At this moment, I am writing to you using a tablet such as a computer, or iPad, or cellphone,” Mikhail writes in the author’s note to Tablets: Secrets of the Clay. The tablet is the device through which we most often receive bad news and are informed of disaster; it keeps us awake until dawn. It is also the surface on which we find the earliest poetry, politics, and myths, on slates made from the same substance as the first humans, wet clay. Tablets have preserved writings for millennia, such as those of Enheduana, but someone still needs to stumble upon them amid the rubble. Siri’s tablet, as a portal to the cloud, appears to offer a more durable immortality, yet archivists warn us that the cloud is even more fragile than the physical records it promises to replace. Mikhail has long been building a dictionary of symbols—the shell, the flower, the stars—that recur across her books. In Tablets she takes the logical next step and creates her own cuneiform. The book gathers 240 pictograms that resemble ancient Sumerian glyphs; the Arabic text is intertwined in each image, and the English translation is beside it. Many of them, Mikhail has said, were “born bilingually,” written in both languages and directions at once: the Arabic and the English “grow together without imposing too much on each other, a behavior similar to true lovers.” The poems are aphoristic, with the brevity of text messages. To decipher many of them requires some knowledge of Mikhail’s oeuvre, although the collection can also serve as a gateway for the uninitiated. The tablet becomes a device for time travel, taking us back to the early development of written language. Mikhail looks to the period in Sumerian history around 3200 BCE when a pictorial cuneiform began to evolve into a syllabic writing system. As the first scribes expressed themselves through images, their works took on an innate and perhaps inadvertent poetry. Mikhail’s lack of drawing skills is an asset, she suggests: “These drawings are supposed to be ‘primitive.’” Many of her tablets are rectangular, but some are round like the school slates of ancient Sumer, which were disk-shaped so as not to confuse student exercises with official documents. Mikhail’s circular Tablet VI.11 forms such a lesson for beginners: “Life is beautiful and painful/like a feather pulled/from a wing.” While she looks back to the Sumerian age, Mikhail refuses to privilege any one period of Iraqi history or identity. She interlinks Arabic with cuneiform and weaves together references to the Qur’an, to Catholicism, and to Arabic modernism, from the pomegranates of paradise in the surat al-Rahman to dissolving communion wafers to elegiac gems from al-Sayyab’s most famous poem, “The Rain Song.” “O Gulf, giver of pearls, shells, and death,” al-Sayyab laments. The image that opens Tablets is a nautilus of poetry—in a sketch of a seashell, the Arabic spirals from the inside to the outside: She pressed her ear against the shell: she wanted to hear everything he never told her. The second tablet alludes to the shell of war, as if exploded beneath the first, on the same page: A single inch separates their two bodies facing one another in the picture: a framed smile buried beneath the rubble. The image depicts two tablets—two tombstones—with human faces. They are embracing, as if for eternity. In another circular tablet, the spiral of poetry turns into a hopeless chase for a lost loved one. Its pictogram resembles the eye that wards off evil, yet the Arabic text is embedded in it like bloodshot veins: My Sumerian ancestors invented the wheel, and poetry followed— words searching for other words like kidnapped family. As if organized in a museum filing cabinet, the poems of Tablets are loosely grouped by theme. They take us as far into the present as the Covid-19 pandemic. Several refer to the central love story of Mikhail’s life. Years after Mazin Hana left Iraq and lost touch with Mikhail, while he was living in asylum in Australia, he caught sight of one of her poems in an Arabic newspaper and wrote to the editor for her contact information. He mailed a letter that went to an old address, and it passed between hands until it finally reached Mikhail. Hana flew to Detroit, yet American immigration restrictions meant that they had to wait several years before he could join her permanently. In Tablets, pictograms evoke the search for traces of each other, Mikhail’s excitement opening his letter, and the belatedness with which—ten years after their separation—their relationship unfolds. Mikhail beautifully describes love growing old: “No, I am not bored of you./The moon, too, appears every day.” There are the vanished who return and those who never do. In a grid resembling tablets from Uruk—among the earliest known examples of writing, used for the accounting of commodities and receipts—Mikhail unites ancient form and modern despair: the confiscated cell phones of the executed, ringing together in a box. Years later, Yazidis are still being freed from captivity and only just returning to their families. The histories Mikhail has witnessed are so often passed off as “unspeakable.” Yet even if we are at a loss for words, there are images, flickering across our tablets. Mikhail’s creation of her own cuneiform—compounding image and text—is not a nostalgic gesture but a new attempt at finding language to express catastrophe. On one page she sketches a small house with a hairline crack running across it. It has two overlapping roofs—a triangle and a dome—making it at once a home and a tombstone. I wanted to write an epic about suffering, but when I found a tendril of her hair among the ruins of her mud house, I found my epic there. . The New York Review For the Love of Money Sue Halpern named Joel Kaplan. As Wynn-Williams tells it, Kaplan—a Harvard-trained lawyer and former marine who came to Facebook by way of the Bush administration, where he was deputy chief of staff—seems to delight in sexually harassing her. Among other things, he chastises Wynn-Williams for being “challenging to engage with” during her maternity leave, part of which she spent in a coma from blood loss; asks her to tell him which of her body parts was bleeding; grinds his pelvis into her backside during a company party; and pushes her to explain breastfeeding. “Friends who have fallen for Sheryl’s Lean In schtick earnestly recommend going to her with my concerns,” WynnWilliams writes: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron, 382 pp., $32.99 In early January Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that the company was ending fact-checking on its social media platforms, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. The reason, he said— parroting right-wing talking points— was that flagging hate speech and misinformation was a form of censorship. The company’s fact-checking program was instituted after the 2016 US presidential election, when Facebook, as the company was then known, was roundly criticized for allowing Russiangenerated propaganda to tip the scales to Trump; it was canceled shortly after Zuckerberg made a post-election trip to Mar-a-Lago to pay obeisance to the man who had been threatening to jail him for life. (In case allowing falsehoods and hate on its platforms was not sufficient, Meta also paid Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit in which Trump claimed that Meta illegally kicked him off its platforms after the January 6 Capitol riot, and Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.) And so it was a delicious irony when, a few weeks after the fact-checking decision was made public, Meta went to court to silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, calling the former Facebook employee’s damning new memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, “false and defamatory.” An arbitrator agreed that WynnWilliams, who had been Facebook’s director of global policy when she left the company in 2017, may have violated the nondisparagement clause in her severance agreement, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the company: though Wynn-Williams was ordered to stop promoting her book, Meta’s actions proved to be invaluable PR . Within days of its legal machinations, the book became a best seller. Wynn-Williams was also invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which she did on April 9, under threat of a $50,000 fine each time she made what Meta considered to be a disparaging comment about the company. Not since 2021, when Frances Haugen, another former Facebook employee, leaked documents revealing that the company was aware of the harms its products were causing, has the predatory cupidity of Zuckerberg, his long-serving chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and their lieutenants been so exposed. As Wynn-Williams tells it, she was eager to work at Facebook because she believed deeply that it was going to change the world. This was in 2009, only three years after Zuckerberg’s popular college website was opened to the wider public. “It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook,” she writes, “and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything.” At the time Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand lawyer, was working as a diplomat at New Zealand’s embassy in May 29, 2025 Sarah Wynn-Williams; illustration by Hanna Barczyk Washington, D.C., after several years at the United Nations, toiling at the margins of international treaties on things like genetically modified organisms, arguing about the placement of commas and semicolons. It took her a few tries before the head of Facebook’s small policy team in Washington brought her on board in 2011 to help the company’s leaders step onto and navigate the world stage. Zuckerberg was not interested, not at first; Sandberg was more amenable, though at times she seemed more focused on advancing her own interests and stature than the company’s. In one telling anecdote, she asked to bring her parents along to a meeting with Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, and wanted a photograph of him holding her corporate-feminist book, Lean In. (Though the prime minister’s office rejected the request for her parents to attend, and insisted that there would be no picture of Abe holding the book, Sandberg decided to “hijack” the event anyway. Wynn-Williams thrust the book into the prime minister’s hands at the end of the meeting, then snapped a few pictures before anyone could stop her. Afterward Sandberg was so thrilled that she pulled Wynn-Williams into a “deep, long hug.”) I t’s a toss-up, really, who comes across as most careless in Careless People. According to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg lies in a Facebook post about almost being on a plane that crashed; insists that Wynn-Williams share her bed on a flight back from Davos, then “ices her out” when she refuses; writes an ostensibly feminist book but “leads” through intimidation, fear, and humiliation; appears to have little interest in actual women’s lives (when told about the Women’s March, for example, she wants to know only what Melania Trump wore to her husband’s inauguration); in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris that killed 130 people, considers the fact that governments will turn away from privacy concerns, which are bad for the company, to focus on security and surveillance—which, by gathering and storing gobs of personal data, are good for it—to be a win for Facebook; and is involved in the hiring of an opposition research firm to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. Then there is Zuckerberg, who wants Wynn-Williams to arrange either a riot or a peace rally to greet him during a trip to Asia so that he can “be surrounded by people or be ‘gently mobbed’”; who, in an address at the United Nations, says that Facebook will bring the Internet to refugee camps, though the company has no intention of doing so; who wants to crush legacy media so that Facebook can control the news; who asks Xi Jinping, the president of China, to name his unborn child (Xi refuses); who wants “lists of adversaries, whether they’re companies, individuals, organizations, or governments,” and to figure out how to “use the platform and tools we have to win against these adversaries”; who sues hundreds of native Hawaiians to force them to sell their land to him; and who believes that the greatest American president was Andrew Jackson because, as Wynn-Williams recounts, “he was ruthless, a populist and an individualist, and . . . he ‘got stuff done,’” a view that ignores, say, his sanctioning the slaughter of Native Americans or embrace of slavery. (Jackson is Trump’s favorite president, too, aside from himself. Upon moving back into the Oval Office, he reinstalled a portrait of Jackson that Biden had removed.) And then there is the dark horse in this race to the bottom, a political hack and former boyfriend of Sandberg’s I get where they are coming from— this is an issue she’s chosen to take a high profile on. Around this time she is quoted in a Bloomberg article recommending a zero tolerance policy to harassment and saying, “I think it’s great when people lose their jobs when it happens, because I think that is what will get people not to do it in the future. And I think it’s a leadership challenge. As a leader of a company, there needs to be no tolerance for it.” And yet the leaders of Facebook not only tolerate sexual harassment, they pretend it isn’t real. Not long after Wynn-Williams lodged a complaint, she was summarily dismissed from the company. Kaplan is now the chief global affairs officer at Facebook. (Sandberg left the company in 2022 and stepped down from the board last year.) A rguably, many of us have had abusive bosses and worked in toxic environments—though maybe not one so odious that, when a colleague is lying on the floor in the throes of a seizure (as Wynn-Williams describes), the boss does nothing because she is “too busy.” Still, Careless People would be just another blistering workplace account of late-stage capitalism’s maleficence if the people in question did not have an outsize influence on global affairs. As Wynn-Williams correctly intuited, it did not take long for a company whose stated mission was “to connect the world” to become a major driver of politics and policy at home and abroad, though not in the genial way she imagined. Instead, during her seven years at Facebook and in the years since, Meta’s leadership has allowed politicians around the world to use its platforms to influence elections, been a willing conduit for misinformation, some of which has incited genocide, and blithely done the bidding of authoritarian governments. Wynn-Williams’s—and Zuckerberg’s—first inkling that Facebook could be exploited by politicians to influence their electoral fortunes came in 2014 during a meeting with the president- elect of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, who called himself “the Facebook president.” As he told them, “I wasn’t supposed to win. I’m a carpenter, after all, but I could talk 29 directly to people through Facebook.” Wynn-Williams was thrilled by this. She was so convinced that the company was a force for good that she could not yet see that Facebook was also available to candidates whose ideologies were less idealistic than her own. That became clear less than two years later. By now the story of how the Trump campaign used Facebook to help pull off his unlikely 2016 victory is well known. As the improbable candidate with less money at his disposal than the putative next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, Trump hired a San Antonio–based Web designer named Brad Parscale to run his digital campaign. Parscale had no political experience—he was hired because he was cheap—but he did know Facebook and understood that the right ads targeting the right people had the potential to turn them into Trump voters or persuade likely Clinton voters to stay home. Facebook sent a crew of its employees to San Antonio to embed with the campaign and help it optimize Facebook’s advertising platform to sell voters on Trump—especially voters who didn’t historically turn out. The company turned a blind eye when Parscale began working with Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy with ties to both the right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon and the wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer that was “harvesting” all kinds of personal information from millions of unsuspecting American Facebook users. That data enabled the campaign to precisely tailor ads to them, and using Facebook’s “Lookalike Audiences” tool it could also send those ads to hundreds of thousands of potential voters that they resembled. As WynnWilliams writes, Parscale “basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages.” But when Trump’s stunning victory was credited to Facebook, Zuckerberg demurred, calling it a “crazy idea.” (The New York Times, in reaction, declared that Zuckerberg was “in denial.” Sandberg, however, was so impressed with Parscale’s work that she wanted to hire him.) Trump’s victory alerted politicians everywhere that Facebook was an electoral force multiplier, if they didn’t know this already. (The year before Trump won, the British Conservative Party seemed to have figured this out, spending ten times more on Facebook than the Labour Party. According to the BBC , “Clever use of Facebook advertising in marginal seats was one of the things credited with helping David Cameron’s surprise win.”) By the 2020 US general election, the Democrats had gotten the message: in the five weeks leading up to the election, Joe Biden outspent Trump on Facebook ads; he also created more Facebook pages from which to launch ads. Four years later the Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns were responsible for six billion ad impressions on Meta’s social media platforms. (An impression means that an ad is displayed on a user’s screen.) Facebook’s influence on elections was not limited to the US and the UK. In 2022 Giorgia Meloni’s victorious right-wing Fratelli d’Italia significantly outspent the other political parties on Facebook, as did Viktor Orbán, his Fidesz party, and their allies in last year’s European Parlia- 30 ment and 2022’s Hungarian elections, which returned Orbán to power. (Like Trump, they benefited from Facebook’s ad pricing, since incendiary ads garner the most engagement, and engagement lowers the price.) While correlation is not necessarily causation, a research group in Germany studied the effect of Facebook and Instagram ads on the 2021 German election to assess