Today in The New York Review of Books: Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein reports from Minneapolis and St. Paul; Cyrus Naji looks at the future of Bangladesh; Vanessa Ogle untangles maritime law; Nell Irvin Painter finds Blackness around the world; Nathan Shields listens for joy and terror in contemporary performances of classical music; a poem by Kathleen Ossip; and, from the archives, Hannah Arendt on lying and politics.

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein
Fifteen Below Zero

Up against the delirious scale of Operation Metro Surge, ordinary people juggle daily life with looking out for each other however they can.

Cyrus Naji
Bangladesh’s Stalled Student Revolution

The young radicals who ousted the country’s authoritarian prime minister have so far failed to implement the democratic reforms they promised. Will elections in February correct their course?

Vanessa Ogle
Rolling with the Economic Tides

Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel follows the lifespan of one barge, from bunkhouse to floating prison to barracks and back, as it traces the shadowy outer limits of the maritime economy.

Nell Irvin Painter
My Elsewheres

A lifetime of travel outside the United States has enlarged my sense of history far beyond the prevailing American ideology of race.

Nathan Shields
Liberalism’s Pianist

Can Igor Levit restore classical music’s claim to cultural and political authority, or is it irrevocably lost?

Childhood

a poem by
Kathleen Ossip

I did die.

Dying was a venetian blind, all parts working together but not in the same direction.
Like a succulent, an aloe leaf—break it and it heals.
I died like boxes in a storage locker—
no hurry to open…

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s November 18, 1971, issue—five months after The New York Times began publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers—Hannah Arendt wrote a reflection on some of the lessons to be gleaned from the revelations in the Department of Defense’s reports about the Vietnam War. Specifically, she was interested in “the basic issue raised by the Papers”: deception. “Whoever reflects on these matters,” Arendt mused, “can only be surprised how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand, for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the actual fact.”

Hannah Arendt
Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers

“The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy.”

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