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This week on nybooks.com: On the NYRblog, manufactured hate in eastern Ukraine, pain in literature and life, the problem of stagnating incomes, a poets’ brawl, and the Obama administration’s denial of its drone killings. The Gallery looks at Queen Victoria’s passion for photography. And from the Review, the dangers of the new synthetic biology, Stefan Zweig’s influence on Wes Anderson, and an in-depth report on tensions from Kiev to Donetsk.
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Tim Judah
Rebel or artist, pensioner or miner, everyone feels cheated. So, when someone decides to exploit this resentment, to stir up hatred among people who are angry and often confused by garbled, nationalistic historical narratives, then people start to die.
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Christopher Benfey
“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three,” Nabokov writes in Lolita. I wondered how many other parentheses like this there were: windows in a wall of verse or prose that suddenly open on an expanse of personal pain.
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Jeff Madrick
The powerful findings of Thomas Piketty have challenged long-held assumptions that America is a meritocracy. Yet we also now have stagnating incomes for a large majority and runaway incomes at the very top. There is a complete lack of growth for much of the country.
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Charles Simic
The biggest and the most illustrious gathering of poets I have ever attended took place in June of 1968. It was the only attempt in this country, as far as I know, to bring together such a wide range of poets, from mainstream to avant-garde and those who eluded classification. Of course, there was a lot of drinking.
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David Cole
According to credible accounts, Obama has overseen the killing of several thousand people in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to four Americans’ deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft
In the spring of 1840, it was reported that the newlyweds Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had made some purchases from Claudet & Houghton of London. This was one of the first firms selling what were known as daguerreotypes.
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Punk rock girls, literature of World War I, a Mizoguchi retrospective, and more in our events calendar
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Richard C. Lewontin
Nothing in history suggests that those who control and profit from material production can be depended upon to devote the needed foresight, creativity, and energy to protect us from the possible negative effects of synthetic biology.
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Anka Muhlstein
In his newest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson takes his inspiration not from a specific novella but from the entire body of Stefan Zweig’s work and his life. It’s Zweig’s influence that tinges the film with nostalgia and gives it its depth.
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Tim Judah
In eastern Ukraine, where neatly kept memorials commemorate the fallen of the great battles fought there by the Red Army during World War II, all the omens seemed to tell of war coming once again. But even at the eleventh hour it is not inevitable.
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