Innholdsfortegnelse for October 3, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Tareq Baconi is President of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a research fellow at the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research, and the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance. Christopher de Bellaigue’s latest book is The Lion House. Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. His books include Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Poverty, by America, which was published last year. Forrest Gander, a writer and translator, is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His novel-poem Mojave Ghost will be published in October. Linda Greenhouse is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and a frequent contributor to The New York…

Jonathan Schell published “The Village of Ben Suc” in the July 15, 1967, issue of The New Yorker when he was twenty-three years old. (That same year the article came out as a book, published by Knopf.) I’d been Schell’s classmate and friend since we were very young, and in 1967 I had thought we were both still more or less boys, figuring things out. When I read his article I realized that Schell had mysteriously and secretly grown up. To my amazement, he’d somehow figured out how to express his intense and passionate outlook on the world through the cool and simple sentences of a factual article about a military campaign, and I could even see his characteristic sense of the absurd glinting out from behind the grimly serious…

Alexandre 25 East 73rd Street, New York, NY, 10021, 3rd Floor 212-755-2828; alexandregallery.com Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM-5:30PM Emily Nelligan: Early Drawings Continues through October 26, 2024 Helicline Fine Art (212) 204-8833; hello@heliclinefineart.com; heliclinefineart.com Midtown Manhattan, Private Dealer by appointment Cuban - Latin American Drawing Edward T Pollack Fine Arts 14 Maine Street, #025, Brunswick, ME 04011 (617) 610-7173; www.edpollackfinearts.com Gallery hours by appointment only Visit us at the Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair September 27-29, 2024 Details at https://finefairs.com/new-york%2C-ny and at the Virtual Empire State Print Fair at https://empirestateprintfair.com LewAllen Galleries Rallyard Arts District 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 988-3250  contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com Born in the Bronx, Rivera distilled the drama he observed along New York City streets and subways in the late 1950s-70s before…

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger. Harper, 290 pp., $29.99 The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti. Other Press, 165 pp., $17.99 (paper) Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence. Norton, 285 pp., $28.95; $19.99 (paper) Of the many books published by Charles Darwin, his second to last, coauthored with his son Francis, ranks among the most tedious. The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) chronicles a series of painstaking botanical experiments Darwin père and fils conducted in the late 1870s. One involved attaching little squares of cardboard to seedlings’ roots to see how they responded. For another, they affixed needles to various plant…

Now there are creases that curvefrom the flanges of my noseto the scissure of my lips.And a deep cleft, like somethingleft by a hatchet,above the bridge of my nose. The brusque, impersonal obstinacy of aging. Weeding around the bushes in frontof our house, I breathe in the slightly licoricescent of rotting leaves. Though it’s twilight, down the street I hearworkers with their tree chipper coming nearer. In the glimmer and darkfallingafterglow, my small exuberances hive in me like worms in a cadaver. I’ll just sleep for a whilewith these stones over my eyes. Don’t turn away or you’ll lose me. But there you go anyway, drifting out inthe saline backwash of dream.…

Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4 by Michel Leiris, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth. Yale University Press, 316 pp., $35.00 Throughout his long and varied literary career, Michel Leiris’s experiments in autobiography made him a central figure in midcentury French intellectual life. Yet his contributions are conspicuously missing from the current conversations about memoir, autobiography, autofiction, and other writing of the self. An unfocused student, Leiris fell in with the Surrealists and agreed, on a lark, to serve as the secretary-archivist on a two-year government-financed ethnographic expedition to Africa. His subsequent working life was split into two distinct parts that influenced each other obliquely. By day he was an ethnographer in his basement office at the Musée de l’Homme; after work he was an art critic…

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich/I Am Me an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, June 6–September 9, 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jay A. Clarke and Jill Lloyd. Prestel, 205 pp., $50.00 At the auction houses the predatory collectors come and go, talking of resale prices high and low. How much can you get for current favorites—Cecily Brown? Mickalene Thomas?—or for early Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden? And what about all the women artists whose work, once overlooked, is enjoying a revival, suddenly seen in a new, brighter—and inevitably more commodified—light: Hilma af Klint, Alice Neel, or Leonora Carrington, whose painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s in May?…

Sometimes I write to try to figure something outI hadn’t understood before, that somebody else has said.I’ve no idea what “the divinity within” might mean,And yet I’ve heard it said so often that it must mean somethingEveryone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.It could mean we’re created in God’s image, if there were one,Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.It’s not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the worldIs real enough without it. It’s that each ordinary life seems at the same timeSo miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be. Why do we think we’re something other than we are? Look at the…

and ask, when does it come to you? Is it a bluemountain or a blushing expanse? Are you mostpreoccupied with the details or the generalshape? In most cases, I am unambiguous. Iresearch from before and wait for movement orlight to have a sense. Don’t have a sense. Doyou? Yesterday the stars are a map and tomorrowthey were a feeling. I see my face in thestars and the sea for the first time like a navigatorholding his breath through the fog. Because ittook five thousand years for the first vision ofthe world to take shape. For the stars to becomeprophecy, then veil, then dust. I am senselessand unreadable just like the ancient stars in themodern. I refuse to help you sail a calm ocean,much less an angry one, and yet the…

Just Journalists To the Editors: I greatly appreciated Susan Faludi’s recent essay, “All the News That’s Fit to Feel” [NYR, August 15], on the attitudes and expectations that have historically greeted women in the press room. But I would like to stick up for the female journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their work had more value than this article presents. The essay uncritically employs the terms “stunt girl” and “sob sister,” slurs coined by male writers to belittle their very successful, well-paid peers; most of the women despised these names, considering themselves just journalists. Faludi notes that, in terms of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, “the women they hired weren’t brought on to report serious news.” Whatever the publishers’ intent, these reporters did cover serious…