Innholdsfortegnelse for October 23, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea by Marcus Rediker. Viking, 403 pp., $33.00 Of the innumerable images published in American newspapers in the decades before the Civil War, few were as ubiquitous as those depicting a young Black man traveling on foot through a forest (represented by a single tree), his belongings wrapped in a sack attached to a pole slung over his shoulder. Instantly recognizable as a runaway slave, the image was usually accompanied by text providing a physical description of the fugitive, the offer of a reward for his capture, and a warning that anyone who assisted the runaway—or even refused to take part in his capture—risked serious legal consequences. Thousands of these notices (including those for women1) appeared in print, testimony to American…

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian. Zone, 279 pp., $29.95 In his 1892 book The Grammar of Science, the pioneering British statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson warned readers that “if society is to shape its own future, . . .we must be peculiarly cautious that in following our strong social instincts we do not at the same time weaken society by rendering the propagation of bad stock more and more easy.” Since “no degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings,” he argued, the only remedy was to winnow out corrupt genetic material via the evolutionary struggle for survival—assuming no pesky do-gooders got in the way…

New York Trilogy by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 94 pp., $20.00 (paper) Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City by Angie Estes. Unbound Edition, 87 pp., $25.00 (paper) T. S. Eliot prophesied it: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In May 2005, when Peter Balakian visited the monument to the victims of the Ar-menian genocide at Margadeh in the desert of Deir ez-Zor, Syria, he compulsively started filling his pockets with dirt. It was almost inconceivable to him that he was standing on the very spot where thousands of his grand-mother’s countrymen were massacred after the death marches from Anatolia in 1915. He had been gripped by this story for a long time. As he tells it in his 1997 memoir, Black Dog…

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality by Renée DiResta. PublicAffairs, 436 pp., $34.00 Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Penguin Press, 468 pp., $32.00 Filterworld:  How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. Doubleday, 284 pp., $19.00 (paper) In 2019 Alex Stamos, the former chief of information security at Facebook, founded the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research center focused on foreign influence operations and other abuses of social media. Stamos had left Facebook in frustration over its failure to disclose more to the public about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. He hired Renée DiResta, an expert on the viral spread of mis- and disinformation, as head of research for the new organization. DiResta led the observatory’s studies of…

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York City, May 23–October 26, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition by Laura Katzman, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Christof Decker, and John Fagg. Princeton University Press, 288 pp., $45.00 (paper) In “The Biography of a Painting,” an essay drawn from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1956–1957, Ben Shahn remembers his early years as an artist in the 1920s, when he was enamored of Post-Impressionist and Fauvist landscapes and peopled his canvases with bathers and nudes. “The work had a nice professional look about it,” he recalls, “and it rested, I think, on a fairly solid academic training.” Soon, though, Shahn began to doubt whether such pleasant, inoffensive paintings sufficed. “This may be art,” his “inner…

Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology by Liliana Doganova. Zone, 330 pp., $28.00 The nineteenth-century abolitionist Lorenzo Dow, who spent years wandering the US as a revivalist preacher, once wrote of the American settler’s unholy hunger for more: And what does he want with more land? Why, he wishes to raise more corn—to feed more hogs—to buy more land—to raise more corn—to feed more hogs—to buy more land—and in this circle he moves until the Almighty stops his hog-gish proceedings. More than a century and a half later, we have had all the hoggish proceedings we can take. Carl Sandburg quoted Dow’s phrase in a 1936 poem critical of American economic mythology, in which a businessman crows about how “it wasn’t luck nor the breaks/nor a convenient…

During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more. Between September 2 and September 19 the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats traveling in international waters, reportedly killing seventeen civilians in cold blood. Ordinarily when US armed forces kill civilians, the president does not brag about it, yet Trump is apparently so proud of the executions that he posted video footage of them on Truth Social. And while ordinarily the killing of any civilian prompts investigations and apologies, in this instance the administration has promised only that there are more to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling…

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. Vintage, 381 pp., $19.00 (paper) The Art of Binding People by Paolo Milone, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand. Europa, 212 pp., $18.00 (paper) Four hundred years ago Robert Burton concluded his majestic (and majestically unwieldy) treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy with a few words of distilled wisdom that remain as useful for sufferers of depression now as they were then: “Be not solitary, be not idle, SPERATE MISERI CAVETE FELICES” (unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious). Hope is the golden promise of every therapeutic encounter: through the judicious application of medical science, allied with human kindness, one’s suffering might be eased, one’s dignity and autonomy honored. This remains true even when the condition is one…

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. Crown, 420 pp., $30.00 According to HUD’s Annual Homeless-ness Assessment Report, approximately 770,000 people in the United States were homeless in 2024, an increase of 18 percent from 2023.1 The number of families that were homeless increased by 39 percent, and the largest increase by age group, 33 percent, was among children under eighteen. “Among people experiencing homelessness, 64% were staying in sheltered locations,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition noted, “while 36% were experiencing unsheltered homeless-ness in places not meant for human habitation.” But “recent research,” Brian Gold-stone writes in There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, “reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the United States...is at…

Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History by Kim A. Wagner. PublicAffairs, 352 pp., $35.00 President William McKinley presented imperialism as a gift to Filipinos. In an 1898 executive order, issued days after he signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish–American War and ceded sovereignty of a number of territories held by Spain to the US, he described the broad aim of co-lonial occupation of the Philippines as “benevolent assimilation”: We come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights. . . It should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection [of Filipinos] by proving to…

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb. MCD, 148 pp., $16.00 (paper) For an island nation isolated in the middle of the North Atlantic, Iceland enjoys a disproportionate hold on the world’s imagination. The terrain is vast and—to most of us—alien, home to endangered icebergs, hot springs, continental rifts, several iconic yogurt brands, and Björk. It’s a country that further fascinates for remaining so sparsely inhabited: today Iceland’s population is comparable to that of a modest American city, totaling some 385,000 citizens. The overwhelming majority can still trace their ancestry back to the original ninth-century Nordic settlers. But some strains of fascination have been less than benign. In the 1930s the Nazis viewed remote Iceland as a paragon of cultural and genetic purity,1 going so far as…