Innholdsfortegnelse for October 5, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher Benfey is the Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke. His latest book is If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. Claire DeVoogd’s first collection of poems, Via, will be published in November. Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and the Chair of the Society of Fellows at Harvard and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. His new book, Bad Jew: A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, will be published next year. Lynn Hunt is a Distinguished Research Professor in History at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her books include Inventing Human Rights, Writing History in the Global Era, and, most recently, History: Why It Matters. Devin Johnston is the author of seven books of poetry. His latest collection…

but that is water, and I the unsure, un-believable sense, to see asthough my eyes were changedby the taking off ofhabit, that habit of waking upmyself at blue day’sstart, at whistle, was rapt insuch turquoise consequenceto see, as solidity dropped from matter, becomingbelow me all deliquescentand teary brine, and I the boat the spineof which cut downand delicious shot along to meetitself again behind—that, and underthat, the sunlit, moving placewe traveled over.…

In just a little over a year, the Supreme Court has gutted the right to abortion, outlawed affirmative action in higher education, and thrown out the entire body of doctrine protecting the separation of church and state. These decisions—as well as others concerning free speech, the free exercise of religion, and the courts’ power to overturn important environmental regulations—mark a judicial revolution in constitutional law: an era-defining rewriting of basic rules and principles in the light of an ideology championed by the Court’s six conservative justices, three of whom were appointed by Donald Trump. This conservative constitutional revolution at the Court is ongoing, but it has reached the end of its beginning. Now it feels possible to identify its structure and strategy. This is an essential step in predicting where…

Questioning Judicial Authority To the Editors: Like many law professors, I read Laurence H. Tribe’s “Constrain the Court—Without Crippling It” [NYR, August 17] with great interest. My first book, Constitutional Faith (1988), analogized classic responses to the Constitution, and in particular to the Supreme Court, to basic divisions in all of the “Abrahamic” religions. One first had to decide what constituted authoritative materials: Were they texts alone or were they supplemented, as in Judaism, for example, by an oral tradition or, as in Catholicism, by doctrines developed over time? Or one could be a radical Protestant (or a Karaite Jew) and declare some version of sola scriptura. But that was only one question. The other was whether there was an institution empowered to deliver definitive resolution of such controversies as…

Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. Deep Vellum, 295 pp., $16.95 (paper) Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing. Petrushevskaya described her stories as “orchards of unusual possibilities” to Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, the translators of…

for Robert Adamson, 1943–2022 First words, last words—mostly they’re inaudible,like the mimicry of bowerbirdsor a radio through cotton woolwith fuzz around the frequency.You guess at what the words might bebut no guess seems quite plausible. First words, last words,the open mouth might hold a placeto fill whenever time affordsa waking dream, or some such phrase,or feathers found inside a bookof Shelley that you turned and shookuntil they molted to the floor.In piles of catalogs you findthe dead leave everything behind. First word, last word,more cry than word, more wheeze than cry:through fuzz and cotton wool you heardno last hello or first good-bye,but muttering that might have beentoday, berley, yes, or spin;such whispers don’t quite signify. First word, last word,they sound both civilized and wild,part human and part bowerbird,the parts as…

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb. Norton, 370 pp., $30.00 Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. Penguin Press, 346 pp., $30.00 If there’s a star in the climate-driven energy transition, it’s certainly the electric vehicle (EV). The heat pump—the efficient replacement for both furnace and air conditioner—is generally squat and beige; the electric cooktop—the efficient replacement for the gas cooktop that emits greenhouse gases and may be giving your kids asthma—is less glamorous than the glowing Vikings and Wolfs made famous by a hundred sweating chefs engaged in TV battles. But the electric car and the electric truck are at least as sleek and glamorous as their internal combustion forebears. Last year’s Super Bowl was the coming-out…

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad. London: Faber and Faber, 472 pp., $29.95 New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced its 2023–2024 season last February, and there is much to be excited about. There will be four Met premieres of provocative contemporary works: Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (on opening night, September 26), Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas (the company’s first opera in Spanish in almost a century), and John Adams’s El Niño. Two others—the 2021 production of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones (the Met’s first opera by a black composer) and last season’s production of Kevin Puts’s The Hours—are returning. There will also be new productions of Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s La…

Art of the Chicken: A Master Chef ’s Paintings, Stories, and Recipes of the Humble Bird by Jacques Pépin. Harvest, 228 pp., $30.00 He who can pay every day for a dinner fit for a hundred persons, is often satisfied after having eaten the thigh of a chicken. –Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste If you are a bird, odds are that you are a chicken. Since the sixteenth century the global bird population has steadily decreased, in both the number of species and the number of individuals, and each year more of them are chickens. Today there are some 33 billion chickens in the world, although this number can fluctuate substantially according to slaughtering trends. If you are an American, odds are that you eat meat. In this…

Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson. New Directions, 264 pp., $17.95 (paper) The Apprentice Tourist: Travels Along the Amazon to Peru, Along the Madeira to Bolivia, and Around Marajó Before Saying Enough Already by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese and with an introduction and notes by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. Penguin, 175 pp., $17.00 (paper) Amar, Verbo Intransitivo/To Love, Intransitive Verb by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese by Ana Lessa-Schmidt. New London Librarium, bilingual edition, 359 pp., $30.00; English-only edition, 256 pp., $16.95 (paper) The central conundrum in Brazil’s struggle to construct a cultural identity of its own has remained remarkably constant since the first Portuguese explorers arrived in 1500 and encountered Tupi-speaking peoples: To what extent…

The New York Review Of Books THE MOTH: PRESENTS A GAME OF STORYTELLING PBS’s The Moth is all about true stories told live, and this game is designed to prompt a volley of sharing and listening between players. Created by the program’s storytelling experts, this interactive card game encourages lively conversations, sparks creativity, and improves public speaking abilities. Players share their own true stories based on themes including Love Hurts, Mama Rules, Busted, Hot Mess, Duped, and dozens more. #05-MOTHG • $17.99 THE REAL WOMEN OF GREEK MYTHS: 1,000-PIECE PUZZLE In this beautifully detailed puzzle, rediscover the lives and stories of the women of Greek myths, from goddesses, mortals, and mythical creatures alike, from Medusa and Medea to Helen, Euridice, Phaedra, Artemis, and others. These classic figures, mortals and goddesses,…

Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to Covid-19 Vaccines by Alexander Zaitchik. Counterpoint, 285 pp., $26.00; $17.95 (paper) One of the main corporate participants in Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar crash program to create and produce a Covid-19 vaccine, was Moderna. The federal government gave Moderna, which in 2019 was a small, unprofitable pharmaceutical firm, some $2.48 billion for vaccine development and bought millions of doses at $26 each for essentially free distribution to US residents. Moderna’s profits soared to $21 billion over the course of the pandemic. In late 2022, when federal subsidies seemed on the verge of ending, the company announced that it would soon offer an updated version of its vaccine at as much as $130 per dose. Many Americans…