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Today in The New York Review of Books: David Cole deplores Trump’s imperial assault on Venezuela; Nicholas Guyatt measures the legacy of the Mason–Dixon Line; Helen Epstein tells Uganda’s violent recent history; Tanvi Misra looks at the prospects for immigrants in Mamdani’s New York; Christopher de Bellaigue scrutinizes Narendra Modi’s claims of progress; a poem by Maureen N. McLane; and, from the archives, Norman Mailer on the invasion of Iraq.

David Cole
Trump’s War

The invasion of Venezuela is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple.

Nicholas Guyatt
The Most Rancorous Line

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a long-standing colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Helen Epstein
Uganda’s Two Tyrants

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation.

Tanvi Misra
Sanctuary City

The question is less what Zohran Mamdani symbolizes for New York’s immigrant communities than what benefits he might deliver for them.

Christopher de Bellaigue
Hype and Fraud in India

Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.

Albergo Caffaro

a poem by
Maureen N. McLane

I opened the window
to clouded sun + a flood
of jasmine or was it fake
jasmine the scent
rushed in the room a
sudden garden + you were
already dead I did not know it
you did not know it…

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—a week after the United States invaded Iraq on a mission of regime change undergirded by a desire for control of oil production—Norman Mailer wrote an “attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.”

Norman Mailer
Only in America

A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are large enough.

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