The New York Review of Books

COLUMBIA AND THE WAR ON SPEECH A Statement by Constitutional Law Scholars on Trump’s Funding Cuts Nadia Abu El-Haj: The Campaign Against Mahmoud Khalil PLUS Nabil Salih: Baghdad’s Construction Boom Ben Mauk: Matt Eich’s New, Weird America Poorna Swami: Love and Longing in Bombay Matthew Rivera: Finding Frankie Newton Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at nybooks.com/issues.…

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. Francisco Cantú is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center and the former National Legal Director of the ACLU. Fara Dabhoiwala ’s book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea will be published this year. He is researching a biography of the eighteenth-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams and teaches in the department of history at Princeton. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro…

Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall. Cambridge University Press, 493 pp., $44.99; $34.99 (paper) During the Easter weekend of 1958, in response to the British government’s recent development of hydrogen bombs, the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) supported a four-day protest march by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, from Trafalgar Square in London to the headquarters of the UK’s nuclear program, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at the former RAF airfield in Aldermaston in Berkshire, more than fifty miles away. The following year CND organized an Easter march in the opposite direction, which then became an annual, ever more popular, international event. In 1963 around 100,000 people streamed into Trafalgar Square at its conclusion. On the website of the…

Audition by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead, 197 pp., $28.00 From the outlines of their plots Katie Kitamura’s novels could be mistaken for melodramas, or concepts for a bingeable TV series. In A Separation (2017) an estranged wife goes to Greece to reunite with her husband, only to discover that he’s been brutally murdered. In Intimacies (2021) an American woman finds herself serving as the mouthpiece for a war criminal when she is appointed as his interpreter at The Hague. In Kitamura’s latest, Audition, an actress is confronted by a young man who claims to be her son, and though this cannot possibly be the case (wouldn’t she remember giving birth?), she invites him to live with her and her husband as their child. But such summaries are misleading, because the novels…

On March 9 Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, posted on X about an apparent threat by Elon Musk to deny Ukraine access to the Starlink satellite system it uses to guide its military drones. Musk, whose company SpaceX operates Starlink, had written that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Sikorski noted that Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers. US secretary of state Marco Rubio weighed in to admonish Sikorski: “Say thank you because without Starlink Ukraine would have lost this war long ago…

Who were we? Where did we come from? What did we look like, trudging up the hill between Convent Avenue and the subway, sitting obediently in class, arguing madly as soon as the bell rang? We were the children of tailors, shopkeepers, factory workers; accountants, bakers, dress cutters; clerks, milkmen, bus drivers. Our shoes were scuffed, our clothes came from chain stores, our haircuts from neighborhood barbershops and “beauty parlors.” And what did we know of the world? Nothing. At the same time, how many of us were wise beyond our years. One afternoon during an English lit class a number of us were buzzing about a boy sitting in the back of the room who looked nothing like us. He was slim and good-looking, his haircut a work of…