Innholdsfortegnelse for June 8, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Torrents have been written about open access, but little comes from those who supply or consume knowledge: the scholars who produce the works that are to be accessible and their potential readers, whether colleagues or the general public. Instead, the drum is beaten by librarians, information- and data-science scholars, media professors, and others who populate a kind of second-order stratum of academia, scholars of scholarship. A vast quantity of work has billowed forth, professionalizing the field by making it a full-time job just to keep up. Countless conferences, workshops, networks, study groups, Twitter feeds, journals, and blogs keep up a tireless outpouring. The caravan moves on, but where is it going? Founding and running open-access journals and publishers, organizing boycotts of the worst-offending academic presses, lobbying politicians to reform copyright…

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery. Bloomsbury, 230 pp., £16.99 (to be published in the US in July) The interiors of AndyWarhol’s Factory, at 231 East 47th Street, were famously all silver: silver foil on the walls, silver paint on the pipes and ducts and furniture, mirrors everywhere. Even the elevator was silver. The intention of Warhol and his decorator, the photographer and Factory acolyte Billy Name, was to create an environment that felt both futuristic and camp—to conjure a future that mocked contemporary futuristic style. Mae, the seventeen-year-old protagonist and narrator of Nicole Flattery’s debut novel, Nothing Special, arrives at the Factory in 1966, and describes it thus: “A room covered in demented silver paper, tacky and peeling. The light poured in and reflected myself back at me.” Later in…

The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God by Robin Vose. London: Reaktion, 296 pp., $35.00 In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this problem. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads. But humans misunderstand; we grope for meaning; we struggle to be understood. From the beginning of the Catholic Church…

The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution by James Oakes. Norton, 256 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper) Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United States Constitution was essentially proslavery in its foundations, and that any attempt to breathe antislavery meaning into it was strained or rhetorical and not textually supported. But no more. In his remarkable and challenging book The Crooked Path to Abolition, he makes the case that there were effectively two constitutions written in Philadelphia that summer…

Joan Acocella is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new collection of essays, Book Reports, will be published in February. David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale. His biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, received the Pulitzer Prize for History. Howard W. French is a Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, was published in 2021. Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time. Trevor Jackson is an economic historian at George Washington University. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism, was published last year. Laura Kolbe is a doctor…

Looking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital,a hedge school, a diner, and an open-air prison with my bare handsand operating them at a continual loss. In this instant they are playing and I’m sitting on a bench where the unhindered sun applies itselfand I can feel it on my skin asking how it’s been since we last touched,and I tell her things are all right mostly: the sky is the epitome of sky, the clouds give birth to themselves, the little people are getting even betterat belittling the bigger people, and I am done in. I think I did my bit.Birdwatching today in Central Park until I saw an osprey with a fish in its beak and a splinter in a finger meant we had to walk out…

I saw them from the canal, nosingtheir way through a spare enclosure behindthe zoo. Dusk gray, two of a kind,and utterly unimposing, they were aimlesslycrossing their corner of Regent’s Parklike a pair of sullen castoffs from the arkand wearing their dirt shamelessly. Who could blame them for their ennui?They were just the secondwarthogs, their features having been reckonedby some zookeeper as not quite worthy of being seen. Oh to be prima ballerinas!Not just understudiessent back to paddocks muddiedby packs of hyenas but actual queens!Believe me when I say there was nothing shoddyabout them. They were half head, half body,and their tusks were terribly clean.…

Best Guesses To the Editors: Fintan O’Toole is a brilliant writer, and usually a sharp-eyed observer of things cultural and political, here and abroad. In his latest piece, “Bump and Grind” [NYR, May 11], he again excels as a writer. Regrettably, however, he falls short as a legal observer, and in a way that is unhelpful to the body politic. With wit and a deft pen, he belittles a Manhattan grand jury’s March 30 indictment of Donald Trump. Trump stands accused of falsifying business records in connection with his alleged hush money payment of $130,000 to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels. O’Toole argues that the prosecution is much ado about very little. Unfortunately, he minimizes the very large thing—at least to this former prosecutor—that is the core of the…

“A voice like no other” From the unique world of Oscar Mandel’s imagination his Gobble-Up Stories, Chi Po and the Sorcerer, and The History of Sigismund, Prince of Poland are collected in the 270 pages of Otherwise Fables ($16). In a remote corner of the world which no human being has ever seen there flourished some trees which, as no one has ever seen them, I can’t describe to you, though I like to imagine them as looking like grand cabbages sitting on their trunks, why not? One day a seedling was wafted into their midst from eastern New Jersey. The seedling took root next to one of these trees, and it too flourished. First a sapling came up, and then, many years later, a pine tree mature enough at…

Distant Fathers by Marina Jarre, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New Vessel, 215 pp., $16.95 (paper) Return to Latvia by Marina Jarre, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New Vessel, 329 pp., $17.95 (paper) In 1925 a girl named Marina was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, to a Jewish Latvian father and a Protestant Italian mother. Ten years later the parents underwent an acrimonious divorce and the mother took Marina and her sister back to Italy. The girls were raised by their maternal grandmother in an Alpine village not far from Turin, because their mother, a schoolteacher with no taste for family life, preferred to find work far from home, just as she had been doing in Latvia. Marina’s father, meanwhile, remained in Riga,…