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Today in The New York Review of Books: Fintan O’Toole condemns Trump’s escalation of state violence; Jérôme Tubiana reports from the endless war in Darfur; Regina Marler reads a sapphic Prufrock; Anika Banister imagines alongside Yoko Ono; a poem by Fernando Pessoa; and, from the archives, Masha Gessen on government goons.

Fintan O’Toole
The Crime of Witness

Renée Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.

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Jérôme Tubiana
Darfur’s Endless War

As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province, self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend their homes.

Regina Marler
Teacher’s Pet

Jane DeLynn’s autobiographical novel In Thrall recounts a same-sex affair between a teenager and her closeted English teacher in the early 1960s, a time when exposure could be more traumatic than exploitation.

Anika Banister
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world.

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Two Odes by Ricardo Reis

poems by Fernando Pessoa
translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari

42/I

Seated securely on the solid pillar
Of the verses in which I remain,
I have no fear of the endless future influx
Of times and oblivion…

163

Fate, deny me anything but the chance
to view my fate,
For, lax stoic that I am…

Free from the Archives

On August 29, 2017, way back in Donald Trump’s first term, Masha Gessen wrote for the NYR Online an analysis of the new president’s autocratic impulses, in particular his “encourage[ment] of extralegal violence.” These sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit incitements included the president’s notorious nod to the “very fine people”—neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far right militias among them—at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist had just killed a woman.

Masha Gessen
Trump’s Hoodlums

“Autocrats frequently rely on delegating violence to extralegal actors or, as in the case of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, on the willingness of law enforcement officers to carry out extralegal violence in exchange for the promise of impunity. Duterte has made this promise explicit; more often, incitement to violence contains a tacit guarantee of protection.”

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