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Today in The New York Review of Books: Nawal Arjini serves Timothée Chalamet’s ping-pong bildungsroman; Paisley Currah deplores the anti-trans agenda; Jonathan Lethem fights One Battle After Another; Zephyr Teachout buys into a multilevel marketing scheme; and, from the archives, Roderick MacFarquhar on the history of ping-pong and Sino-American relations.

Nawal Arjini
East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

Paisley Currah
The Anti-Trans Playbook

The current crusade against trans people imperils not just their rights but the survival of the legal doctrine built to protect all women from discrimination.

Jonathan Lethem
Frantic Realism

Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch.

Zephyr Teachout
Selling a Defective Dream

How did multilevel marketing schemes come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The answer has to do with how we think of workers and how we think of consumers.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s March 20, 2014, issue, Roderick MacFarquhar wrote about the 1971 visit by a ragtag American table tennis team to China that helped pave the way for Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing the following year—a footnote in history that came to be known as “ping-pong diplomacy.” Along the way, MacFarquhar introduces readers to Ivor Montagu, the wealthy Englishman and ping-pong enthusiast who founded the International Table Tennis Federation and was also a Communist spy; Zhuang Zedong, the world champion and rumored lover of Mao’s fourth wife; and Glenn Cowan, the stoner teenager who served as an unwitting pawn in Zhou Enlai’s scheme to bring the American team from Japan to China.

Roderick MacFarquhar
Paddling to Peking

“Cowan entered China wearing his ‘Let It Be’ T-shirt, purple tie-dye pants, and a floppy yellow hat and carrying a bag of dirty clothes, condoms, and marijuana. His wave good-bye to the Western world as he crossed into China appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and other papers across the globe.”

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