Innholdsfortegnelse for April 24, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

COLUMBIA AND THE WAR ON SPEECH A Statement by Constitutional Law Scholars on Trump’s Funding Cuts Nadia Abu El-Haj: The Campaign Against Mahmoud Khalil PLUS Nabil Salih: Baghdad’s Construction Boom Ben Mauk: Matt Eich’s New, Weird America Poorna Swami: Love and Longing in Bombay Matthew Rivera: Finding Frankie Newton 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.…

Audition by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead, 197 pp., $28.00 From the outlines of their plots Katie Kitamura’s novels could be mistaken for melodramas, or concepts for a bingeable TV series. In A Separation (2017) an estranged wife goes to Greece to reunite with her husband, only to discover that he’s been brutally murdered. In Intimacies (2021) an American woman finds herself serving as the mouthpiece for a war criminal when she is appointed as his interpreter at The Hague. In Kitamura’s latest, Audition, an actress is confronted by a young man who claims to be her son, and though this cannot possibly be the case (wouldn’t she remember giving birth?), she invites him to live with her and her husband as their child. But such summaries are misleading, because the novels…

The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda. City Lights, 258 pp., $17.95 (paper) Every few months I visit a local graveyard to help tend to the headstones of unidentified migrants who lost their lives along Arizona’s border with Mexico. To reach it one must drive through Tucson’s Evergreen Cemetery, past large pines and manicured cedars that shade the grassy grave sites below. Beyond these well-cared-for plots is a patch of dry, unshaded earth known as Pauper’s Field. It is here that the Pima County Public Fiduciary, over many decades, has laid to rest those whose families cannot afford burial or cremation. Pauper’s Field is located on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, but I first learned of its existence only a few years ago, when I began to meet…

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne. Scribner, 228 pp., $28.99 It must be hard to find the appropriate tone in which to tell a family horror story that goes back generations—a problem compounded when an ancestor was not the innocent victim of that horror but one of its perpetrators, or at least a willfully obtuse collaborator. One doesn’t want to sound reflexively judgmental or apologetic, secretly proud of one’s criminal DNA, or resentful of the burden levied by the sins of the dead. It must be even more complex when the consequences of the crime are enormous, when the skeletons in the closet are, by any standard, numerous. Such challenges must have faced Joe Dunthorne in writing Children of Radium, an account of his discovery of, and…

can still speak from their cage? It’s been quiet for a while now.A wind came through &drowned out the last of thechatter. It was a terrible chatter.Then the rain came and we thought itmight clean us.It did not clean us. They took pictures. You have them I assume.Someone must have them.There must be a record.Of what we lived. Or thatwe lived. I don’t expect you to care.There used to be birdsong. A Carolina wren was piped inover and over withoutceasing.It did something to the latticework of our cages.As if it all caught fire.But it’s been a long time. Since we saw real fire.Even that would bebetter. I’d put my hands in it, I’d feel it with my fingers.Sometimes I don’t know if I havefingers, there is so little to touch…

Kennan: A Life Between Worlds by Frank Costigliola. Princeton University Press, 624 pp., $39.95; $24.95 (paper) In The Silent Woman (1994), her meditation on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the limits of biography, Janet Malcolm insists on the “epistemological insecurity” that attends every attempt to unlock the story of another person’s life. “We almost never know the truth of what happened,” she writes. “The narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life.” You wouldn’t know this from contemporary reading habits: year after year, colorful and expansive biographies find their way to the best-seller lists, beguiling readers with pattern-seeking accounts of significant individuals that cast their life and work in mutual illumination. George F. Kennan, the subject of half a dozen biographies, is…

Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism by Rachel Shabi. Oneworld, 281 pp., $28.00 Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Willard Wood. Other Press, 105 pp., $15.99 (paper) Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart. Knopf, 172 pp., $26.00 The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra. Penguin Press, 291 pp., $28.00 To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism by Yaacov Yadgar. New York University Press, 215 pp., $30.00 What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh. Other Press, 113 pp., $15.99 (paper) [Occupied from Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Israeli Constitutional Coup] by Michael Sfard. Berl Katznelson Center, 181 pp., 50.00 The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine by Margaret Olin and David Shulman. Intellect, 227 pp.,…

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. Francisco Cantú is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center and the former National Legal Director of the ACLU. Fara Dabhoiwala ’s book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea will be published this year. He is researching a biography of the eighteenth-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams and teaches in the department of history at Princeton. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro…

On March 9 Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, posted on X about an apparent threat by Elon Musk to deny Ukraine access to the Starlink satellite system it uses to guide its military drones. Musk, whose company SpaceX operates Starlink, had written that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Sikorski noted that Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers. US secretary of state Marco Rubio weighed in to admonish Sikorski: “Say thank you because without Starlink Ukraine would have lost this war long ago…

