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
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—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
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author of The New Jim Crow
by NgNJgƭ wa Thiong’o
“Unearths the hidden connections
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learn' is the most important lesson.”
—Donzell Lee, PhD, president,
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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
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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
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Dissertation on
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The New York Review
Contributors
Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King, the
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of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy,
September 1939–March 1942.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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January 1, 2025. 10.75 × 10.75 in. 103 pp.
University of Maine Press
978-0-89101-138-5 Hardcover, $40.00
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May 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
op.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 pres-
ence 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-year- old 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. The
Containment shows that the door had
closed long before.
3
Reviewed in these pages by Jonathan Zimmerman, November 22, 2018.
The New York Review
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37
Iran: A Grand Bargain?
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, center, at the annual Army Day parade, Tehran, April 18, 2025
For the past forty-six years, since the
Iranian Revolution of 1979, the enmity
between Iran and the United States has
been a major factor in Middle East politics. Washington objects to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and
its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon,
the Houthis of Yemen, and other members of the “axis of resistance” to Israel
and the US in the region. It has armed
and given intelligence to Iran’s enemies,
tried to destroy its economy, and assassinated its most influential military
strategist and commander, all without
formally espousing regime change.
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 neces-
sary 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.
.
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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.”
.
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