whether those ads were, in fact, decisive. Its conclusion: “Online political advertising significantly influences election outcomes and may even sway elections.” The other lesson from Trump’s 2016 digital campaign was that running a fundraising operation alongside an ad campaign can generate enough revenue for both to be self-supporting. Not only was the first Trump campaign one of Facebook’s top advertisers globally; Facebook was also the campaign’s largest source of cash. On the flip side, says Wynn-Williams, Facebook made a record amount of money from the Trump campaign. Its value to Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and their team, though, went beyond the cash haul: once politicians understood that Facebook was vital to their electoral success, the company could extract favorable policies from them. Or, as Sandberg euphemistically put it, “Where policy makers have a positive experience using Facebook for campaigns or governance, they’re more open to partnering with us to address policy issues.” (That’s one reason why in the United States, for example, there has been no significant federal data privacy legislation, and why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which absolves companies of responsibility for the material posted on their platforms, has not been amended.) According to Wynn-Williams, during her time at Facebook the company also started investing in elections outside the US, showing politicians how to use the platform to target specific voters with specific ads in order to make those politicians “reliant on Facebook for their power.” To this end, the company hired a political “sales team” to get politicians hooked on the platform. Her boss, Kaplan, also wanted to create political action committees (PAC s) around the world to “channel money to our key allies offshore, you know, our most influential politicians in other countries.” He seemed surprised when she explained that in most countries, doing so would be considered bribery. (Kaplan, though in charge of global affairs, was also surprised to learn that Taiwan is an island.) The problem with becoming enmeshed in the domestic politics of other countries is that it is a two-way street. Just as Facebook could get concessions and favors from politicians, politicians could use Facebook to pursue their own malign agendas, at times with the company’s help, tacit and otherwise. At the request of Russian authorities, for instance, the company blocked an event page for a rally in support of the Russian dissident Alexey Navalny. When the Nobel Prize– winning Filipina journalist Maria Ressa alerted Facebook that the new president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, had used the platform to spread falsehoods and fear during his election campaign, the company chose to do nothing. (Duterte was recently arrested by the International Criminal Court and is being detained in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity. He is also running for mayor of Davao City, his home base in the southern Philippines, and some analysts have said that they think he can win.) Perhaps most egregiously, the company also did nothing when presented with incontrovertible evidence that the junta in Myanmar was using Facebook to spread hateful, anti-Rohingya propaganda that eventually led to genocide. In Wynn-Williams’s estimation, this was because Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Kaplan “didn’t give a fuck.” It seems likely, though, that they did give a fuck—not about human rights but about their business interests. As Wynn-Williams tells it, More and more politicians are explicitly requesting that Facebook put its thumb on the scale. . . . Some are less delicate than others and accompany the request with a threat to regulate if the request is refused. So when Facebook’s “growth team”— what Wynn-Williams calls “the beating heart of the company”—encounters intransigent politicians, they consider “juicing” the algorithm to show them “some love.” L ike many companies, Facebook’s corporate goal is growth. But unlike a company that wants to find new markets for its tennis rackets or phone chargers, Facebook isn’t moving physical products. Rather, it is in the business of capturing people’s attention. More users mean more personal data, and data is the engine propelling the company’s core business: advertising. In 2023 and again last year, nearly 100 percent of Meta’s revenue came from selling ads. The problem with this model is that it requires more and more users—and more and more data about them—to attract new advertisers and retain old ones. Is it any surprise, then, that the company offered its advertising clients access to teenagers who were feeling worthless and depressed? As Wynn-Williams points out, “The advertising industry understands that we buy more stuff when we are insecure, and it’s seen as an asset that Facebook knows when that is and can target ads when we’re in this state.” In 2012 Facebook had grown to a billion users worldwide—or one in seven people on the planet—doubling its user base in just two years. Though Zuckerberg celebrated this milestone in the press, he and his team were actually concerned about “running out of road.” To get to the next billion, the company would have to figure out how to move into countries that had been hostile to Facebook in the past. According to Wynn-Williams, one unnamed Facebook board member suggested that the company cozy up to far-right parties in Europe such as the AfD in Germany and the National Front in France, since that was where power seemed to be shifting. But the holy grail for Facebook was capturing the Chinese market, where the platform is still banned. Facebook’s pitch to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a master class on how to appease an authoritarian regime. For example, the company promised that Facebook would help the Chinese government promote a “safe and secure social order”—a not-soveiled invitation for the government to use Facebook for surveillance. Additionally, it stipulated that Facebook’s presence in China would “create an online environment that is civilized, which is why we respect local laws as well as harmonious which is why we remove offending content.” The company proposed partnering with a Chinese private equity firm that would be responsible for creating a content moderation team to censor banned content, store Chinese data in China (where it would be available to the regime), and honor requests from the government to hand over user data. Facebook would also supply facial recognition, photo tagging, and other tools to enable the Chinese authorities to review private messages. The team at Facebook working on this overture understood that it would look bad if their concessions to the Chinese were to become public, so in addition to wanting to coordinate with Chinese authorities to control leaks, they floated a couple of potential newspaper headlines internally to get a jump on dealing with bad press. “China now has access to all Facebook user data,” one read. “Facebook hands over data on Chinese citizens to the Chinese government,” said another. In other words, Facebook knew what it was doing. Despite these concessions, the Chinese government continued to block Facebook. That did not stop Zuckerberg from misleading Congress about the company’s willingness to work with the CCP to build censorship tools, or from doing the party’s bidding by permanently removing the Facebook page of a prominent dissident and then having Facebook’s general counsel lie to the Senate Intelligence Committee about it. Not to be denied, the company came up with a work-around, launching two unlicensed apps in China through a shell company under another name. Facebook did this without informing its investors, the Federal Trade Commission, or Congress. “One of America’s biggest publicly listed companies is completely indifferent to the rules,” Wynn-Williams writes, and it is either her cri de coeur or a declaration of defeat. Much has been written about the ways authoritarian regimes, antidemocratic politicians, and other pernicious actors have used Facebook to achieve illiberal and repressive goals. Careless People demonstrates once and for all that Meta’s social media platforms have never been neutral conveyors of information—the newsprint, as it were, not the news. The company’s ability and eagerness to “juice” the algorithm to get what Facebook’s leadership wants, as well as the rapacious self-dealing of Zuckerberg and Sandberg as they exploited the intimacies of users’ lives, make it clear that their business model—and their public personae—depend on artifice and pretense. Wynn-Williams is not wrong: these are fundamentally careless people, which is to say that they could not care less about their effect on others when that effect is not to their benefit. Like The Great Gatsby’s Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Zuckerberg and Sandberg “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” But these are not fictional characters, and the things they smashed up—individual lives, entire communities, and even, in places, democracy itself—are not imaginary, either. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Zuckerberg told us his plan from the get-go: “Move fast and break things.” And then he did. . The New York Review Pure Thought on Paper Chris Ware FANTAG RAPHICS Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen. Fantagraphics, 468 pp., $39.99 (paper) Between 1918 and 1920, The Little Review serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work so extraordinary, so experimental, and so exacting in its efforts to render the flow and form of human experience that in literary circles it gained an incandescent notoriety, not only for its capturing of the texture of perception and memory over the course of a single day but also because the book was so fabulously dirty. “God knows I have no objection whatsoever to so-called frankness in novels,” Vladimir Nabokov offered in his college lectures on Ulysses—though he did lightly tweak Joyce for implying that ordinary citizens think about sex as much as does poor Leopold Bloom. Nabokov also criticized Joyce for stressing language too much in his depiction of human consciousness, as “man thinks not always in words but also in images.” Such a parry might seem odd to level at a writer, especially by a writer, and particularly at one who could paint pictures with phonemes as could Joyce. But Nabokov was a closet comics fan: he owned an original drawing by Saul Steinberg, and he once idly mused in the presence of the scholar Alfred Appel Jr. that Dennis the Menace might be illegitimate. As a college professor, he implored his students to make the effort to see in their mind’s eye the details of a book, and also, if necessary, to draw them, e.g., his serviceably naive sketch of Anna Karenina’s tennis outfit or his doodled floor plans of some novels’ settings. This is canny advice for both readers and writers, though it’s worrying to think that today’s librarians might just thank him for helping along “reluctant readers.” The Belgian graphic artist Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday is not a book for reluctant readers. Over the years Schrauwen wrote and drew the work, it was, in my weirdo orbit of experimental cartoonists, especially Charles Burns and Richard McGuire, the subject of discussion and esteem. The Berlin-based publisher Colorama serialized the graphic novel in four installments, which have now been collected in a single volume, and while not, unfortunately, fabulously dirty, it does—somewhat like Ulysses— attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over the minutes and seconds of a single day, along with, somehow, all of its ineffably linked people, places, and things. Through its combination of words, images, typography, color, and texture, coincidence, correspondence, and connection, it so firmly impresses the sheer peculiarity and enchantment and tragedy of human experience on the printed page that it took my breath away. The reader will also be glad to learn it is fun and extremely funny (and, fortunately, also just a little bit dirty). The story itself is simple, almost the Odyssey turned inside out: a thirtyfive-yearold Belgian typographer named Thibault Schrauwen—perhaps as ordinary a citizen as a Belgian protagonist can hope to be—awakens at May 29, 2025 A page from Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday 8:15 on a Sunday morning in early autumn 2017 and passes the entire day within his apartment complex while awaiting the return of his girlfriend, Migali, from her several-week trip to Gambia. As the clock ticks, he ruminates, recalls shreds of a drunken revel with a wild alcoholic friend named Rik, and rewatches a pretentious art school film he made over fifteen years earlier with Rik and Migali—and another girl, Nora, whom he briefly dated and whom he decides, after drinking most of the alcohol from a gift basket he’s purchased for his father, he is actually in love with. He falls into a sort of obsessive mania, tracking down Nora’s Instagram account and convincing himself that he’s also somehow telepathically connected to her. Which, in fact, he appears to be. Or perhaps not, because threaded throughout are shifts in time and location, and digressions on beliefs, animals, music, ideas, sounds, themes, language, food— really, everything—which seem at first to be the imaginings of Thibault but, as the story unfolds and folds in and out and around itself, turn out to be almost certainly “real” and represent Schrauwen’s (Olivier’s, not Thibault’s) ideas of causation, coincidence, and synchro- nicity. All of it repeats and builds in intensity as it forms a poetic-musical fabric of time, space, sensation, and thought, linking the characters’ impulses, memories, words, and actions, starting softly but ending in a crescendo that feels sometimes like a dream and sometimes completely real; I couldn’t ever decide. I f you’re confused, we can go back to the book’s beginning. Here, an affably Nabokovian introduction from the cartoonist Olivier frames the book as his valiant attempt to recreate a 31 Hello, my name is O. Schrauwen, graphic author. Over the last decade, I have devoted myself to documenting the lives of some of my relatives. With this in mind, I got talking to my cousin Thibault Schrauwen about six years ago. He spoke with great displeasure about “wasted days.” Days, filled with procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which he failed to do anything edifying. His account intrigued me and immediately seemed a suitable subject for a new graphic novel. I asked him if he was interested in doing something with this rather negative subject, the wasted day. I was convinced that through the wonders of the comic medium we could make something beautiful out of it. He reluctantly agreed. Thus at the very outset Schrauwen dusts aside any notion that the book is fictional; the object in your lap is as much a real part of the story as the story itself, and it inhabits your world, not a made-up one—just as Humbert Humbert’s manuscript of Lolita does. Olivier even appears in Sunday’s pages as a character, first as an actor in the art school film, then again midway, interviewing a sunglassed Thibault (who seems nothing like the Thibault we’ve come to know in Olivier’s drawings), and finally at its end, as part of a Felliniesque midnight gathering of all the book’s characters, who have arrived outside of Thibault’s apartment to surprise him in the first few seconds of his thirty-sixth birthday. The importance of this day (Monday) has previously been only grudgingly alluded to amid Thibault’s increasingly drunken self-loathing, a fact he is apparently unwilling to face, if not actually the unconscious cause of his inebriation (since who hasn’t had the horrible feeling that none of one’s friends care enough to observe one’s birthday?).1 I should clarify that the exuberance with which Schrauwen channels thought, or what academics now call “interiority”—and specifically American English interiority, in which Schrauwen composed the book—is as rich, pink, and flowing as frosting from a pastry bag, having nothing in common with the deliberate stiltedness of his introduction. There are probably as many fucks in this book 1 I looked him up: on LinkedIn there is a single Thibault Schrauwen, who works as a sales executive in Amsterdam, has an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used to live in Antwerp, and attended Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where he studied in an “international environment.” He “worked in a ceiling company from a young age, [learning] how to work in a team with people that have far more experience than me.” I briefly entertained the notion that Olivier Schrauwen had created the webpages and links as an elaborate structural subterfuge to his book, as I tried to do years ago for a very tiny part of my own Building Stories, but abandoned the idea as too threatening to my artistic self-worth. Besides, the dates don’t match up. Almost all other Internet links to the name “Thibault Schrauwen” are to Olivier’s book, so make of the Schrauwen family tree what you will. 32 as there are in the average contemporary conversation (I’d estimate several hundred), and I don’t want to imply that what is essentially an extremely ostentatious undertaking comes off as pretentious. On every page the reader will cringingly recognize him- or herself 2 in the painfully real and revealing raw thoughts of Thibault: Maybe I can add some emojis? Maybe even change the font . . . pfff That won’t change much if the content isn’t there Fuck you, Antoine Yuck Perhaps I oughtta jerk off again That’ll relax me of images with applied text but an ongoing spine of text connecting short bursts of Thibault’s thoughts set along the top of every panel; the images either converge or wildly diverge therefrom as memories, imagined scenarios, or events transpiring simultaneously, such as in the earliest section when Thibault readies his bath while his neighbor breakfasts and, in Thibault’s memory, dim recollections of the drunken night with Rik slowly come into focus. Similar to the seemingly simple innovation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014), in which images are layered on top of one another—connecting not only on x- or y-axis (left/right and up/ down) but also on the z- (in/out)— panel. Special effects, schmecial effects. This is pure thought on paper.3 It’s probably clear by now that I’m wildly admiring, even envious of Schrauwen’s work. Comics are a living language, and we cartoonists