Innholdsfortegnelse for February 13, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

THE END OF THE BIDEN ERA Brent Cebul: The Paradox of Bidenomics  Diane Ravitch: The Coming War on Schools Dan Kaufman: The Revitalized, Threatened NLRB PLUS Stefan Tarnowski: The Syrian Gulag Katie Kadue: That’s Roman Entertainment! Nawal Arjini: The Cruel Optimism of ‘Slow Horses’ Claudio Lomnitz: Mexico’s Revolutionary Printmakers C. L. R. James and Stuart Hall: The 1976 BBC Interview Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at nybooks.com/issues.…

at the checkpoint during the search they confiscatedan old family photographa powerbanktoner concealer lip gloss mascaraa block of marlborosa ring with a sealher beryl diademher blessed symbols of sovereignty and judgmentthey groped around in her underpants and bra allegedlylooking for hidden cashwhat are you doingwhatcalm down they said Inannathe laws of the underworld are harshor whatever your name is Oksana listen upkeep your mouth shut during the sacred ritualsher whole viber chat historywith her husband and daughtershe knew to erase ahead of time (originally published in both Ukrainian and Russian; translated by Ainsley Morse)…

Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, among other books. Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale. He is the translator, most recently, of Iman Mersal’s poetry collection The Threshold. Deborah Eisenberg has written five collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Your Duck Is My Duck. Nicole Flattery, a writer and critic, is the author of the short story collection Show Them a Good Time and the novel Nothing Special. She lives in Dublin. Maria Galina is a poet, prose writer, translator, and literary critic. She lives in Odesa. Ainsley Morse teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and the languages of former…

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler. Random House, 315 pp., $28.00 As a female novelist who was born in 1985, Halle Butler is routinely mentioned alongside other millennial writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Catherine Lacey, and Raven Leilani. The laziness of these comparisons reminds me of what Butler often satirizes: someone in an office cubicle halfheartedly putting together an Excel spreadsheet toward the end of a tough week. Their eyes are on the clock. Patricia Lockwood? Is that another one? Sure, why not? Let’s be honest, nobody really cares about their job anyway. Put those women together, it’s fine, it’s nearly 5:00 PM. This is funny, in a way Butler might find funny, since the idea that animates all three of her novels is that not all millennials are…

Franz Kafka an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, May 30–October 27, 2024, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, November 22, 2024–April 13, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 175 pp., $55.00 If Franz Kafka, whose arresting appearance we know so well from photographs, had looked like Ernest Hemingway or Homer Simpson or Boris Johnson—almost anybody other than Franz Kafka—the figure of a hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, self-enclosed neurotic, whose quivering otherworldly sensitivity unfitted him to the trivialities of human intercourse, might not stand so firmly between us and him. The ears suggesting extraterrestrial ancestry, the “intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control,” as Philip Roth puts it. Even Kafka’s baby picture reproduced on a wall of the Morgan…

Edges of Ailey an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Adrienne Edwards. Whitney Museum of American Art, 387 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) She shuffles on her knees in a dress as white as death. She has been told to scrub, march, twirl, smooth, shake, pound, kick, grasp a hard knot just below the navel and bend, bend. A length of fabric is her rag, her crown, her votive. She moves like athletes do after training under harsher conditions so that their elegance still bears the trace of some great resistance. When she lays her burden down—when this cloth that could swaddle or hang lies limply on the ground—the force of all…

The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle Simon and Schuster, 969 pp., $34.99 Charles de Gaulle saved France twice. The first time was in June 1940, when the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler after France’s defeat by the Germans and set up a new collaborationist and authoritarian French state at Vichy, since Paris was occupied. De Gaulle, a relatively unknown brigadier general, gathered a few dissidents in London to form what became known as Free France. He gambled rashly but correctly that by contributing, however marginally, to the war against the Axis he was assuring a French presence on the ultimately victorious Allied side. He saved France again in May 1958, when the faltering Fourth Republic faced a revolt by army leaders in…

There is the sheer spectacle of this falls:it always plummets and it never dies.But if you close your eyesthe rush recalls a dead-on headwind’s steel wool of blarerebuking an intrusive jumbo jetso coarsely you forgetthe hiss is there, and static pirating the final stationto notify you, in a lost broadcast,your journey has at lastreached desolation, and summer falling from an interposingold box of Freon as autumnal airon a recliner chairas you start dozing. Just mind your landing from those scenes of zen:their breathy vastnesses and engines runningcome down to a stunningShhh again.…

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara E. Mattei. University of Chicago Press, 452 pp., $30.00; $22.50 (paper) Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy by Elizabeth Popp Berman. Princeton University Press, 329 pp., $24.95 (paper) Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality by Angus Deaton. Princeton University Press, 271 pp., $17.95 (paper) In a 1968 presidential campaign speech at the University of Kansas, Robert F. Kennedy warned that an overreliance on economics had led American politicians to misunderstand fundamental facts about their country. While the American economy might appear strong based on the statistics that economists monitored—the unemployment rate was then under 4 percent—there was much that they missed, he said. When…