Innholdsfortegnelse for November 20, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Rae Armantrout ’s most recent book of poems is Go Figure. Her book Safe Rooms will be published next year. Colin B. Bailey is the Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. Joanna Biggs is the Deputy Editor of The Yale Review and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Anne Diebel works as a private investigator with Quest Research and Investigations in New York City. Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art. He is writing a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop. Linda Kinstler is a…

Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs by Marcia C. Inhorn. NYU Press, 323 pp., $32.00; $19.95 (paper) The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility by Natalie Lampert. Ballantine, 409 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper) In the early 2000s reproductive medicine doctors in the United States, using methods developed in Italy, started offering to freeze their patients’ eggs. The far simpler process of cryopreserving human spermatozoa had been explored as early as 1776 (by an Italian priest-scientist who found that sperm, of unstated origin, became motionless when cooled by snow and then started swimming again when warmed), but it wasn’t until 1965 that oocytes, which are water-laden and comparatively huge, were successfully preserved,…

A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 503 pp., $40.00 James Schuyler was a great nature poet. But that way of putting it is misleading because he usually observed nature from indoors, framed by a window, and the nature he was writing about was often a city view with skyscrapers, or an arrangement of tulips on a table, or the fanciful names in a flower catalog. And the word “nature” isn’t right because it refers to something large and abstract, whereas Schuyler was writing about “the day,” meaning the sheer offhand presence of the world, which is always particular and local. The scenes and sensations Schuyler captures in his poetry are both ordinary and hypervivid. His poems can make you…

Justice for Babbage To the Editors: In “The Labor Theory of AI” [NYR, March 27], Ben Tarnoff is quite right to note Charles Babbage’s emphasis on total visibility and managerial control in his writings on factory work and his own never-finished Difference and Analytical Engines, which sought to extend the “eye of the factory’s master” by automating mathematical calculation. Tarnoff contrasts this visibility with the opacity of contemporary AI modeled on neural networks and trained on massive stores of data. (“Nobody really knows how the technology works.”) However, a different picture of Babbage emerges in his more speculative writing, which highlights what we can’t see. In his Ninth Bridge water Treatise (1838), a spoof of traditional theistic science, Babbage envisions a form of superhuman intelligence obscure to the most…

Ruth by Kate Riley. Riverhead, 248 pp., $29.00 About a third of the way through Kate Riley’s novel Ruth, its protagonist, Ruth Della Scholl, makes a friend. This is remarkable not because Ruth is a loner, though she is, or because she is damaged, though she may be that too, but because she lives in a closed religious community in Michigan. Before now, she hasn’t had a chance to make a friend outside it. Ruth, in her late teens, is a terrible cook. It is around 1980, and the elders of the community have enrolled several young people, including her, at the local community college for training that will “better qualify them to serve.” Ruth’s culinary arts teacher, Chef Paul Ficarello, assigns her a partner named Kim Modelski. At first…

Revoir Watteau, un comédien sans réplique: Pierrot, dit le Gilles [A New Look at Watteau, an Actor with No Lines: Pierrot, Known as Gilles] an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 16, 2024–February 3, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition by Guillaume Faroult. Paris: Musée du Louvre/Lienart, 239 pp., €39.00 (paper) In 1984 the three hundredth anniversary of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s birth was celebrated with an extraordinary retrospective of his paintings, drawings, and prints, seen first in Washington, then in Paris and Berlin. That memorable exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, assembled some 73 paintings, 143 drawings, and 8 etchings, and it was accompanied by a magisterial 580-page catalog as well as an international symposium. In his review of the exhibition Francis…

APPLIED SCIENCES Inequalities of Platform Publishing The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era by Claire Parnell The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular platforms, these services perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures. October 28, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 240 pp. University of Massachusetts Press 978-1-62534-905-7 Paper, $32.95 ARCHAEOLOGY Archaeologies of Food in Australia Edited by Madeline…