steal from one another like rats. Should word balloons sit on top of the image or behind it? Should eyes be dots or lidded scallops? Should color be local or mnemonic? Should I kill myself? These are questions we seek answers to in our own work and in the work of others. Unfortunately, it’s the instinctual balance of all of cartooning’s component parts, not just one trick, that constitutes an artist’s power. Schrauwen’s oeuvre—from his 2011 collection The Man Who Grew His Beard to 2014’s Arsène Schrauwen (about another supposed relative of Schrauwen’s, his grandfather) through several other books to now—demonstrates an artist carefully testing his work against the cold experience of reality, and seemingly incessantly asking, Does this work? Does this feel right? I t is a universal rule of all real literature that writers should create characters who are smarter than themselves, lest their stories spiral into irony and derision.4 Unlike the characters in most graphic novels, which still carry the taint of the form’s commercial origins, Schrauwen’s feel real, and he affords them great sympathy and expansiveness of mind and heart. He avoids the simplistic cant and caricature of many cartoonist contemporaries (I’m including myself here), producing characters who act and move like living, breathing people on the page. Or, in electoral parlance, they seem like the kind of folks you might want to have a beer with. Spoiler: there are many beers had in this book. Not only by Thibault but especially by his old friend Rik, who is a Dostoevskian rascally alcoholic, following his instincts and impulses, and who encourages Thibault’s worst inclinations: a (recent?) incident involving theft and the destruction of property slowly returns to a horrified Thibault in fragments (ironically, as he day drinks and smokes, the smell and taste of the alcohol and cigarettes acting as his own madeleine).5 This said, you can’t help but like Rik, particularly as he goes out of his way to 3 A page from Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday In this tone it evokes a feeling congruent with (but absolutely not in the style of) Karl Ove Knausgaard’s very European as-truthfully-as- he-cantell-it self-examination in My Struggle, or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—or, perhaps most properly, the unnamed protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (in Nabokov’s translation, Memoirs from a Mousehole; the word chthonic plays a major part in Sunday, as does the life of one specific rodent). Which brings up an important structural point: the anchor of this book is not, as in most comics, a grid 2 Or themselves; Schrauwen is probably among the most vivid and empathetic cis cartoonists when it comes to drawing gender-nonconforming characters; his science fiction graphic novel Parallel Lives (2018) contains the most believably embarrassing futuristic blurred-gender sex scene I’ve ever read/seen. Schrauwen’s text spine opens up possibilities heretofore unimaginable. The “wonders of the comic medium” Schrauwen refers to in his opening words are indeed dramatically realized. In what other medium could one simultaneously inhabit the mind of a character and “see” both his memories and imaginings, as well as the pursuit of a mouse by a cat across the apartment roof while his girlfriend walks the streets of Gambia, all easily understood without being disorienting or, worse, suffering the airlessness of technical experimentation without human grounding? Most split-screen experiments in film feel forced, but comics—endemically split- screen themselves—are built from a grid of images subdivided and squared by the very shape of the page itself, and allow such experiments to easily flow, especially as the images bend and shift effortlessly from panel to Additionally, Schrauwen seems to have stumbled on a particular truth up to which many wireless microphone–wearing productivity gurus have yet to fess: namely, that “multitasking” is near impossible in language-based thought. At least as far as this consciousness is concerned, any ideas we harbor of attentiveness or the stream of consciousness as parallel-running congenial rivulets are just plain wrong. One’s inner experience is instead more of a single-melody line, switching between broken phrases and pieces rather than polyphonically flowing alongside each other. One can step back and forth between them every second or so, but hearing/thinking both at the same time is near impossible—at least until one admits pictures are also part of the mix. (It’s easy to check: just close your eyes.) 4 Actually, I made this up, but I believe it. 5 Schrauwen’s previous book, a collaboration with the French cartoonists Ruppert and Mulot, Portrait of a Drunk (2020), seems to employ nearly the same actor he’s cast as Rik—also a self-destructive alcoholic consumed by abandon and narcissism. The New York Review FANTAG RAPHICS single, apparently meaningless day, as remembered and reported to him by his cousin Thibault: make a genuinely thoughtful birthday gift for Thibault, seeming to understand his friend’s self-limitations and unrequited emotions with a penetration that only the close confessional of the beersoaked bar booth can provide. Again, Thibault essentially never leaves his apartment. He is terrified (1) by his neighbors who, knowing he’s alone, try to bring him food, and (2) by an editor who torments him via e-mail, asking for an overdue typography assignment.6 Thibault tumbles further and further into himself, titillated by the thought that his old friend Nora might be as in love with him as he’s decided he now most certainly is with her (that is, after a few beers). Schrauwen captures Thibault’s slow cognitive decline in sad solitary inebriation, his physical coordination dwindling in direct proportion to the arrogance of his rightness about this or that topic as it passes before and within him. One begins to wonder whether Thibault suffers from some sort of agoraphobia or autism, his socially aphasic inclinations if not his profession itself somehow contributing to a mania where he begins to “read” the world as letterforms, recalling not only Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Texts” (which I have no idea if Schrauwen has read)7 but also the aesthetic structure of comics itself. As I’ve tiresomely written many times, comics are an art of reading pictures as well as words; the relationship between looking and reading is sort of like the relationship between singing and talking—they both require the same tools, but engage vastly different modes of cognition, experience, and feeling. Whereas the Western artistic tradition has only recently begun to cautiously legitimize the reading of pictures, the Eastern world has accepted it for centuries in picture scrolls and pictographs and written languages that are adjacently pictorial themselves. Schrauwen so thoroughly plays with these ideas in Sunday—the characters sometimes even visually align themselves with familiar typographical characters—that by the time you’re through it, you’re seeing things differently. In fact, I found myself at one point in a quasi-psychedelic state of mind, trying to “read” objects and images not only on the page but also in my actual surroundings. The effect is overwhelmingly strange, aligned in a way with how Tolstoy not only convinces the reader of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” that he (Tolstoy) has died and come back to tell the good news, but also manages to somehow provoke in 6 It’s crucial to the book’s structure that all of its words, unlike in the hand-lettered tradition of cartooning, are mechanically typeset in as banal and transparent a font as possible. 7 In e-mailed correspondence during the much-missed misanthropic pandemic a couple of years back, I asked Schrauwen about his literary and artistic influences, and he said that with Sunday he was indeed thinking of Ulysses, adding that he also liked the composer and artist Christian Marclay, the comedian Stewart Lee, J Dilla’s album Donuts, and Fischli and Weiss’s 1987 film Der Lauf der Dinge. And the writer Nicholson Baker (whom he asked if I also liked; yes I do, greatly). Clearly a generous and kind spirit, he added that there were a “million tiny formal things that he stole” from my own comics, adding, “I hope you forgive me!” which I of course do not. May 29, 2025 the reader some of the same physical sensations that poor Ilyich suffers.8 OK: sex. How much thought, or time (or, in this book, space), do we actually give to it? According to Sunday’s protagonist, it’s a goodly amount. Sex enters his mind in his third minute of consciousness and recurs throughout the entire work, as extreme-present onanistic act9 but also as an oft-tapped well of memory and a zone of possibility. In a medium where sex is either raw and ever motivating (Robert Crumb) or ignored (Dennis the Menace), Schrauwen walks a more empathetic path, recreating a sense of its alluring siren without being filthy about it. There’s something of the nature documentary to his slight yet explicit distance, anthropologically curious while oddly tender at the same time. Thibault “gets up” out of bed and then, reminded of James Brown, “gets on up” and puts on and briefly dances to “Sex Machine,” bits of the song repeating in his head for hours (and pages) thereafter, like the idea of sex itself, which appears quite regularly and reliably, again and again. The overall effect is utterly familiar, genuinely funny, and very, very real. W hich is also one way of describing Schrauwen’s approach to drawing—or, more properly, cartooning. He aims for a cultivated naive clarity without virtuosity for, one assumes, the sake of legibility. In other words, the smooth, show-offy pen line of, well, Dennis the Menace is nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s the humble mark one might associate with a grocery list, or recognize in the work of David Salle, the cartoonists Yuichi Yokoyama and Christopher Forgues, or the pioneering graphic fiction writer Ben Katchor. Schrauwen knows that the half-life of an image in comics is exactly the fraction of a second it takes the eye to move to the next one, and he’s not wasting his or anyone’s time. In this, he is deferential and congenial; it’s the equivalent of writing clearly and simply, and the professional benefit is that he finishes a lot more pages than the rest of us cartoonists. He also deploys a wider palette of visual tools than any other graphic novelist I can think of, declining, for example, to represent space and experience as anything other than sensation and impression except in a few moments when their texture and complexity demand a more familiar “illustrated” approach. Blurred images indicate an uncertainty about or unconcern for space in exactly the way one experiences it. Schrauwen allows images to slightly merge or overlap, to reflect the possibility of rounding a corner to find—what? yes, the corner we know, but maybe something else, unforseen. In this, he has especially harnessed the medium of printmaking, which by historical example 98 percent of com8 The only other time I’ve felt this was while reading Nabokov’s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura (published posthumously in 2009), in which, through the cynosure of textual erasure, he somehow also inculcates the sensation of creeping death and disappearance within the reader’s extremities. 9 It is one of the only moments in which Thibault’s anchoring thoughts disappear, with an appropriately synesthetic asterisk linking his golden moment to the dry editorial comment of “no thoughts.” ics use, applying a two-color palette in the cheap mimeograph-esque Risograph process in which these chapters first were serialized: he assigns colors at the book’s introduction to the past and to hypotheticals and allows them to combine to indicate the present, or to disassociate to produce a feeling of uncertainty, or to do whatever the story requires or Schrauwen feels. Then, toward the end of the book, he suddenly draws more “virtuosically,” in black chiaroscuro, for its return-fromOz-like celebratory/funereal meeting of all its characters. This is an artist firmly in command of his medium. Finally, the reader and the book cannot escape its title and the day on which it is set, associating Thibault not only with impiety and moral struggle but also typographically with the very T image of the Crucifixion itself (don’t worry— it’s not pretentious, but funny). Schrauwen also sets an hour or so of Sunday in the nave of a church, repurposed in twenty-first-century post-ecclesiastical Europe as an experimental performance space. (As a guest at the 2022 Italian Comics and Games festival in Lucca— claimed to be the largest of its kind in Europe—I marveled at the throngs and thongs of cosplaying teenage demons and princesses and superpeople all colorfully greasepainted and parading along the ridge of the medieval wall of the town, an endless stream of lurid spectacle yet also of sweetly innocent self-expression, while nearly all the churches in town opened their doors to American media companies—and, in one case, a sports video game brand, which had hung a screen in front of the centuries-old crucifix, still peeking out from behind, all the pews temporarily removed and replaced by cushioned recliners, their plump armrests excavated with large drink holders, colorful pamphlets and plastic swag bags littering the marble mosaics below.) While the importance of Sunday to Sunday is implied, and Schrauwen’s introduction refers to both the day and the book as faithful, the theme only gradually develops until it almost overtakes the action in a penultimate scene in which Thibault smokes some of his girlfriend’s high-octane weed while trying to make sense of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, his inner thoughts overlapping Schrauwen’s redrawing of the film’s banal scenes in a maelstrom of dissociation and—? Thibault cannot die, since he provides the novel’s reportage . . . right? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but the book taken in its sum feels to me to be Schrauwen’s quiet, unspoken, and affecting attempt to capture what we used to call God. In this spirit, Sunday will make you love those you already love, but more. I’ve deliberately left out much of the plot and story and the characters who contain such feelings because I don’t want to ruin any more of it for you. I hope you will read it, especially if you’re a person who loves books and appreciates being respected by a writer and is interested in the fine texture of experience itself and the ongoing, lifelong effort of cultivating an inner voice—a private pursuit slowly being eroded by phones and screens (said screens play a huge part in the book, incidentally). In a word, Sunday is a masterpiece, and it will be a long time before it is completely understood and comprehended—or, I think, bettered. . “Sharp, deft commentary.” —Kirkus Reviews “For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I’ve been overcome with the sensation that my life is effectively over. Note the personal touch here. This is not a sensation of the world ending, which has been in vogue for quite some time now, and maybe for good reason. It’s a distinct feeling of being at the end of my days. My time, while technically not ‘up,’ is disappearing in the rearview mirror. The fact that this feeling of ambient doom tends to coincide with the blue-tinged, pregloaming light of the late afternoon lends to the whole thing a cosmic beauty, as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. As such, I’ve dubbed this the catastrophe hour.” Written between 2016 and 2023, these essays are classic Daum, showcasing the author’s wit, her intellect, and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Delving into divorce, dating, music, friendship, beauty, aging, death, and money, Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists. “In these forthright pieces, Daum meditates on the vagaries of midlife.” —Publishers Weekly “A master of the bold admission.” —Los Angeles Times THE CATASTROPHE HOUR SELECTED ESSAYS Meghan Daum Paperback with flaps • $18.95 New York Review Books represents selected titles from Notting Hill Editions Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com 33 How Brown Came North and Failed Linda Greenhouse “root out every vestige of discrimination in this country of ours,” but that “the way to end discrimination against some is not to begin discrimination against others.” Thirty-five years later, as Adams notes, Chief Justice John Roberts used almost the same words to explain why the Supreme Court was declaring unconstitutional modest voluntary integration plans adopted by the cities of Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007).1 “M Illustration by Roderick Mills The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 494 pp., $35.00 Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure. In The Containment, Michelle Adams’s account of how that effort was effectively shut down by public opposition, opportunistic politics, and a hostile Supreme Court, there are powerful parallels with today’s turn against the goal of racial equality. Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, doesn’t draw these parallels explicitly. Her book tells the story of Milliken v. Bradley, a Supreme Court case from 1974, which invalidated a federal district judge’s desegregation order that encompassed not only Detroit’s heavily Black schools but also the nearly allwhite schools of fifty-two surrounding suburban school districts. Without a multidistrict plan, the judge had found, there were not enough white children in Detroit’s schools to remedy the city’s unconstitutional segregation. His solution was racially conscious school assignments across three counties, and a federal appeals court agreed. The Supreme Court did not. 34 Just a few years earlier, the country appeared to be nearing a settlement on questions of race, with courts finally embracing the obligation to fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the South, where segregation had been enforced by law. Segregation in the North, meanwhile, remained entrenched in many urban school districts, presenting the civil rights movement with an obvious if challenging target. How the Supreme Court that rejected the legal regime of segregation in Brown might have responded to the effort to “take Brown north,” where segregation was maintained by political and social forces but not by statute, we will never know. Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 ushered in a period of fundamental change at the Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had written the unanimous Brown decision, retired the next year, followed in rapid succession by three other justices. As Milliken v. Bradley reached the repopulated Court, time ran out. The Milliken majority did not question the facts that a forty-one-day trial had established: Detroit’s schools were disproportionately Black, and only a metropolitan-wide order could provide enough white students to achieve meaningful integration in the city. But because the suburban school districts had not been “shown to have committed any constitutional violation,” wrote Chief Justice Warren’s successor, Warren Burger, it was “wholly impermis- sible” to include them in a remedy. The constitutional right of Detroit’s Black schoolchildren, he declared, “is to attend a unitary school system in that district.” Period. The vote was 5–4, with the four Nixon appointees in the majority. Even though its effects are obvious today across many northern metropolitan areas, Milliken is not a widely known case. Few people would recognize the name. But it was a galvanizing political issue from the original filing of the class action lawsuit by a group of Black Detroit parents and the NAACP in August 1970 until the Supreme Court’s decision on July 25, 1974—the day after the justices ruled unanimously against Nixon in the Watergate tapes case. In his 1972 reelection campaign Nixon had made much of the prospect that Milliken, then pending in Detroit, would result in “forced busing,” as had George Wallace, who shocked the political establishment that year by winning Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary—a victory fueled at least in part by his antibusing message. Not to be outdone, Nixon ran a television commercial declaring that “President Nixon believes that busing is wrong. And he intends to do something about it.” In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Adams writes, he “hinted at the idea that desegregation constituted some kind of reverse discrimination against whites.” Nixon said that he wanted to illiken was where the promise of Brown ended” is Adams’s blunt appraisal of the decision’s import. On one level, that is a simple conclusion, with facts to back it up: the white population of Detroit’s schools, roughly 30 percent when the case first went to trial in 1971, is just 2 percent today, with nearly 80 percent of all students eligible for free or reducedprice lunches. The surrounding suburbs and their schools remain mostly white. As Adams acknowledges, to say that Milliken ended Brown’s promise raises the deeper question of what that promise was. The lawyer for the suburban school districts, arguing in district court against the prospect of a multidistrict remedy, described Brown’s requirement as only “removing any legal or other barriers which preclude one from attending a school district on account of their race,” without an affirmative obligation to do more. That is essentially the current Supreme Court’s view, as expressed in the Parents Involved case. But if fidelity to Brown requires more, what exactly might that be? Adams explores the deep and often bitter division over goals that accompanied the effort to bring Brown north. Detroit’s Black community was split between advocates for integration and those who sought “community control” that would enable Black school administrators and parents to set their own course. And those seeking integration were split further between people for whom the vision of Black and white children sitting side by side in a classroom was a worthy goal in itself and people for whom the purpose of integration was essentially instrumental: a school with white students would likely receive more resources. Verda Bradley, the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, was in the latter category. “For her, desegregation was a means to an end,” Adams writes. Bradley joined the case on behalf of her six-year-old son, who was attending a crumbling, overcrowded, nearly allBlack elementary school. “I want to see the schools better,” she told the Detroit Free Press—a “strategic” goal, as Adams describes it. The legal his1 See my discussion of this decision in “A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent,” The New York Review, October 6, 2022. The New York Review torian Tomiko Brown-Nagin similarly used the word “pragmatic” in Courage to Dissent (2011), her “bottom-up” account of the civil rights movement in Atlanta. That book, which won the Bancroft Prize, deemphasized the role of courts in order to depict a profound if largely forgotten struggle within the civil rights community not only over tactics but also over the meaning of equality in the public schools. “Pragmatism privileged politics over litigation, placed a high value on economic security, and rejected the idea that integration (or even desegregation) and equality were one and the same,” Brown-Nagin wrote. The Containment, while focused on a single Supreme Court case, is very much in the tradition of Brown-Nagin’s book. It is not so much about the Court as about a social movement that had to find a way to speak effectively about the problem it confronted before it could begin to seek redress. The lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision does not appear until page 117, and the decision itself takes up only one short chapter out of twenty-four. The book’s first hundred pages are essential for understanding the central fact about the Detroit public schools— one that the lower courts understood but that the Supreme Court never acknowledged. That fact is the “containment” of the book’s title, meaning the barriers that Black people faced as they crowded into the few areas of Detroit open to them. T he dictionary definition of “containment” is “the act of controlling or limiting something or someone harmful.” In its Cold War usage, containment was the basic US policy for resisting Soviet expansion. In public health, containment is the strategy for protecting a community from a disease for which no effective treatment exists. That notion of containment as protection against contagion figures in Adams’s use of the word: were at least 90 percent Black, while the dwindling numbers of white students attended schools that were at least 90 percent white. Government policy maintained and amplified the problem. For one thing, public housing in Detroit was officially segregated while the practice was permitted by law, and it remained functionally segregated long after the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. More broadly, as Richard Rothstein documented in detail in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017),2 the mortgage insurance policies of the Federal Housing Administration made it nearly impossible for Black would-be homeowners to get mortgages anywhere that white people lived. Rothstein cited the FHA ’s underwriting manual, which warned banks that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” Adams notes that the Michigan state agency in charge of licensing realtors endorsed a similarly worded ethics code promulgated by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which stated that a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood. F or Michelle Adams, this history is no abstraction. She was born in Detroit in 1963, the daughter of solidly middle-class parents whose own parents had made the Great Migration. Her father was a lawyer, one of two Black men to graduate from the Detroit College of Law in 1957. She grew up in an almost entirely white neighborhood called Palmer Woods, It was impossible to understand the plaintiffs’ containment theory without appreciating the extent to which blacks were viewed not just as harm-causing agents, but as contagions to be quarantined and avoided at all costs. With its factory jobs, Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s was a magnet for the Great Migration from the South; the city’s Black population doubled in that first decade, but limited in their opportunities by racially restrictive covenants, bank redlining, and the discriminatory practices of realtors and title companies, the newcomers had few places to live. By 1948, when the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unenforceable, the pattern had long been set. Detroit’s Black population was essentially confined to one quarter of the city. As white people left for new suburban subdivisions, Black neighborhoods expanded, but only within the city limits; the suburbs remained closed to them. Detroit’s schools became majority Black in 1963. By 1967 the racial divide was stark, with housing segregation having led inexorably to segregated neighborhood schools. More than 70 percent of Black elementary school students attended schools that May 29, 2025 in a house her parents had built on a corner lot that they acquired in 1967. How was that possible? All Adams knows is that a “white intermediary” bought the land and assigned the deed to her parents: “How my parents obtained the intermediary and what he charged for his service is unknown. But what I distinctly remember is my mother telling me that they couldn’t have bought the land without him.” As young activist lawyers in Detroit considered litigation to desegregate the city’s schools, the facts were clear, but the law was not. The movement’s judicial victories had been against legal segregation in the South. 2 Reviewed in these pages by Jason DeParle, February 22, 2018. There were no laws in the North that separated students by race. This was the challenge of taking Brown north, and it was acute. Under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, plaintiffs needed to show that a claimed constitutional injury was intentional and that it resulted from “state action,” not simply from the inevitable outcome of private choices. In 1968 the Kerner Commission, set up by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other cities in what became known as “the long hot summer of 1967,” had called for the enactment of a fair housing law, drawing the link between housing and schools. “Racial isolation in the urban public schools is the result principally of residential segregation and widespread employment of the ‘neighborhood school’ policy, which transfers segregation from housing to education,” its report said. But was this enough to get a lawsuit over the state action standard? Would a court even find Brown to be applicable in northern cities like Detroit? In the absence of guidance from the Supreme Court, the potential plaintiffs faced a “void.” To those at the highest level of the movement’s leadership, it was not clear that proceeding with a northern strategy was the best choice. Adams suggests that Thurgood Marshall, who served as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1940 to 1961 and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967, was not completely on board. Speaking at the NAACP ’s annual convention in 1961, he had observed that “the past year has also brought into focus the segregation by custom in the North.” In Adams’s view, that statement “reinforced the idea that there was a significant regional dichotomy between northern and southern segregation,” instead of pointing out the connections between the two. A “custom” did not imply state action. According to Adams, “Marshall’s use of the word ‘custom’. . . showed just how difficult the road ahead would be for those trying to take down northern segregation.” She maintains that it was the convention’s delegates, with the urban North increasingly represented in the organization as the Black population shifted, who forced the hand of the southern-focused leadership. Adams may have overinterpreted Marshall’s comment. According to Patricia Sullivan’s history of the NAACP , Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (2009), “The NAACP ’s national office supported an extensive campaign against northern school segregation.” Sullivan added that “in 1947, Marshall publicly announced that the NAACP would devote significant resources to this effort.” Further complicating the picture, however, is Sullivan’s suggestion that what Marshall may have had in mind in those years before Brown was a legal attack on school systems in small northern towns and rural areas that explicitly excluded Black children. In any event, despite the daunting challenge that it posed, the NAACP did support the Detroit lawsuit. Its Detroit branch joined the parents as a plaintiff. Nathaniel R. Jones, the organization’s general counsel and later a federal appeals court judge, was one of the two lawyers who argued for the plaintiffs at the Supreme Court. The case began inauspiciously in a federal district court where the judge, Stephen Roth, appeared openly hostile. After a pretrial hearing, he described the NAACP lawyers as “outsiders” who should “go away and let Detroit solve its own problems.” Convincing him that state action and not just private choice accounted for the segregation of Detroit’s schools would not be easy. Remarkably, the lawyers succeeded in showing that housing discrimination in Detroit was the result of official policies that had led inevitably to the visible and undeniable segregation of the city’s schools. At first Judge Roth was impatient and didn’t see the relevance of the housing evidence. He asked the school board’s lawyer to attest to the existence of housing segregation so that the case could move along. The lawyer refused, an error Adams describes as an “own goal” that meant the plaintiffs’ presentation would continue and the judge would get a complete picture of the “containment.” The housing evidence consumed ten trial days, and its effect on the judge’s thinking was “catalytic,” Adams writes. The evidence “was like a tapestry—composed of many invisible threads, which when woven together yielded a striking, unified design.” The picture that emerged was of a set of deliberate actions and policies that showed a crucial link between the public and the private, between the regulatory authority of the state of Michigan and the seemingly disparate and uncoordinated acts of discrimination undertaken by the real estate industry. I n suing the Detroit school board and the state of Michigan, the plaintiffs had not asked for a remedy that would extend beyond the city limits. The idea of an area-wide remedy entered the case seemingly by happenstance. The judge had allowed a group of white residents, organized as the Citizens Committee for Better Schools, to intervene in the case. In the course of cross-examining a witness from the US Commission on Civil Rights, the group’s lawyer observed that desegregating Detroit’s schools by court order would be “a study in futility” that would simply lead to a “mass exodus of the remaining white citizens into the suburbs.” It was an “‘aha’ moment,” Adams writes, that planted a seed in Judge Roth’s formerly skeptical mind about what would be necessary to achieve actual desegregation. In his decision on liability, the judge held both the school board and the 35 state responsible for the racial segregation in Detroit’s schools. He fully understood and accepted the plaintiffs’ evidence, noting how the board had gerrymandered district lines and school feeder zones “to contain black students,” adopting the plaintiffs’ unusual use of the word. “The Board’s building upon housing segregation violates the Fourteenth Amendment,” he declared. (The state’s liability largely depended on broad supervisory powers over education that in effect placed it in partnership with local school boards.) The parties—and the country—had to wait nine months, until June 1972, for Judge Roth to issue the remedy portion of his decision. Limiting the remedy to Detroit could not cure the constitutional violation that had evolved over the preceding decades, he held: The white population of the city declined and in the suburbs grew; the black population in the city grew, and largely, was contained therein by force of public and private racial discrimination at all levels. His order established a “desegregation area” covering some 800,000 schoolchildren in Detroit and two suburban counties, Macomb and Oakland. Black and white students were to share the burden of desegregation equally, and faculty and staff were to be integrated as well. Within these general guidelines, Judge Roth left the specifics to a desegregation panel to be established and charged with developing a detailed plan by the following year. The response to the decision was explosive. Nixon denounced it. Judge Roth, whose family had emigrated from Hungary when he was a child, was derided as un-American. A fight over busing convulsed the Democratic National Convention, held weeks later in Miami. After his antibusing plank was defeated, George Wallace predicted that the Democrats would lose in November. Amid the uproar, not many noticed a portion of Judge Roth’s remedy that pointed to trouble ahead. The judge noted that he had “taken no proofs” on the question of whether the suburban districts themselves had “committed acts of de jure segregation.” That was hardly surprising; the case had taken a direction the plaintiffs had not anticipated. Verda Bradley, after all, was seeking a better school—in Detroit— for her son. But the absence of such “proofs”—indeed, the absence of particular allegations about the suburbs in the lawsuit’s original complaint— turned out to be fatal. Adams quotes an exchange from the Supreme Court oral argument in February 1974 between Chief Justice Burger and Robert Bork, the solicitor general, who was presenting the Nixon administration’s position that Roth’s order should be overturned. Burger asked Bork to tell him “when, in the course of this litigation, the allegations were made that the outlying districts . . . had engaged in conduct violative of the Constitution.” Bork responded, “Mr. Chief Justice, it is my understanding that no such allegation had been made to date.” “This was a vision of the suburban school districts as, in effect, little mini-states,” Adams observes. As often happens at the Court—and 36 happened a generation later in the Parents Involved case—the oral argument was predictive. In his opinion for the Court, issued over a bitter dissent from Justice Marshall, who called the decision “a giant step backwards,” Burger wrote that “there has been no showing that either the State or any of the 85 outlying districts engaged in activity that had a cross-district effect.” Given that absence, he continued, an interdistrict remedy “can be supported only by drastic expansion of the constitutional right itself, an expansion without any support in either constitutional principle