Innholdsfortegnelse for August 21, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

John Berryman (1914–1972) was an American poet and scholar. His poem in this issue will be included in Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, to be published this December. Costică Brădăţan is a Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. He is the author of, among other books, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility. Sean M. Carroll is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins. His most recent book is Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Chloë Clifton-Wright is one of Peckham’s most freelance journalists. Any similarity between her Hughesian exegetics and those of the risible Richard Ayoade is entirely coincidental. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law…

At his confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared judges to umpires. “It’s my job to call balls and strikes,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” It’s not clear that anyone ever really bought the analogy, but at least since President Donald Trump nominated his third Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, giving the conservatives a solid 6–3 advantage, they have not just called balls and strikes; they have repeatedly changed the strike zone. Some of those changes have been obvious, as when the Court overruled Roe v. Wade and deprived half the country of a right they had counted on for almost half a century. But overturning precedent is costly to an institution whose legitimacy turns significantly on its commitment to be…

A Little Book About the Big Bang by Tony Rothman. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 225 pp., $24.95 An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe by Will Kinney. MIT Press, 237 pp., $24.95; $22.95 (paper) On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog. Bantam, 313 pp., $28.99; $20.00 (paper) Should scientists be embarrassed that they can’t settle on a definition for the Big Bang? The cosmologist Will Kinney describes it as the “physical theory of the hot infant universe,” while Wikipedia goes for the more elaborate “a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature.” The first refers only to early times, while the latter seems to extend to subsequent times as well.…

all of us are shopping.Our lists are made out carefully.Don’t forget anything a voice calls out.Remember what I asked you for.Do I know her.She is oddly far away.Slowly we cross each thing out. The finished list is our masterpiece.There must be nothing left on it—this blueprint meant to repair—or is it outsmart—the horror.Whose cart is this?I realize I’m sweating.It feels like the moon has been full for years.It won’t go back down.All the tree crowns have been razed to stop the spread ofthe disease,though the forests of trunks and hacked limbs remain. On good nightsthey gleam. Their shadows rakethe empty lots.Are you almost done I hear myself say,but when I throw my words onto the scalesnothing moves.These days the words become realonly for the speaker—the air whispers to me—the listener…

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. Pantheon, 322 pp., $29.00 Laila Lalami’s disturbing new novel, The Dream Hotel, raises an existential question: How to read dystopian fiction when what has been imagined is now a familiar, quotidian reality? Lalami’s protagonist, a thirty-eight-year-old American-born academic and archivist at the Getty Museum named Sara Hussein, is pulled aside by functionaries from the government’s Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) when she arrives at Los Angeles International Airport after attending a conference in London. An algorithm has flagged her as “an imminent risk” for a crime she has not committed, based in part on her dreams. Sara is then remanded to a “retention center” for a “forensic observation” until she lowers her “risk score”—an inscrutably derived number that supposedly represents the likelihood of committing a…

Whereas the moon, the sun, indifferent,do less than us dream, whereas the troubled storeis looted and fired,whereas there is continuous taxes and rentand friend elected, hell swarms on him orhis, whereas one is tired, whereas is people so kind he near’ weep(furtiving a napkin) and suffer jazz;the jerk.Whereas he blows white and is lucky to do; sleepat this closed hour many enemies; whereasever he hated work: could not he be replaced in Paradise,with the Serpent, here now 35 feet longwhich can not sting?—Well, how we work it out? Don’t. Mr Bones, Iseprepared to come on heavy and strongon your side. Only: sing.…

Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade, translated from the Yiddish by Rose Waldman, with an introduction by Adam Kirsch. Knopf, 678 pp., $35.00 If Tolstoy had written about the hardscrabble, scholarly Jewish communities of Poland and Lithuania in the early 1930s instead of the convulsions that gripped feudal Russia in the nineteenth century, he might have been Chaim Grade. Like Tolstoy, Grade had a monumental imagination; his novels are teeming with fully realized characters—stringent rebbes, unscrupulous merchants, restive young men and romantic young women pushed into unhappy arranged marriages—as well as seething conflicts, particularly the tension between secular life and religious tradition. Grade captured the raging complexities of the Eastern European shtetl, a world soon to be blotted out. In 1974 Elie Wiesel called him “one of the great—if not…

“Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid’s first published short story, appeared in June 1978 in The New Yorker, a magazine I could find time for only during summer vacation, when I would lie in my parents’ backyard and read each issue straight through—or, at least, I would try to. I seem to have stumbled on “Girl” without glancing at its author’s name. I had just submitted my doctoral thesis at Cambridge and was anxiously awaiting word of its approval, which would allow me to become an assistant professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale. Exhausted by the ordeal, I found leafing through those splendid pages to be welcome relief. I knew that in the magazine’s weekly short story I would find style and literary titillation; I wasn’t expecting to find work that…

The playwright Harauld Hughes, who was born in 1931 and died in 2006, remains little known and seldom read. His work, which includes Platform (1960), Table (1961), and Shunt (1965), is rarely staged in the US. His groundbreaking collaborations with the Norwegian director Ibssen Anderssen on films such as The Swinging Models (1966), The Especially Wayward Girl (1967), and The Deadly Gust (1973, and still the best film I’ve seen about an evil breeze) have bypassed even the most plugged-in genre aficionados. What’s more, Faber and Faber’s recent three-volume reissue of Hughes’s oeuvres complètes—The Models Trilogy, Four Films, and Plays, Prose, Pieces, Poetry—barely registered on the cultural cardiogram.* So why have people forgotten the recipient of the 1986 Euripides Prize for short-form drama (the only award that entitles the winner…