We believe—1. In the One God: 2.Source of all,ruler of all,maker of heaven and earth:of all things seen or unseen. And in one Lord: 7.Jesus of Nazareth,Christ the Messiah,the only-born Word of God;eternally issued of that of the One:God of God, light of light,true God of true God;issued, not made:the same being as the One;and through whom all things aremade; That for us mortals 16.and for our salvation came down from heaven;and was made fleshof the Holy Spiritand the Virgin Mary;and became human; Was also crucified, for our sake, 23. in the time of Pontius Pilate:and suffered, and was buried;and arose on the third day,in accordance with the scriptures,and went back up into heaven;and sits in power beside the One:and shall come again, in glory,to judge those living and dead;and…

Great novels are not always recognized in their own time; often they lie waiting, as if in ambush, for the future to catch up to their achievements. “Nothing odd will do long,” Dr. Johnson quipped to Boswell. “Tristram Shandy did not last.” Sometimes odd things outlive the savviest critics. When odd literary works happen to be written by black writers, it can be harder still to tell whether their neglect stems from discerning judgment or the censure of contemporary taste. William Melvin Kelley’s 1970 magnum opus, Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a creolized answer to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, was described as “exhaustingly difficult to read” by Kirkus Reviews and was out of print for half a century before its revival in 2020. We can agree or disagree—as people always have of Finnegans…

When it came to ranking writers, the Texas novelist Larry McMurtry wielded the word “minor” like an edged weapon. He used it to fix them in their place, recognizing that they had done something, were pretty good or better, were in the race—but didn’t make the cut. Late in life he told a book dealer that he had a hard time naming any recent writer he judged really “major.” “Mailer and Roth and Bellow,” he said, “I think all those guys are minor.” Mailer, Roth, and Bellow—all minor? It kind of takes the breath away. But McMurtry was serious about literature. A semester spent prowling the stacks in the Fondren Library at Rice University in 1954 taught him to know a great book when he read one. He didn’t just…

Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress by Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 71 pp., $24.95 Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Was he right? Some skeptics might question whether there even is such a thing as “the moral universe.” What we call morality, they may say, is nothing more than the subjective judgments of people in various times and places. Customs or religious teachings may impose a high degree of uniformity within a particular society, but cultures differ, and there is no basis for saying that one has gotten it right and the other wrong. It would therefore be an illusion to think that the shift from one conception of morality to another amounts to progress,…

To the Editors: In a recent book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023), I argue that contemporary science shows that free will is a myth (along with the passing opinion that the world would become more humane if that myth were jettisoned). In her review of the book [“Turtles All the Way Up,” NYR, February 13], Jessica Riskin strongly rejects the idea that science informs the free will debate. She bases this on two issues that seem logically and factually suspect: 1. The accretion of scientific knowledge Crucially, in evaluating what science says about free will, no singular scientific discipline precludes its possibility—no gene(s), neurotransmitter(s), hormone(s), early developmental epigenetic effect(s), and so on, accomplishes this. Collectively, however, they certainly do. Riskin rejects the notion that multiple scientific disciplines…

Text from Rite 4: An Experimental Liturgy for the Eucharist, Based on the Book of Common Prayer (forthcoming, Trinity Press, DC); © 2025 J.A. Frazer/TrinityPress.org. Meticulously updating the Book of Common Prayer, Rite 4 offers inclusive, graceful texts and a fiexible, modular framework for the Eucharist liturgy of the Episcopal Church. While there is also a more traditional form, the Contemporary translation of the Nicene Creed, above, updates the idiom and uses functional equivalents for Father (Source, One), Son (Word), and in lines 16 (mortals), 29 (in power beside), and 32 (presence). The italics also mark interpolations for syntax, clarity, or rhythm—but both forms are otherwise close literal (formally equivalent) translations from the Greek. t Trinity Press www.TrinityPress.org…

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Viking, 660 pp., $40.00 “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” So opens the most erotic book of the Bible, the Song of Songs. “Surely this mode of beginning… is not a beginning,” remarked Bernard of Clairvaux, in a sermon to his chapterhouse of celibate monks in the early twelfth century. Bernard was right, of course. The woman of the Song of Songs does not begin from the beginning but from the raw middle of desire. “How delightful a ploy of speech this is,” marveled Bernard, “prompted into life by the kiss … inspiring the reader and enticing him on.” The poem pleads for interpretation, and Bernard satisfied its yearning with exegesis. He transformed each…

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry edited by George Getschow. University of Texas Press, 268 pp., $29.95 Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 259 pp., $18.99 (paper) In a Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry, with an introduction by Diana Ossana. Liveright, 204 pp., $16.95 (paper) Literary Life by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 175 pp., $14.00 (paper) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 858 pp., $24.99 (paper) Paradise by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 159 pp., $13.00 (paper) Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 206 pp., $16.99 (paper) Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry. Simon and Schuster, 204 pp., $18.99 (paper) The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry.…

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below. She would read, with an air of intense absorption, about people who seemed to her very much like the people she had met in her first year at an old East Coast university, which in turn seemed very much like…