or precedent.” The housing evidence, the heart of the plaintiffs’ theory of “containment,” was irrelevant, Burger wrote in a footnote. The Court sent the case back to the lower courts for “prompt formulation of a decree directed to eliminating the segregation found to exist in Detroit city schools.” Stephen Roth would not be the judge to prepare it: two weeks earlier, at the age of sixty-six, he had died of a heart attack. While Burger relegated the housing evidence to a footnote, Justice Potter Stewart was flagrant in his discounting of it. One of the more overrated justices of the mid-twentieth century, Stewart, named to the Court by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, was the only member of the majority not appointed by Nixon. The racial makeup of Detroit’s schools, he wrote in a concurring opinion, was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors, such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears”—presumably meaning white flight; only these sorts of factors, and not governmental policies, could significantly account for “the ‘growing core of Negro schools,’ a ‘core’ that has grown to include virtually the entire city.” Adams’s appraisal of Stewart’s opinion is both angry and sorrowful. “As one of our nation’s most important national institutions, the Supreme Court’s view of the past helps construct Americans’ beliefs about what they think actually happened (or didn’t happen),” she writes. In Stewart’s version of events, she continues, people lived where they did because of private choices and individual preferences. . . . The unspoken rationale behind Judge Roth’s order was that suburban whites had benefited from generations of public and private racial discrimination; requiring them to participate in a metropolitan desegregation plan was only fair. But in Justice Stewart’s story, the containment never happened. The only problem with Justice Stewart’s story was that it had been conclusively refuted during a forty- one- day trial in Judge Roth’s courtroom in downtown Detroit. G iven the Supreme Court’s makeup and the political environment at the time, could Milliken v. Bradley have turned out differently? Might the lawyers who designed the case have succeeded with a strategy that included the suburban school districts from the beginning, even assuming that the NAACP had the resources to undertake such an ambitious effort? Or was bringing Brown north doomed to fail? The Dybbuk for Delmore Schwartz From the parched courtyards of our past they grope toward us in the night, the desperate shades of schnooks, outcast before their debts are paid. One might be in me as I speak, stuck fast. Excuse my cough. It is the strain all overburdened asses feel— too many souls, like sacks of grain strapped to my back. I stagger, kneel in pain—not prayerful, pure and plain. Come, brother dybbuk, to my trough. Drink up. I’ll bear our double heap of guilt, before I shuffle off your half of it and make the leap into some other poor dummkopf. Adams doesn’t directly address these questions, but she does make an important observation about a difference between North and South that is often overlooked. School districts in the South were then and remain now for the most part countywide, while in the North almost every city and town has its own school system and to this day fiercely resists any hint that consolidating even the smallest districts might make good economic and educational sense. The Supreme Court’s decision in Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg Board of Education (1971) showed how metropolitan-area desegregation could work in a southern county. The Court upheld a sweeping integration order, including busing, for Charlotte, North Carolina, and its surroundings, a county school system with 84,000 children in 107 schools. The unanimous decision proved to be perhaps the most successful of the Court’s post-Brown interventions in K–12 education, but the Milliken decision meant that that template could never be replicated in the North. As Justin Driver noted in The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (2018),3 the Charlottearea plan was generally well accepted and helped the schools maintain a stable racial composition for nearly three decades. But in 1999 a federal judge lifted the busing order on the ground that the district had achieved “unitary” status. “In short order,” Driver wrote, Mecklenburg County’s schools reassumed the skewed racial demographics of their surrounding neighborhoods, thus ending a remarkable run of meaningfully integrated schools in metropolitan Charlotte and making the region one small part of the broader phenomenon that has been labeled “the resegregation” of American education. It was an effort by two cities to avoid resegregation that led to the 2007 Parents Involved decision. Both Louisville, once segregated by law, and Seattle, suffering the effects of extreme residential segregation, had managed to achieve a measure of integration and had adopted modest limits on student assignments to avoid tipping individual schools to one race or another. Two federal appeals courts had found the plans constitutionally acceptable. Michelle Adams and I have never met, but I learned from the opening pages of her book that we had both been at the Supreme Court on December 4, 2006, to hear the argument in Parents Involved. It was not hard to see where the Court was heading. My account for The New York Times began: By the time the Supreme Court finished hearing arguments on Monday on the student-assignment plans that two urban school systems use to maintain racial integration, the only question was how far the court would go in ruling such plans unconstitutional. —Boris Dralyuk . I thought I saw a door closing. 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For Israel’s leaders the danger posed by Iran helps to justify their claims on American friendship, money, and protection. Détente between Washington and Tehran would threaten the favored status of the Jewish state. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies have long opposed any deal between the two that would, as they see it, diminish pressure on Iran and allow it to more easily propagate its brand of Shia militancy in their Sunni-dominated polities. In Iran the allure of a “grand bargain”—a deal that, through an inspired resolution of all the issues, lays the enmity to rest—is so intense that politicians have sabotaged and exposed the efforts of their rivals to achieve it. Grudges and unpleasant memories have also stood in the way. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has been fulminating and plotting against the “Great Satan” ever since, as a young cleric, he helped overthrow Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, a US client. Iranian anti-Americanism increased when the US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its eightyear war with the nascent Islamic Republic in the 1980s. On the American side, the hostage crisis of 1979–1981, when radical students occupied the US embassy in Tehran and held the staff hostage for well 38 over a year, has had lasting effects. Warren Christopher was Jimmy Carter’s deputy secretary of state during the crisis, which cost Carter the 1980 presidential election. In 1993 Christopher became Bill Clinton’s secretary of state and, invoking the “evil hand” of Iran, oversaw the introduction of sanctions that cut all significant commercial ties between the two countries. Joe Biden was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the hostage crisis. More than four decades later, as president, he tried without enthusiasm to revive an agreement that had been approved by Barack Obama in 2015 and abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018 for being too soft on Iran. Under this agreement, negotiated between Iran and the US, the UK, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the EU and known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA ), the Iranians received sanctions relief in return for accepting limits on the amount of uranium they could enrich and the level they could enrich it to (3.6 percent is good for generating electricity; at 90 percent you can make a bomb). An Iranian official told Trita Parsi, a prominent US-based advocate of détente, that for Biden “offering us sanctions relief was as painful as peeling off his own skin.” Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA prompted Iran to stop abiding by many of its provisions. Since then the Islamic Republic has enriched enough uranium to a high enough level to be able to build several bombs, although it might need months to perfect the design of a weapon and its means of delivery. For all the urgency of the current crisis, however, the nuclear negotiations that started in Oman on April 12 between Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and continued a week later in Rome, again under Omani auspices, stand a reasonable chance of success. Many of the old impediments have disappeared, and the conditions that are necessary to end the nuclear standoff and revive commercial ties between Iran and the US—the essentials of a grand bargain—are in sight. P ower in the Islamic Republic is now concentrated in the hands of Khamenei. Only the supreme leader, who despite being eighty-six appears regularly in public and seems to retain all his faculties, has the necessary combination of institutional authority and ideological credibility to authorize a deal with the US and ensure that Iran sticks to it. One of the biggest issues between the two sides has solved itself. Thanks to Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and obliteration of its leadership and networks, and the fall last year of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s longterm ally, the axis of resistance has been damaged, possibly beyond repair. The other big regional change is that Iran is two years into a détente with Saudi Arabia that has survived the resumption of attacks by the Houthis— with whom the Saudis have been at war for ten years—on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and almost daily American air strikes against Houthi targets. The Saudis have welcomed the prospect of a deal between Iran and the US and oppose the kind of attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities that, according to The New York Times, Israel had been planning, perhaps for May, and that Trump “waved off . . . in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program.” On April 17 Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi defense minister, visited Tehran and was received by the supreme leader. Iranian state TV showed Khamenei at his most avuncular, no doubt having forgiven the minister’s older brother, Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, for having referred to him as “the new Hitler” back in 2017. During the exchange of amenities Khamenei expressed his hope that the two countries would become such good friends that they “complement” each other. Significant though all these changed circumstances may be, the main reason why a grand bargain is more likely to happen now than at any time in the past twenty years is Trump. The president seems to bear no special animus toward the Islamic Republic, and having gained little from his recent interventions in Ukraine and imposition of tariffs, he needs a trophy. He also probably appreciates the opportunities that may accrue to American companies as a result of reestablishing commercial ties with an untapped market of 90 million well-educated people sitting atop the world’s thirdlargest oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves. In the event of a deal, and with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, the president has both the authority and the motivation to lift sanctions faster and more effectively than either Obama or Biden could. An early benefit might be achieved by reviving Boeing’s agreement in 2016 to sell some one hundred airliners to Iran, which Trump blocked when he withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions. Of course, had Trump not pulled out of the JCPOA —dismissing it as “the worst deal in the world”—Iran would not have gone on to become what it is now: a nuclear breakout state. Trump isn’t the only populist to present himself as the solution to crises of his own making. If he negotiates a deal, he “can claim that he got better terms,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins, said on April 13, but “the best we can get is that Iran goes back to terms that look like the [ JCPOA ].” That would upset not only hawks in the United States, including members of the Trump administration, but also Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s prime minister has argued that any deal must require that Iran’s nuclear facilities be destroyed “under American supervision and with American execution” and that the Islamic Republic must submit to a “Libyastyle” solution, which, in the case of Muammar al-Qaddafi, not only ended his nuclear program but led to his overthrow and execution. Nothing that Khamenei or Araghchi has said suggests that Iran will accept the dismantlement or destruction of its nuclear program. From the Iranian perspective any deal will be based on adjustments to the amount and purity of enriched uranium it is allowed to have, along with more stringent inspections. The only reason for Netanyahu to make demands that he knows are unacceptable is to justify Israeli military action when Iran rejects them. He will need the help of the United States, with its superior firepower and defensive capabilities, should Iran hit back with missiles and drones or show The New York Review ZUM A PR ES S /ALAM Y L IV E N EWS Christopher de Bellaigue signs of going for a nuclear bomb. But Trump doesn’t want to spend American dollars and American lives on faraway places of which he knows little. Having given Netanyahu a free hand to resume the obliteration of Gaza following the breakdown of Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas, as well as having endorsed Israel’s scheme to rid the Strip of its Palestinian inhabitants, he is now imposing his own Iran plan on his ally. More explicitly than any of his predecessors, Trump has given Iran a choice between war and normalization. That he is capable of acts of extreme aggression against Iran is clear from his assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Khamenei’s most valued military commander and strategist, in a drone strike near the Baghdad airport in 2020. Trump has said that military action would be “very bad for Iran” and has brought B-2 bombers capable of delivering “bunkerbuster” bombs that can penetrate deep underground to within striking distance of Iran. His oft-stated preference, however, is for Iran to accept what Witkoff refers to, with the obsequiousness we have come to expect from the president’s courtiers, as a “Trump deal,” which would enable Iran to become, in the president’s words, a “wonderful, great, happy country.” Nowhere does Trump’s plan provide for the regime change that Netanyahu alluded to last year when, in an address to the Iranian people, he anticipated the moment “when Iran is finally free” and predicted that “that moment will come a lot sooner than people think.” On April 7, when the president used a joint press conference with Netanyahu in the Oval Office to announce that the US was starting talks with Iran, the expression on the face of the prime minister, perched awkwardly at the edge of one of those tall lemony chairs, suggested trapped wind. A US-Iranian détente would also cause discomfort for Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah’s exiled sixty-four-yearold son and self-declared crown prince. Pahlavi has a following in Iran, and over the past five years or so he has positioned himself as a patriot and democrat who will assume a leading, if ambiguous, position when the Islamic Republic falls. On April 18 he warned that Iran is participating in negotiations only to “win time. . . . However good America’s intentions, it is handing a lifeline to the dictatorship . . . which is on the verge of collapse.” He also insisted that “the only arrangement that can set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East is helping the people of Iran get rid of this weak, divided regime.” Anyone who remembers the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq knows that when you help people get rid of their nefarious rulers, peace, stability, and prosperity don’t automatically follow. In making the case for regime change, Pahlavi argues that the Islamic Republic is “weaker than at any time in the past forty-six years,” but it is precisely this weakness that has forced it to the negotiating table. How else to explain why Khamenei, who as recently as February described the idea of negotiating with the Trump administration as “not logical, nor wise, nor honorable,” has consented to this process, and why the Iranian side wants May 29, 2025 to see it concluded (in the words of a foreign ministry spokesman) in “the shortest possible time”? Governing Iran under the most comprehensive sanctions regime in the world is an exercise in managing dysfunction. Salaries are paid using the revenue from heavily discounted oil sales to China, and goods are bought from a variety of sources; in many cases sanctions are circumvented with costly, inefficient, and corrupt methods that benefit a few at the expense of the many. Popular discontent finds expression in millions of women not wearing the mandatory hijab and a rumble of protests against quotidian government failures ranging from water shortages to pollution and power outages caused by shortages of the natural gas with which Iran is so abundantly endowed. On April 26 a huge explosion of unidentified chemicals at the port of Shahid Rajaee, on the Strait of Hormuz, touched off a fire that killed around seventy people. Israel, which five years ago launched a cyberattack that disrupted operations at the port, the country’s largest, has not commented on the explosion, while The New York Times was told by “a person with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” that it was caused by sodium perchlorate, an ingredient in fuel for ballistic missiles. On March 2 the Iranian parliament impeached the country’s finance minister, Abdolnaser Hemmati, for allowing the rial to depreciate by 60 percent against the US dollar in just seven months and for the soaring cost of food and medicine. In his defense Hemmati noted that 10 million Iranians have fallen below the poverty line over the past seven years and that the smuggling trade is worth $30 billion. Eighty percent of the population, he went on, is “being crushed by the actions of smugglers, profiteers from sanctions and those with special privileges.” President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was elected in 2024 (from a field of just four candidates who had been cleared to run), appeared in parliament that same day. In tones of anguish he evoked the difficulty of running a country in which straightforward transactions have become insurmountable hurdles. “Trump came back in,” Pezeshkian told the hostile chamber, and now all our ships at sea are once again subject to sanctions and no one knows how they’re going to offload their oil and gas. Our dollars that are being held by Qatar . . . the supreme leader has said that they won’t hand over $6 billion of our money. It’s the same with Iraq . . . the same with Turkey. Pezeshkian ran through a list of troubles: “Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Trump . . . we are fighting the enemy on all fronts. . . . We need to be on a war footing.” In the days before the Persian New Year, which this year fell on March 20 and is traditionally the busiest time for shoppers, social media footage showed empty markets in Tehran, Isfahan, and the northern town of Varamin. “There is nothing going on in this market,” a sad voice intoned. “No one has anything to do. This year it will be as if there is no New Year.” —May 1, 2025 . Two novels from the perspective of Hamlet’s Ophelia, written entirely by remixing and repurposing the character’s dialogue from Shakespeare’s original text. “So: now I come to speak.” With this line, Shakespeare’s Ophelia starts telling her story. In let me tell you, this newly revealed woman uses exactly the same words Shakespeare gave her in Hamlet, shifted as in a kaleidoscope to create a very different voice: her own. We hear her personal narrative from childhood to the moments before the start of the play, when she knows she has a fateful decision to make. Along the way, we discover whole new angles on her father, her brother, the prince, and other characters who come out from behind the curtain. LET ME TELL YOU AND LET ME GO ON Paul Griffiths Paperback • $18.95 ALSO BY PAUL GRIFFITHS MR. BEETHOVEN Available from booksellers and nyrb.com In let me go on, her decision made, she refashions herself. Emerging from her old world, she explores a new one, of magical variety yet coherent. As she goes in search of what she may still become, she meets a new cast of characters, some poignant, some hilarious. Paul Griffiths gives this remarkable protagonist—and us—a play-full of humor, poignancy, passion, adventure, and a great many surprises. “Griffiths, a leading music critic and author of two other novels, here lets Ophelia recount her story in her own words. Literally. His first-person narration uses only the 481-word vocabulary that Shakespeare gives to Ophelia in Hamlet. It sounds bizarre. Yet the result is tender, touching and extremely beautiful.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Independent “Whereas let me tell you is set before the action of Hamlet, thereby offering Ophelia the chance to dodge the fate that awaits her in the play, let me go on is set after it. [She] embarks on a journey to find out who she is in this afterlife. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she has many extraordinary encounters along the way.” —Lara Pawson, The Guardian Two books by the Danish Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan Henrik Pontoppidan is admired for the concentrated force of his novellas, like The White Bear and The Rearguard, as much as for long, populous, world-encompassing novels, like A Fortunate Man. NYRB Classics is pleased to publish these new translations by Paul Larkin. The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Müller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head. In the end, Thorkild disappears, presumably back to Greenland. THE WHITE BEAR WITH THE REARGUARD Translated by Paul Larkin Paperback • 168 pages • $16.95 On sale June 10th The Rearguard is a marriage story. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist. Ursula comes from a conservative, upper-middleclass family. As they start their married life in Rome, they each try to change each other’s view but as time wears on, it becomes clear there can be no reconciliation. It is a tragic tale of art and idealism, individuality and love. The White Bear is the June 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. To join the club, please call 1-800-354-0500 or visit www.nyrb.com A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor’s son who revolts against his family and flees the backwaters of Jutland for Copenhagen. Per is handsome, ambitious, and hungry for the technological future of the twentieth century. A FORTUNATE MAN Translated by Paul Larkin Paperback • 880 pages • $29.95 On sale June 10th He studies engineering, hoping to transform Denmark into a commercial giant. Per becomes engaged to Jakobe Salomon, a young Jewish woman whose family is eager to underwrite his plans, and he falls under the spell of Dr. Nathan, a popular philosopher who rails against the conservative powers that be. Ultimately the powers win, the engagement is broken, and Per returns home. Though fortunate, Per is never happy. Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com 39 Grand Opera’s Tribulations Joseph Horowitz Aida an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Michael Mayer, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, December 31, 2024–May 9, 2025 The Metropolitan Opera is America’s biggest performing arts institution, with an annual budget of more than $300 million. This season it gives 194 performances of eighteen works. The Met is also the largest of the major international opera houses, with 3,800 seats. So the company is a bellwether. It has been obvious for some time that the Met is complexly troubled. Box office income is down. The endowment has twice been raided over the past two seasons. A new and younger audience lacks orientation. The big voices needed to fill the vast auditorium are in short supply. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager since 2006, has announced a strategy for renewal that includes programming more new and recent operas, often by Americans, with the expectation that some of the works the Met introduces will become repertory staples. None have. He is equally challenged to demonstrate that the Met can continue to successfully mount the core canon: Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Richard Strauss. The current season includes four contemporary operas, a drop from six in 2023–2024. Its most conspicuous feature may be a three-part run of Verdi’s Aida, performed seventeen times, with a goal of selling some 64,000 seats. A new production was unveiled on New Year’s Eve, starring one of the company’s heralded young sopranos, Angel Blue, and conducted by its music director, Yannick NézetSéguin. But the result is tepid. (I heard the January 7 performance.) Aida is the quintessential grand opera, so its fate 40 this season must disclose something about the fate of the house and the issues at hand. Press attention initially focused on a couple of cast changes, when the original Radamès and Ramfis proved vocally challenged, and on the production, which was likened (by Kevin Ng in The Times of London) to “a light show at the [Las Vegas] Luxor Hotel & Casino.” A more fundamental impediment, less readily detectable, is what’s happening—and not—in the pit. This can best be understood by considering the distinctive history of the institution. The defining characteristics of the Metropolitan Opera, in contradistinction to major houses abroad, are two. For a century and more opera elsewhere was given in the language of the audience. Italians once heard German and French opera in Italian translation, Germans heard opera in German, and the French heard opera in French. New York had a multilingual house, presenting opera in Italian, German, and French for an audience that for the most part spoke only English. The second defining characteristic was the sheer size of the old Met: 3,600 seats, compared with today’s Vienna State Opera and Milan’s La Scala, both with roughly 2,000. The Met emphasized prestige and glamour; this suited the boxholders, who were also shareholders. And it was they who, when the house opened in 1883, required 122 boxes. Hence the gigantic scale of the gilded horseshoe auditorium. All of this sidelined the cultivation of opera in English. Things might have evolved otherwise. Anton Seidl, the Met’s first conductor of world stature (1885–1898), favored Wagner in English. Henry Krehbiel, New York City’s reigning music critic prior to World War I, wrote in 1908 that opera in America would remain “experimental” until “the vernacular becomes the language of the performances and native talent provides both works and interpreters. The day is far distant, but it will come.” Though it never did, attempts to implement English-language opera continued. Among the most visionary was the Rochester American Opera Company, begun in 1924 by the tenor Vladimir Rosing and the director Rouben Mamoulian; it had started touring when the Depression hit. Concurrently the most eloquent advocate for change at the Met was a member of the company: the baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who may be the most imposing operatic artist ever produced in the US. Throughout the 1930s Tibbett declared opera “in grave danger” in America. He insisted that the oversize houses in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco prioritized glamour and a “star system” favored by the socially elite. He tirelessly espoused English-language opera and American opera. He resisted touring abroad or Italianizing his name. He lobbied for a cabinet-level department of science, art, and literature and for financial support for American opera composers. He wrote that “the whole structure of opera must be Americanized if Americans are to support it in the long run.”1 B ut these warnings were silenced by the Met’s evident success: big audiences, big voices, and a standard repertoire enjoyed by all. A crucial component, taken for granted, was a 1 For more on Tibbett’s prophecy, see my “The Baritone as Democrat,” The American Scholar, November 21, 2024. lineage of resident conductors maintaining a great opera orchestra. It began with Seidl, a legendary protégé of Wagner, who presided over six seasons during which the Met—giving everything in German—boasted the world’s supreme German ensemble. The conductors who followed Seidl included Gustav Mahler (1908–1910), who considered his Met casts superior to his singers in Vienna. Mahler was ousted by Arturo Toscanini (1908–1915), whose 480 Met performances emphasized both the Italian and German repertoires. After Toscanini, the German and Italian wings were superintended separately, with Artur Bodanzky (1915– 1939) in charge of the former and eventually Ettore Panizza (1934–1942) handling the latter. These two master conductors (little remembered today because they barely recorded) were full-time residents, coaching singers, keeping the orchestra sharp. They also maintained musical style—crucial in a multilingual house with singers from everywhere. Beginning in 1931 the Met broadcast its Saturday afternoon performances, and these recordings remain an invaluable resource. Even in Wagner, the Met orchestra of the 1930s was an Italianate ensemble, defined by taut tonal filaments, bright brasses, forward percussion, and clipped, attenuated phrasings; ferocity of attack was a defining feature. Its members selfevidently knew and loved the operas they performed. When Panizza, who had conducted with distinction in Vienna and Milan, called his Met orchestra the equal of any opera orchestra abroad, he meant that it equaled the Vienna Philharmonic. No one could say that about the Met orchestra today. Of the Met’s earliest Aida broadcasts, the most esteemed aired on Feb- The New York Review KEN HOWAR D/ ME TR OPOLI TAN OPE RA The triumphal scene in Act II of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Aida ruary 6, 1937. (It is readily available on YouTube.) That afternoon marked the Met debut of a major Italian soprano, Gina Cigna. The Radamès was Giovanni Martinelli, long the most eminent Met exponent of the role. But what first commands attention is Panizza and his band. The intensity of their contribution is not merely different in degree from what we now hear but different in kind. Compared with Nézet-Séguin, Panizza deploys a vast range of tempo. (The final duet is more than a third slower than the one to which we have grown accustomed.) Additionally, the pulse throughout is radically flexible, accommodating scorching accelerandos (typically at cadences and phrase endings) and lyric allargandos (expanding the arc of a sung phrase). At the same time, linear tension is maintained, so the cumulative effect is that of an ongoing flexed line. All of this provides punctuation and trajectory, shape and purpose. The pit is not supportive; it is collaborative. The crux of Aida is not its grand processionals but the intimate Nile scene, in which the enslaved Ethiopian princess Aida undergoes a crisis of conscience. In a wrenching duet, her father, the Ethiopian king Amonasro, persuades her to acquire vital military information from the head of the Egyptian army, Radamès, with whom she is in love. A second duet, between Aida and Radamès, yields this information. But they are overheard. Aida and Amonasro flee; Radamès is arrested for his betrayal. Coming first in the scene is a prefatory aria: “O patria mia.” Aida is anxiously awaiting Radamès. She fears a last farewell. She anticipates expiring in exile, never again to see her homeland. Panizza introduces the aria with a grand retard: we know something important is coming. He demarcates and molds its sectional structure and shifting moods. Where Aida is accompanied by a flute or oboe, he invites his instrumentalists to become soloists in duet with Cigna. At one point he delays the entrance of his oboist so as not to overlap her plaint. The aria ends on a pianissimo high A, which Cigna prolongs with a swell diminishing to silence (an effect not attempted by Angel Blue at the Met). The one-minute ovation is a spontaneous eruption, not a polite formality. Now Amonasro enters, a wild man: “You are not my daughter! You are the slave of the Pharaohs!” And Panizza’s orchestra is wild. Where Verdi interpolates accented chords in the strings, the razor attacks and hurtling acceleration of these interjections are more than exclamatory; they are exhortative. The baritone Carlo Morelli feeds on the sudden weight and lightning velocity of the bow strokes consuming Panizza’s massed violins, violas, cellos, and basses. Compared with this powder keg, today’s Met orchestra is a matchbox.2 2 Artur Bodanzky, presiding over the Met’s German wing, did the same. I cannot resist citing a comparable example from another opera performed this season at the Met: Beethoven’s Fidelio. Collaborating with Kirsten Flagstad—a great-voiced soprano who could be temperamentally placid— Bodanzky and his orchestra ignite her big aria (“Abscheulicher!”). You can hear it in a supercharged broadcast from March 7, 1936 (forty-four minutes in). Compare that May 29, 2025 The governing conceit of the new Met production, by Broadway’s Michael Mayer, is that a team of archaeologists is exhuming Verdi’s story and characters. Its purpose is elusive. Its main manifestation comes during the triumphal scene: instead of Egyptians flaunting captured Ethiopian objects, as in the libretto, we have archaeologists parading looted Egyptian treasures. Perhaps Mayer is glancing toward Edward Said’s well-known allegation that Aida is imperialist. But all Verdi’s sympathies are with the enslaved Ethiopians. The best thing that can be said about the trappings of this new Aida is that they usually don’t get in the way. An exception is the Nile scene, which Verdi introduces with a flute and muted strings evoking palm trees on a “clear starry night” illuminated by “a bright moon”—prefiguring the enchanted music with which Aida will remember the “soft breezes,” “grassy hills,” and “cool valleys” of her homeland. Mayer furnishes a sepulchral underground vault, a tone-deaf miscalculation that diminishes “O patria mia.” The most affecting member of the Met cast that I heard was the young Korean tenor SeokJong Baek, replacing the indisposed Piotr Beczała. Though his voice is a size too small for bighouse Verdi, it carried beautifully; in the closing duet, after Radamès has been condemned to death, his enthralled, bewildered discovery of the hidden Aida—“Tu, in questa tomba!”