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2 weeks ago | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Hari Kunzru
“Fears of a ‘world government’ or ‘new world order’ have been bubbling under the American cultural surface for a very long time,” writes Hari Kunzru in an essay on conspiratorial thinking in US politics for the May 26, 2025, issue of The New York Review.
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1 month ago | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Jonathan Mingle
The Environmental Protection Agency was founded with bipartisan support not all that long ago—in 1970.
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2 months ago | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Nawal K. Arjini
It has been the curse of many New York City mayors to see themselves as viable presidential candidates, indeed with one foot already in the White House. If Eric Adams nurtured similar ambitions—as some commentators speculated early in his mayoralty—the difference was that his presidency of the mind was unusually focused on foreign policy. “If you are a mayor that only stands on your block, you are not going to solve the problems of the globe,” he said to reporters in 2022.
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Feb 8, 2025 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Abduweli Ayup
“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.
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Dec 7, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Olivia Paschal
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.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Rhiana Gunn-Wright |Bill McKibben
On Wednesday October 16, 2024, environmentalist and award-winning contributor Bill McKibben and renowned political scientist and author Rhiana Gunn-Wright met for an online discussion about climate, truth, and disaster in the next presidential administration. The conversation was moderated by Willa Glickman. This was the second in our series of online events in the run-up to the 2024 election. You may view all available recordings in this series on this page.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Elizabeth Kolbert
A body of recent scientific research suggests that plants can adapt to new information, predict the future, communicate with animals, and confer privately with each other. Should we think of them as sentient? In our October 3, 2024, issue, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several recent books on the topic of plant cognition and argues that despite the popularity of the burgeoning field, we are hardly prepared to grapple with the implications of such a profound shift in our understanding of life on Earth.
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May 25, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Tiya Miles
“To the extent that national progress in the arts and sciences can be attributed to university breakthroughs of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the nation as a whole gained from universities’ exploitation of Black and Indigenous people,” writes Tiya Miles in her review of Rachel Swarns’s The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, from our May 23, 2024, issue.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Lucy Jakub |Daniel Drake |Willa Glickman |Andrew Katzenstein
Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse April 12, 2024 I. Andrew Katzenstein in Mason, Texas II. Willa Glickman in Rochester, New York III. Daniel Drake in Warren, Vermont IV. Lucy Jakub in the Rangeley Lakes, Maine 🌘 🌗 🌓 🌒 I learned about this year’s eclipse in late 2016, when I read an article in The New York Review by James Gleick, who mentioned it in a discussion of scientific determinism: There is a strain of physicist that likes to think of the world as settled, inevitable, its path...
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Mar 30, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Willa Glickman |Margaret Scott
In February Prabowo Subianto—who as a commander and, later, general in the Indonesian army during the “New Order” Suharto dictatorship had led units accused of human rights abuses in Indonesia and East Timor—was elected president of Indonesia, raising concerns about the future of democracy in the country after twenty years of stability. Prabowo is the handpicked successor of the current president, Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi.
