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

In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement from NASA: A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will destroy most of Europe upon impact, causing seismic events that will generate one-thousand-foot-high tsunamis and nine-hundred-degree surface winds traveling faster than the speed of sound. Within hours, all of the continents will be on fire as the impact’s molten debris rains down from the upper atmosphere. The family manages to get on a small plane heading for Greenland. As they fly, Garrity dreams of a verdant homeland of lush groves and sprinklers watering the lawn…

The Constitution of the War on Drugs by David Pozen. Oxford University Press, 292 pp., $27.95 As failures go, the war on drugs has few peers. Formally launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971 but in practice dating from much earlier, it has locked up millions. Today there are 360,000 people incarcerated for drug crimes in the United States; from 2010 to 2019 state and federal police made more than a million drug arrests per year. We spend billions of dollars on enforcement. And yet drugs appear to be as plentiful and potent as ever. Meanwhile drug laws foster a black market enforced by gang violence, which accounts for 15 percent of all homicides, according to a Justice Deparment estimate. Despite proportional drug use by whites and minority groups, African…

Mr Loverman a television series directed by Hong Khaou The front room was the prime signifier of achievement for the pioneering West Indian migrants to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, now known as the Windrush generation. A version of the Victorian parlor, the pristine front room was emblematic of the quest for respectability, with a settee whose protective transparent plastic covering was never shed, crocheted doilies adorning every item of furniture, and a glass, gold-trimmed drinks cabinet in the shape of a ship’s bow. The dapper seventy-four-year-old Barrington Jedidiah Walker (Lennie James) is the embodiment of the spirit of the West Indian front room in Mr Loverman, the BBC TV series adapted from Bernardine Evaristo’s novel of the same name. He is rarely seen without a fedora and…

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. Norton, 614 pp., $32.50 “I have been a liberal all my life,” Andrew O’Hagan told an interviewer last April. I have been on every march. But I have to look now and say: “Did we achieve as much as we hoped or did we let ourselves off too easily?”… We did well. We got the free education [British students didn’t pay for university until 1998], we got the equity, we got the houses. We must say to our children: “We owe you an explanation.” Now, over the course of a 614-page novel, O’Hagan sets out to provide it (and a whole lot besides). Caledonian Road’s main character is Campbell Flynn, who, like his creator, was born in working-class Glasgow in 1968, grew up with an…

The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers by Josh Cowen. Harvard Education Press, 200 pp., $34.00 (paper) Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public schools by supporting vouchers, which divert money from public education systems to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools. But most voters today do not favor vouchers. In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed. In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated. Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump—and in both states public…

I first visited Los Angeles exactly fifty years ago and fell in love with it the moment I saw the gigantic steel and sprayed concrete doughnut atop the Randy’s Donuts drive-in on my way out of LAX. On the plane I read the architecture critic Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), an appreciative and seductive study that marked a major turning point in the appraisal of the city’s idiosyncratic character following decades of disdain. Yet what initially grabbed me about LA was not so much its architecture, high or low—though its preponderance of clean white (if mainly mediocre) buildings was so refreshing after the sad gray decrepitude of New York City in the Seventies—but rather its incredible green lushness. Here were bushy ficuses planted as street…

Political repression is a matter of the Soviet past, according to Vladimir Putin. The human rights group Memorial disagrees. Although the Russian government disbanded Memorial’s Moscow-based Human Rights Center four years ago, the group’s project supporting political prisoners lives on, with almost all its staff now abroad.1 As of February 11, Memorial has officially recognized 837 political prisoners. Though over half of them are confined on the basis of religion, since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most arrests have been made for actions against the war. The month after the invasion, Russia added to its criminal code “discrediting” and “intentionally spreading false information” about the military. Speaking of executions in Bucha, for instance, became illegal. To identify a detainee as a political prisoner, Memorial follows…

Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation by Sune Engel Rasmussen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 339 pp., $30.00 How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan by Amin Saikal. Yale University Press, 306 pp., $30.00 The first time the Taliban asked Omari to place a bomb beneath a convoy of American soldiers, he was happy the detonator used a motorcycle battery rather than a cell phone battery because the latter often blew up in people’s faces. He buried the bomb in the sand moments before four American Humvees passed over it, and hiding in tall grass he watched as a door flew over his head and American bodies fell to the ground. It was 2011, he was sixteen, and he had been…

To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah by Dvora Hacohen. Harvard University Press, 388 pp., $35.00 Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream by Francine Klagsbrun. Yale University Press, 239 pp., $26.00 The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America by Daniel Schulman. Vintage, 568 pp., $23.00 (paper) Last year the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, entitled “Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken,” of a dozen monumental drawings by the Israeli artist Netta Lieber Sheffer, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The drawings are an expression of a wish on the Jewish left that history had not made Israel the prosperous, powerful, ethnically restricted, violence-plagued, and widely despised state that it…