New York Review of Books

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Tim Flannery

It is well understood that our bodies have a genome containing the DNA instructions responsible for our development and function. But few would say that they also have an “electrome”—or cellular electric system—of equal importance. Yet this is the case that Sally Adee makes in her scintillating, at times vexing book We Are Electric. “Every one of the 40 trillion cells in your body is its own little battery with its own little voltage,” she writes.

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Christopher Benfey

In 2016 a small blue-and-white teapot with a repaired handle and a missing lid sold online for around twenty dollars, a plausible price for damaged bric-a-brac, at an antiques sale in Lincolnshire. “If it hadn’t been for that Internet bid,” an expert in English ceramics remarked of the lone offer, “it probably would have ended up in a bin”—in a trash can, that is. Two years later the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the teapot at an auction in Salisbury for $806,000. What changed?

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Tim Judah

As I was waiting outside Kyiv’s main military hospital at the end of April, I saw a man in a wheelchair come out of the main gate. He wove gingerly past seven “hedgehogs”—the large metal antitank traps that were deployed across the capital’s streets at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Now they have almost all been cleared away. Soldiers were walking out of the gate carrying bags of medicine and large flat folders with their X-rays, while visitors were checking in.

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Jenny Uglow

Orchids grow in tropical forests and on icy mountains, in lowland bogs and wildflower meadows. They are found on every continent apart from Antarctica. Some grow on the ground, others climb high; some self-pollinate, others depend on insects. There are currently around 30,000 named species, and although many are threatened with extinction, botanists find new ones every year. Two new books, The Lost Orchid by Sarah Bilston and Saving Orchids by Philip Seaton and Lawrence W.

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Leanne Shapton

This thirty-second art newsletter, covering the art and illustrations in our May 15 and May 29 issues, comes from the Martha Graham School’s Spring Showcase, where my daughter and her dance class opened the show with a demonstration of the Graham technique. The May 15 issue was our annual Art Issue, and this year’s cover is by the artist Tacita Dean, the subject of a wonderful essay inside by Sam Needleman.