All posts tagged: Brief Encounters

Brass in Pocket | Sally Rooney, Daniel Drake

Brass in Pocket | Sally Rooney, Daniel Drake

Published by skeptic

“If you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time,” writes Sally Rooney in the Review’s March 27 issue, channeling perhaps her inner Donald Duck. But for the best billiards players, like the snooker great Ronnie O’Sullivan, complex computation seems to pass without effort: “O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years. What then?” asks Rooney. “If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing?” What, her essay elaborates, is the nature of athletic genius? A native of County Mayo, Ireland, Rooney is the author of four novels and a half dozen short stories that often follow the trajectories of people caroming around Dublin, and …

“I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On” | Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Will Simpson

“I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On” | Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Will Simpson

Published by skeptic

Some readers may have been surprised to find a three-page comic in our February 27 issue: a collaboration by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco titled “Never Again and Again.” It’s a “graphic conversation” between the cartoonists about Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and—as Sacco puts it on the comic’s first page—“obliteration” in Gaza. Spiegelman is best known for Maus, a comic about the young artist coaxing out his father’s recollections of surviving Auschwitz. It was serialized in Raw, a magazine of avant garde comics published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, in the 1980s, finished in 1991, and then published as a graphic novel. Sacco’s comics also rely on firsthand stories of war and occupation, including three books on Palestine (Palestine, 1993; Footnotes in Gaza, 2010; and War on Gaza, 2024). I spoke to Art by phone in mid-February about the new strip, the failures of Zionism, and what it means to him to once again don his “mouse mask,” the cartoon avatar that he created for Maus. Joe Sacco followed up via e-mail …

Notes from Underground | Joy Neumeyer, Dahlia Krutkovich

Notes from Underground | Joy Neumeyer, Dahlia Krutkovich

Published by skeptic

Russian human rights organizations estimate that there may be as many as 10,000 political prisoners scattered across the country’s penal colonies. Last summer, Joy Neumeyer wrote to fourteen of these imprisoned dissidents, unsure whether anyone would even receive her messages. To her surprise, some of them wrote back, enclosing heartfelt, roving reflections on their childhoods, their political awakenings, their last moments of freedom, and how they feel about their antiwar activities now. In our March 13 issue, Neumeyer writes about this “hidden archipelago of opposition that has endured and adapted” since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In that time, the Kremlin has tightened speech restrictions to such a degree that anyone can be imprisoned for “discrediting” or “intentionally spreading false information” about the military—statutes broadly construed to include any criticism of the army’s actions in Ukraine. Some of those imprisoned have been convicted on the strength of pseudonymous social media posts. Neumeyer, who received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, is a journalist and historian of Russia and …

Dress It Up, Then Make It Real | Blair McClendon

Dress It Up, Then Make It Real | Blair McClendon

Published by skeptic

In our February 13 issue, Blair McClendon reviews “Edges of Ailey,” the Whitney Museum’s show about the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey, curated by Adrienne Edwards. “If Ailey’s dances come across as pleasurable rather than noxiously pandering to a received idea of blackness, it is not solely because we recognize the motions and situations,” he writes. “It’s Technicolor again. We know the strut, but then, none of us can move quite like that.” As the Technicolor analogy perhaps suggests, McClendon comes from the film world; he is an editor whose credits include Aftersun, The Assistant, and, in 2024, The Last Showgirl and Union, a documentary about the successful effort to unionize Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island. His writing—about cinema as well as novels, art, memoirs, and celebrity—has appeared in Bookforum, n+1, and The New Yorker. Last week over e-mail, McClendon and I discussed Ailey, the interaction between art and politics, the class divisions within black art, and the narrative possibilities and biases of nonfiction. Nawal Arjini: You write that “Ailey—his name, his fame—has given the …

The Fight for Uyghur Rights | Abduweli Ayup

The Fight for Uyghur Rights | Abduweli Ayup

Published by skeptic

“A new crackdown was clearly underway,” writes the Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup in the NYR Online, remembering the fifteen months he spent imprisoned in Xinjiang, China. “No one I spoke to knew why the police had abducted them. Each inmate was a bomb, filled with nausea, impatience, and boredom. One would ready the wick and another would light it.” In August 2013 Ayup was detained without trial on charges of “illegal fundraising,” after organizing Uyghur-language programs for children, and moved among several severely overcrowded prisons in which he had to wear the uniform of a political prisoner. In his essay, developed from excerpts of a memoir-in-progress, he describes the cruelty and humanity of both inmates and guards, the misconceptions many in Han-majority China have about Uyghur history, and the subtle resistance necessary to keep the Uyghur language and culture alive, even inside prison. Ayup was eventually released after international political pressure, and he moved with his family to Norway, where he continues his fight to protect the Uyghur language in diaspora and, with an organization …