— provided the evening’s expressive high point. But nothing could efface the impression of Martinelli in this music in 1937: his mastery of the long line, his impeccable diction and breath control, his capacity to inhabit the moment. Twenty-nine years later, when the Met moved to Lincoln Center and an even bigger auditorium, it anticipated full houses and mounting ticket revenues. And Rudolf Bing, the general manager, had at hand for Aida bigvoiced singers sustaining a lineage— Franco Corelli, Leontyne Price, Rita Gorr. He did not anticipate that by the time he departed in 1972, casting the Verdi canon would become a tribulation. I f grandly scaled grand opera is a thing of the past, if new operas require smaller spaces and a different aesthetic approach, could innovative stagings become a way to reinvigorate the form? This, too, is part of Gelb’s prescription—“new productions of the classics” can “re-energize” the Met’s “audience engagement.” The current Aida is a conflicted example: it selfdefeatingly aims to satisfy traditionalists and nontraditionalists alike. The Met has endured its share of catastrophes in quest of freshly conceived mountings, the most notorious being Robert Lepage’s high-tech version of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung (2010–2012), in which a failure to engage with the complexities of the drama made every special effect seem gratuitous. Last season’s Carmen (which returns in October) inflicted black skies, barbed wire, and machine guns. According to the program, the diwith Lise Davidsen and the Met orchestra conducted by Susanna Mälkki (an impressive conductor) at www.metopera.org/ season/2024-25-season/fidelio/. rector, Carrie Cracknell, sought a “contemporary American setting” where “the issues at stake seem powerfully relevant.” Bizet’s Seville cigarette factory became a guarded arms factory, with Carmen and her coworkers oppressed in a man’s world. Whatever one makes of the logic of Cracknell’s strategy, it poisons the aroma of the music at every turn. Regietheater (director’s theater)—now ubiquitous on world opera stages—was largely born in Germany after World War II. Radically rethinking the operas of Wagner to rid them of Nazi associations seemed an inescapable priority. The most prominent German practitioners, including Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer, were nevertheless literate readers of score and text. Unlike Lepage and Cracknell at the Met, they subverted intended musical meanings knowingly, often cleverly. The same was true of Patrice Chéreau’s landmark Ring at Bayreuth in 1976, conceived as an allegory of industrial capitalism. The Met, where the work of Friedrich and Kupfer was never seen, followed suit with a 1979 Flying Dutchman reimagined by JeanPierre Ponnelle. A year before, Kupfer had staged the same opera in Bayreuth as dreamed by the high-strung, headstrong Senta—and wrought an ingenious interpretation of Senta gone mad. Ponnelle had an ancillary character, the slumbering Steersman, dream the tale of Senta and the Dutchman and achieved little beyond a mise-enscène resembling a high school auditorium at Halloween. The most successful of the Met’s forays into reinterpreting Wagner was a Parsifal in 2013 directed by François Girard, whose declared goal was to “engage a modern audience and to let this piece say things that matter, without kidnapping it and throwing it into a new context, which I think is being done to Wagner too often.” By doing away with the Hall of the Grail Knights, with flowers and Flower Maidens, with Parsifal’s suit of armor, Girard arguably eliminated details newcomers might find anachronistic. Wagner’s characters were closely and freshly observed. Girard had Amfortas, with his deliriums of pain and longing for death, enter not on the prescribed litter but leaning heavily on a pair of knights, contorting his body—a picture of unendurable physical pain. When he elevated the Grail cup, it quaked with the palsy of his infirmity. Exiting the stage, he bore his entire story and fate on spastic shoulders. More radically, at the opera’s close Girard did not have the redeemed Kundry expire, as in Wagner’s text; rather, it was she, not Parsifal, who now raised the Grail cup. This feminist ending did not necessarily register as strange. Rather, it excited compassion—and compassion is what Parsifal is about. Coming up, beginning in 2025–2026, will be Met stagings of Tristan und Isolde and the Ring led by NézetSéguin and staged by Yuval Sharon, whom Gelb believes can help to lure and engage new audiences. As director of the Detroit Opera and Los Angeles’s the Industry, Sharon has prominently staged La Bohème with the acts in reverse order and Götterdämmerung in a parking garage. He embraces political art. He rejects linear narrative in favor of plotted ambiguities of meaning. His book A New Philosophy of Opera (2024) is a rescue plan. Sharon will be a much more knowledgeable Wagnerite than Lepage and also more genuinely meddlesome by far. Is his a plausible prescription for a new Wagner audience? Maybe. Or it may be that Regietheater, born abroad, works best in houses with audiences who already know the operas. A pertinent Wagner experiment at the Met last season was the revival of Otto Schenk’s 1977 production of Tannhäuser. This would have been unthinkable in any European house, because the Schenk Tannhäuser, designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, attempts to faithfully render Wagner’s complex scenic intentions, albeit with stagecraft unavailable in his time. Schenk does not meddle with this opera’s obsession with honor and duty. No questions are asked about hidden agendas. At the opera’s close, Wagner has Tannhäuser expire alongside Elisabeth’s bier, and young pilgrims arrive with a flowered staff betokening his forgiveness. Countless latter-day productions have rejected this ending as toxic or tired. But faithfully conjoined with the reprise of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, it remains overwhelming. At least it was my impression that a new audience was thrilled and surprised. I also noticed acres of empty seats. A basic reality, finally, is that grand opera is a product of the nineteenth century, and its most idiomatic exponents began to fade from the scene half a century later. The implications for the Metropolitan Opera, for Aida or the Ring or Tannhäuser, are infinitely complicated. Absent a time machine, maintaining opera as a living art form today can only be an exercise in ingenious accommodation. Panizza was no anomaly: he embodied interpretive norms once widespread and now best remembered via the recordings of Toscanini (they were colleagues at La Scala). Are those performance practices—if adequately acknowledged and studied—to any extent renewable? Is it at least possible to revive the intensities of Dimitri Mitropoulos or Georg Solti—nonidiomatic Verdi conductors who lit a fire at the Met? A further consideration: Toscanini, in his final Met season, led 68 out of 209 performances. Panizza, in his final Met season, led 38 of 69 performances given in Italian. This season Nézet-Séguin (who is also music and artistic director of the Philadelphia Orchestra) leads only 36 of 194 performances. The house needs a genuine music director. As for the auditorium, it, too, is a remnant of another day—of voices and operas more grandly scaled. When Bing retired, his successor, Gören Gentele, insisted on the creation of a “MiniMet”—a smaller second house—but he died in an automobile accident eighteen days into the job. James Levine, named artistic director in 1986, declared that he would “have to leave the Met” if such a smaller house proved an impossibility. But this expensive can, kicked down the road, was finally simply kicked aside. Though the house’s acoustics are not an issue, its size poses artistic obstacles more fundamental than was ever the case across the plaza at Philharmonic Hall, which was gutted and shrunk. More than ever, the Metropolitan Opera is an institution displaced in time, awaiting a reckoning day. . 41 One Brief Shining Moment A Freedmen’s Bureau office, Richmond, Virginia, 1866; illustration by James E. Taylor The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1890–1920 by Manisha Sinha. Liveright, 562 pp., $39.99; $19.99 (paper) In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a few of whom had to be taken away in horsedrawn ambulances when felled by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked, frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago. A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part (or said they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”: 42 We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten. . . . How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic. Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her provocative The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, but it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the rights of Black Americans. In Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.” Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies. R econstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white men,” he wrote, “and . . . as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”), who was in office from Lincoln’s death in 1865 until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining historical moment” that held open a door to a different America. Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but Congress usually overrode him. The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans” that did everything from helping them settle on public land to protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the newly freed in their homes. All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a number of what today we call HBCU s—historically Black colleges and universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first commissioner. Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians ranging from W. E. B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in 1866 warned “lovers of . . . constitutional liberty” of the dangers of a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was “by coercion” robbed of land. Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans: protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and more. The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war (almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama established an agricultural college and property rights for married women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could collect pay from their former owners for the The New York Review HOUS E DIV I DED PROJ E CT, DICKI NS ON COL LE GE Adam Hochschild period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation— surely America’s first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not say if anyone was actually able to collect. Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first time in the South, with South Carolina . . . and Texas making attendance mandatory. . . . They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the crops they produced. Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state legislatures. A ll these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in 1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White, was chief justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana. The early moment of promise had existed only while the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder, mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and highly segregated for nearly a century to come. It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. Again, Sinha’s wide perspective covers more than race: Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common grazing lands. . . . They also rescinded lien laws that protected sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia . . . even authorized whipping for petty theft. Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes, helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements. The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again, declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the British were so successful in their colonial wars. Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and Indian must jointly occupy the country.”* William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home. The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns. One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We got the Yankees on the run!” On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now “being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and working hours but demanded that government soldiers sup*See Brenda Wineapple, “Living in Words,” The New York Review, November 3, 2022. press unions. And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain will never be known. I t is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained away . . . there are many more ifs. Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the West after the war . . . was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun, telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the Dominican Republic. If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income, wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government as well. I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the “contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South, while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded “uniform national system of primary and secondary education.” Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley. Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never gives us full, fleshand-blood portraits of any of the major figures, especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America that might have been. Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes. The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913 fell short of the one that at least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very satisfied. . The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semimonthly in February, March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305. 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Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. The cover date of the next issue will be June 12, 2025. May 29, 2025 43 The Connoisseur of Desire Andrew Delbanco Soon after leaving college, Fitzgerald declared to his Princeton friend Edmund Wilson that “I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?” Inspired by Lawrence as well as by such older American contemporaries as Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, and Willa Cather, he set out to write about young people vibrating between excitement and anxiety at the first intimations of a breach in their sexual restraint. But moving east didn’t take him all that far from the norms of his native Midwest. Most of his classmates remained unwillingly chaste. In response to a senior-year survey, barely half the class of 1917 (Fitzgerald matriculated with that class but never graduated) claimed ever to have kissed a girl. As for those who answered with an honest “yes,” they knew that nothing much more than a kiss could be expected from the sort of “nice” girls they encountered in New York or New Haven or, in Fitzgerald’s case, at holiday sledding parties back home. Like many young men of his caste, he had his sexual initiation with a prostitute when, at age twenty in the spring of 1916, for “the first time . . . I hunted down the spectre of womanhood.” Years later Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night (1934) recalls with lingering frustration his Yale days, when “the young maidens . . . kissed men saying ‘There!,’ hands at the man’s chest to push him away.” In that same book we find Dick’s wife, Nicole, begging the half-French mercenary Tommy Barban: F. Scott Fitzgerald; illustration by Grant Shaffer The Annotated Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III, with an introduction by Amor Towles. Library of America, 238 pp., $35.00 Reviewing The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald in these pages forty-five years ago, Gore Vidal called him a “bold chronicler of girls who kissed.”1 Apart from the unwarranted condescension, the point was fair enough. Fitzgerald wrote frequently and fervently about boys dreaming of kissing a girl or recollecting the thrill of it, or relinquishing the hope of it, or, upon achieving it, asking themselves, “Had she been moved?. . . What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?” Here, from his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is the first kiss between Amory Blaine, a “young egotist” fresh out of Princeton, and Rosalind Connage, a girl with an “eternal kissable mouth” who’s been expelled from Spence for an infraction that she can’t, or won’t, remember: HE : But will you—kiss me? Or are you afraid? 1 “Scott’s Case,” The New York Review, May 1, 1980. 44 SHE : I’m never afraid—but your reasons are so poor. HE : Rosalind, I really want to kiss you. SHE : So do I. (They kiss—definitely and thoroughly.) HE : (After a breathless second) Well, is your curiosity satisfied? SHE : Is yours? HE : No, it’s only aroused. Then a coy stage direction (“He looks it”) invites the reader to decide whether Amory’s arousal reveals itself as a facial flush or an evident erection. Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), includes a chapter called “The Connoisseur of Kisses” that categorizes kisses by motive and effect. Some burn fiercely before “the flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire.” Others are cool from the start, as when a college boy presses himself upon a trusting shopgirl who, “after half a dozen kisses,” expects a proposal but gets at most a trinket before he moves on to his next adventure. Then there are young women who, with the nonchalance born of money, “kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.” In this gallery of portraits, Fitzgerald brought special conviction to those of earnest young men—no doubt partly self-portraits— fumbling to express “the most inept intimacy” with young women who kiss them casually as a form of recreation. This kind of mismatch furnished the plot for several early stories published in Redbook, McCall’s, and other mass-circulation magazines and later collected under the summary title All the Sad Young Men (1926). Adolescent mouth-to-mouth action might seem an unpromising subject for a serious writer. But in the America of Fitzgerald’s youth—he was born to Catholic parents in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896—sexual life was still tightly regulated, and the idea of writing about young people taking tentative steps toward intimacy with commingled breath and lips touching lips was daring in a way that’s difficult to grasp in our age when teens are connoisseurs of pornography. An array of strong forces—school (Fitzgerald attended a Catholic prep school), church (he briefly aspired to the priesthood), and family (his mother refused to venture during her honeymoon into the naughty streets of Paris)—rallied around the conviction that sexual desire, as D. H. Lawrence put it with rage and sorrow in Sons and Lovers (1913), must be “suppressed into a shame.” “Kiss me, on the lips, Tommy.” “That’s so American,” he said, kissing her nevertheless. “When I was in America last there were girls who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips all brought out in a patch—but nothing further.” Throughout his writing life, Fitzgerald’s animating theme was the sweet torment of “nothing further.” T he book that proved him to be more than a minor writer about frat boys and flappers was published one hundred years ago, when he was not yet twenty-nine. Initially conceived as a story with a “catholic element” set in the Midwest and New York in the 1880s, The Great Gatsby had several false starts. Fitzgerald jettisoned large portions of early drafts but salvaged some material for use in freestanding stories. He rewrote numerous passages and, with the indulgence of his editor, Maxwell Perkins, extensively reworked the galley proofs just weeks before the scheduled publication date. In a preface to the annotated centennial edition published by the Library of America, the eminent textual scholar James L.W. West gives a valuable account of the evolution of The Great Gatsby from germinal idea to finished novel, carried along by the author’s determination, in West’s words, “to bring it as close to perfection as he could.” It was published on April 10, 1925, to good reviews but disappointing sales. The New York Review Two months later Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins suggesting jacket copy for the collection of stories (All the Sad Young Men) that Scribner’s planned to bring out that fall on the heels of the novel: Show transition from his early exuberant stories of youth which created a new type of American girl to the later and more serious mood which produced The Great Gatsby and marked him as one of the half dozen masters of English prose now writing in America. Perhaps abashed by his own self-praise, he assured Perkins that the blurb could be “toned down as you see fit.” In fact he had no reason to retract it. One of the early reviewers, Gilbert Seldes, marveled at the “intense life” with which Fitzgerald rendered “crowds and conversation and action and retrospects” and agreed that he had “mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight.” The new book should “be read, the first time, breathlessly,” as it sends everything, animate and inanimate, into exuberant motion. Outside Tom and Daisy’s house the lawn “ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens”; inside, “two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon . . . their dresses . . . rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” Across the bay, at Gatsby’s parties, there’s also perpetual movement, but it feels more frantic than ebullient—couples dancing to the “tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn . . . old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles,” or “superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably,” locked in solitude despite their bodies converging and diverging under “the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket.” Fitzgerald was acutely observant of manner and style in his major and minor characters and equally attuned to the veiled disquiets of their inner lives. He had accomplished something uncommon in fiction: a work of social realism from which there emanates a shimmer of allegory. The Great Gatsby tells the story of a lowborn midwesterner, Jimmy Gatz, taken under wing by Dan Cody, a man of equally inauspicious origin reared in “the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon,” who, having made a fortune in mining, cruises on his trophy yacht with Jimmy aboard as aide and protégé. Young Gatz eventually makes his own fortune in the bootlegging business and, mimicking his mentor’s self-invention, transforms himself into Jay Gatsby, a putative Oxford man (“All my ancestors have been educated there”) on the shore of Long Island Sound in a huge faux-Norman chateau, “spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy,” with a portrait of Cody hanging on his bedroom wall. But before the transition was complete, he had enlisted in the army and was assigned to a training camp near Louisville. There, magnetic and extravagantly handsome, he courted a much-pursued Kentucky belle, Daisy Fay, whose voice was “a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were May 29, 2025 gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” Allowing this beautiful siren to believe that he, too, was highborn, Gatsby succeeded in seducing her. At first his motive was the usual hunt for transient pleasure, but while awaiting deployment to war, as “she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her finger, gently, as though she were asleep,” he discovered that he loved her—insatiably, irredeemably—and that she nourished him with “the incomparable milk of wonder.” This twice-transformed man returns after the Armistice to discover that on the rebound from their affair Daisy has married a more socially suitable suitor—Tom Buchanan, a rich, stupid, thuggish Chicagoan with a Yale pedigree. But Gatsby is desperate “to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” and so becomes what in today’s idiom would be called a stalker. All this is told in flashback. The narrative of Gatz-Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy—recounted by her cousin and Tom’s college classmate, Nick Carraway, an unambitious bond salesman who rents a cottage on the edge of Gatsby’s estate—begins four years later, in the summer of 1922. In the intervening years Gatsby has become a considerable gangster, but he has a countervailing gentleness that’s not wholly a pose; his love for Daisy, acquisitive and vain, also has a dazed reverence that borders on piety. Fixated on the dream of recovering her, he establishes himself in impressive grandeur across an inlet from the Buchanan mansion, at which he stares with mixed yearning and revulsion. He’s been obsessed with retrieving Daisy for “so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.” T he Great Gatsby is an intensely erotic book. But it carries Fitzgerald’s favored theme of “nothing further” far beyond the erotic life narrowly construed and into the universal experience of obstructed longing. Consider Jay and Daisy’s first kiss: His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. The writing here, verging on purple, recalls William James’s account (Fitzgerald had read James after college) of religious ecstasy as a “marvelous and jubilant . . . sense of renovation . . . as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession” of the believer. But what Gatsby yearns to feel again is not “the incarnation . . . complete.” It’s the wild anticipation he felt in the instant when, to the pounding of his heart, her “face came up to his” for the first time. Soon after the transfiguring kiss, he “took” her “ravenously and unscrupulously”—an act he would undo in his retrospective imagination. It’s the virginal, bridal Daisy of whom he dreams. She is to him the immaculate lady of the troubadour songs of courtly love, or Goethe’s Lotte, who tells her fated lover in The Sorrows of Young Werther—the urtext for all Fitzgerald’s stories of sad young men—that “it’s only the impossibility of possessing me that makes you want me so much.” Lionel Trilling once described The Great Gatsby as a book filled with “tenderness toward human desire.” Maureen Corrigan, in her delightful So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (2014), says that “wanting . . . runs through every page.” It is indeed an almost concupiscent book brimming with desire— not only Gatsby’s for Daisy but Nick’s for the illicit promise of New York by night, Tom’s for any rush of pleasure to match his college football glory days, Myrtle Wilson’s (Tom’s current mistress) for release from her ashen life, Jordan Baker’s (the louche woman who vaguely wants to sleep with Nick) for desire itself. For Fitzgerald, the electric shock of desire is always strongest just before the circuit is closed. The theme of delicious anticipation runs through everything he wrote, from the portrait of young Amory (“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being”) to the account in his essay “My Lost City” (1932) of New York radiating “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” When, from the observation deck of the newly opened Empire State Building, he sees that the city “had limits,” the discovery fills him with dread. In The Great Gatsby, everything seems in motion, but the movement tends toward depletion, the keynote always the imminence of the end, as with Daisy’s voice, “the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again,” or the ephemeral glow of evening light as it fades from her face, “deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.” This dread of endings—the end of youth, of frolic, of love, of life itself— was one reason Fitzgerald resorted with such lust to alcohol, by which he could compress past, present, and future into one rapturous moment that felt impervious to time. “The drink,” he writes in Tender Is the Night, “made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future, as if they were about to happen again.” Galdós's satire of middle-class life bears comparison with the novels of Dickens and Balzac, serving up a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption of 19th-century Spanish society Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially he is optimistic that he'll be able to find work and pull his family out of financial straits. At home, Villaamil’s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law—whose feline appearances earn them the nickname the Miaows— are unimpressed by Villaamil's failures, and the only joy left in his life is his young grandson, Luis. When Luis’s disgraced father, the dastardly Víctor Cadalso, reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even though he knows there's nothing pure about Víctor’s intentions and his return might spell their ruin. Margaret Jull Costa’s new translation brings out the tragedy, the comedy, and the vitality of Pérez Galdós’s prose. MIAOW Benito Pérez Galdós Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Paperback • $17.95 • On sale June 10th Miaow is the July 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. To join the club, please call 1-800-354-0500 or visit www.nyrb.com ALSO BY BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS F itzgerald has been aptly called our “prose Keats.” He loved the great odes—compared with which most other poetry struck him as “only whistling or humming”—especially “Ode to a Nightingale” (from which he drew the title for Tender Is the Night), in which the “light-winged Dryad of the trees” soars and sings in joyous flight above the scene below, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;/. . . Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.” This craving to arrest the relentless process of loss and decay suffuses Fitzgerald’s prose as much as Keats’s verse. Reading his notebooks (his biographer Matthew Bruccoli calls them his “workshop”) is like overhearing a musician improvising while practicing for no audience Tristana Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com 45 but himself. We listen in as he tries out images and phrases for expressing desire intensified by foreknowledge of its evanescence—as when prospective lovers approach each other, moving closer, leaning in, delaying contact in order to prolong the exquisite tension of the penultimate moment: A few little unattached sections of her sun-warm hair blew back and trickled against the lobe of the ear closest to him, as if to indicate that she was listening. Her face, flushed with cold and then warmed again with the dance, was a riot of lovely, delicate pinks, like many carnations, rising in many shades from the white of her nose to the high spot of her cheeks. Her breathing was very young as she came close to him—young and eager and exciting. She kissed him several times then in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him, her hands holding him by the shoulders, and still he kept his arms by his side. Fitzgerald was always hoping to preserve hope before it subsided into experience. This was Keats’s theme in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” whose painted lover is frozen in the “wild ecstasy” of perpetual pursuit: Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! With Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald embodied this inextinguishable desire in a figure who is relentless, deluded, but immensely attractive all the same. He’s an impostor and a con man yet somehow not a phony or a liar. He brings a radical, even noble fidelity to “the colossal vitality of his illusion,” at the center of which is always and only Daisy, about whom one imagines him singing like Keats’s discarded lover in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”: I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. . . . And there she lullèd me asleep, And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill side. second life when it was issued in 1945 as an Armed Services Edition (155,000 copies printed), perhaps on the premise that GI s abroad would be drawn to the story of a soldier carrying the torch for a girl back home. Beginning in the 1950s it became a staple of high school and college reading lists and has since sold in the tens of millions. Among major American novels it must hold the record for bad adaptations. The competition began almost immediately, with a 1926 stage version by Owen Davis, whom Fitzgerald called with wry contempt “the king of proffessional [sic] play doctors.” Later that year Paramount released a silent film based on the play, starring Warner Baxter as Gatsby (before he became famous as the Cisco Kid).2 After the Armed Services Edition gave the book a second wind, a parade of heartthrob actors lined up for the role. First came Alan Ladd in 1949, then Robert Redford in 1974, and most recently Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 costume spectacle, with significant changes in the plot. (A 2000 TV version cast its leading man, Paul Rudd, in the role of Nick.) All these films—except for the Alan Ladd version, which has a brisk film noir pace—are talky and stodgy, with the predictable feel of a period piece. Two musical versions have lately reached the stage—The Great Gatsby on Broadway and Gatsby: An American Myth at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, both with lavish sets populated by gyrating dancers and humping couples (including Jay and Daisy) and, in the latter case, an enhanced role for Myrtle Wilson, whose adultery is treated empathetically as her effort to escape her grief for a lost child. Much closer in spirit to Fitzgerald’s book is Elevator Repair Service’s eight-hour full-text reading, Gatz, which forces the audience to concentrate on his words in the context and sequence in which he wrote them. Five years ago Parul Sehgal offered a lively survey (with no claim to be exhaustive) of “Fitzgeraldiana,” which by then included young adult and mystery novels, prequels and sequels, and even a Taylor Swift song.3 Among Gatsbyinspired writers, she rightly singled out Joseph O’Neill for his beautifully wrought novel Netherland (2008), set in post–September 11 New York and narrated by a wounded man in a wounded city who’s drawn, like Nick to Gatsby, to a charming gangster “cheerfully operat2 When at last Gatsby is startled awake from his dream, Fitzgerald delineates with great compassion the agony of his recognition, and his simultaneous refusal to believe, that Daisy will never rejoin him. S oon after publication, sales of The Great Gatsby dried up. Four months before Fitzgerald died of alcoholism and heart disease in December 1940, the last royalty statement he saw reported seven copies sold in the previous year. After his death it got a 46 Davis’s script, which added to the cast of characters a “colored maid” in the Fay household, has been published in The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel and James L.W. West III (Cambridge University Press, 2024). As for the movie, only a one-minute trailer survives. 3 “Nearly a Century Later, We’re Still Reading—and Changing Our Minds About— Gatsby,” The New York Times, December 30, 2020. A more recent account of its “unparalleled staying power” is A. O. Scott, “It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It,” The New York Times, March 27, 2025. ing in the subjunctive mood.” Guided by his motto to “think fantastic,” this “willful, clandestine man” steps in one scene onto a gravestone marked “DAISY ” and ends up a corpse not in a swimming pool but, with his hands bound, in the industrial stew of the Gowanus Canal. Now in its centennial year, The Great Gatsby seems likely to remain a touchstone of our culture at least for a while. Among canonical authors Fitzgerald has so far been spared from fatal chastisement for barely making room in his fiction for people without club memberships or trust funds. Black people flicker by in the background as exotics. Gay people seem menacing. Jews are sly and slithery, most famously Gatsby’s business partner Meyer Wolfshiem, the canny gambler who wears human molars as cufflinks. (One of Fitzgerald’s best readers, Arthur Krystal, calls his antisemitism “provincial but not malicious.”) As for women, they are assessed almost entirely through male eyes. Even Daisy is less a fully drawn character than a projection of Gatsby’s imagination as he feeds on the “incomparable milk of wonder” with which she nurses his narcissism. But Fitzgerald was far more dismissive, even savage, about the selfadulatory country-club set, as in his portrait of Tom Buchanan, who is cruel to women (both Myrtle and Daisy) and warns with odious sanctimony that “if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged” in the coming flood of miscegenation. Fitzgerald had measureless contempt for “careless people” like Tom, and ultimately for Daisy, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Back in 2020, with her eye on the inscrutable future, Sehgal asked, “What other waves of analysis await us as the new narratives rush in?” Since then The Great Gatsby has continued to be read as, among many other things, an indictment of Jazz Age decadence, a parable of overreaching, a study of gender dynamics, a tale of old money triumphing over a parvenu, and an account of unconscious homoerotic desire—in one way or another, a modernist rebuke of the hollow mendacity of the American Dream. Most recently, it supplied the title, Careless People, for Sarah WynnWilliams’s best-selling takedown of Meta (formerly Facebook).4 But first and last, The Great Gatsby is a story of unrequited love that invites rereading or even reciting, as poetry does when there’s too much music in the words to be absorbed in a single listening. However counterfeit Gatsby may sometimes seem, there is, as Nick says, “something gorgeous about him,” something ingenuous in his “extraordinary gift for hope.” And so the sadness is fierce when, forced at last to relinquish his imperious dream, he “looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” The story of this man—once brazen, now bereft—is told with such ravishing prose that he must have merged again in Fitzgerald’s imagination with Keats’s broken lover, stranded where “the sedge is withered from the lake,/And no birds sing.” . The Classifieds The Classifieds To place an ad or for other inquiries: email: classified@nybooks.com You may also place an ad through our website at www.nybooks.com/classifieds/ Classified Department The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016 All contents subject to Publisher’s approval. 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