The Campaign to Destroy Public Schools | Diane Ravitch

The Campaign to Destroy Public Schools | Diane Ravitch

Published by skeptic

In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.” A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia …

The Ungovernable Economy | Trevor Jackson

The Ungovernable Economy | Trevor Jackson

Published by skeptic

“Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics,” writes Trevor Jackson in the Review’s January 16 issue. Reviewing Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Jackson examines capitalist democracies past and present to find where the economic system of capitalism and the political system of democracy have aligned and where they have diverged. He is particularly interested in the history of policies designed to revitalize economies and nations after an economic crisis and charts the way these policies have privatized gains and socialized losses. But Jackson also insists that these events—both the crises and the state’s responses—must be understood as historically contingent, lest “expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths.” Without considering the contemporaneous debates about class and conditions of economic inequality, he argues, we won’t understand how crisis continues to be the order of the day. Jackson is an economic historian and teaches history and political economy at UC Berkeley. Though his research focuses on early modern Europe, he has taught courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of …

What Happened | Magda Teter

What Happened | Magda Teter

Published by skeptic

In our December 5 issue, Magda Teter reviews a new book ostensibly about the last decades of the Regency of Algiers and “the ties between the land and the sea and between the sea and the history of events, money, and power.” But behind that history, Teter writes, is “a story of the perception of Mediterranean Jewish traders by European and American actors, who projected their sense of superiority over and disdain for both Jews and Muslims.” Teter scrutinizes what more conventional histories take for granted, pointing out, for example, how “speeches the consuls claim to have delivered are taken at face value, without considering that they might be, as Natalie Zemon Davis put it, ‘fiction in the archives.’” This particular care with archives and interpretation is the mark of Teter’s career as a historian. At Fordham, where she is the chair of Judaic studies, she concentrates on premodern relations between Jewish and Christian peoples and how that lineage informs the present. Her books include Blood Libel: On the Trail of Antisemitism, which won the 2020 National …

Eyes on the Border | John Washington

Eyes on the Border | John Washington

Published by skeptic

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to “close the border” on his first day back in office. That won’t happen, but he’s sure to clamp down on immigration in other ways. “The president and his legal team have four years to appoint new federal judges to change not only the operational landscape—more prosecution, detention, and deportation—but also the legal landscape of immigration enforcement,” writes John Washington in his November 10, 2024, essay for the NYR Online. “Humanitarian visas could disappear. Asylum protections will likely be further gutted, and more families intentionally separated. States may even be able to run their own immigration enforcement or deputize their own border forces.” Washington is well positioned to analyze these developments. As an investigative journalist based in Tucson, Arizona, he has been reporting from the US–Mexico border for more than a decade. His first book tells the story of one Salvadoran man’s repeated attempts to secure asylum for himself and his daughter in the United States. “The Dispossessed offers what is perhaps the most complete narrative account of modern-day asylum …

‘An Internal Colony’ | Olivia Paschal, Willa Glickman

‘An Internal Colony’ | Olivia Paschal, Willa Glickman

Published by skeptic

Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States when it hit in early October—killing about 230 people and causing over $50 billion in damages—particularly in North Carolina. “Those with financial resources may be able to rebuild,” writes Olivia Paschal in a November 3, 2024, essay for the NYR Online. “In the meantime, those without them—including renters and mobile-home owners—may be forced to pick up and leave.” Paschal, a scholar of the history of capitalism in the Ozarks, argues that concerns about gentrification and displacement in the rebuilding process are connected with decades-long struggles against consolidated land ownership in Appalachia. She writes that a generation of scholars and activists at progressive Southern organizations like the Highland Center, who turned their attention to Appalachia in the 1960s and 1970s, came to see the region “as an internal colony—a place peripheral to America’s capitalist development, where coal magnates from outside the region extracted natural resources, paid locals poverty wages, and left open wounds on the mountain landscape.” Paschal is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia …