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Today in The New York Review of Books: Thomas Powers looks back on Bernie Sanders’s rise to mayor; David Cole weighs the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Trump tariffs; Anjan Sundaram joins indigenous Mexicans in their fight against developers; Beatrice Loayza watches The Secret Agent; Colin Grant reads A House for Miss Pauline; a poem by Stephanie Burt; and, from the archives, Michael Neill on Christopher Marlowe.

Thomas Powers
A Real Live Socialist

What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.

David Cole
Trading with the Enemy

By striking down Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court acted like a court should, in response to a president who acted like a president shouldn’t.

Anjan Sundaram
‘We Think They’ll Kill Someone’

Indigenous communities in Mexico who oppose the construction of megaprojects on their lands do so at great risk.

Beatrice Loayza
Timekeepers

In The Secret Agent, his sad, riotous new feature, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho at once archives a vanished world and mythologizes it.

Colin Grant
If These Walls Could Talk

In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.

Sappho 27

a poem by
Stephanie Burt

σὺ τοῦτ᾿ ἀλλ᾿ ὄττι τάχιστα

It makes me ill to think about it too,
how the people I love the most
sometimes treat me the worst. Don’t let that be you…

Free from the Archives

Christopher Marlowe was born 462 years ago today. In the Review’s October 5, 1995, issue, the English literature scholar Michael Neill wrote about a then new book purporting to show that Marlowe’s murder “in an apparently casual brawl” was in fact part of a deliberate, elaborate plot related to a network of spies in Elizabethan England. In unraveling the story (“too speculative to satisfy a historian”), Neill also pages through Marlowe’s improbable life: born to a shoemaker, he became “the most prodigally gifted of Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries,” only to be stabbed in the head under suspicious circumstances one spring evening, age twenty-nine.

Michael Neill
The Marlowe Murder Case

“The Latin tag that concludes both printed versions of Dr. Faustus (‘Terminat hora diem, Terminat Author opus’) suggests an uncanny symmetry between the playwright and his protagonist—as though Marlowe had laid down his pen on the very stroke of the midnight hour that sees Faustus carried off to Hell; and in the violent trajectory of his career Marlowe does indeed bear a notorious resemblance to the upstart heroes of his plays—a comet consumed by his own prodigious flames, as if in fulfillment of the defiant motto that adorns his portrait: Quod me nutrit me detruit.”

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An exhibition in Paris of archaeological treasures from Gaza served as a reminder of how much of the Strip’s history has been destroyed.

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For half a century the US government has assigned a dollar value to human life. By denying that the EPA needs to mitigate carbon emissions, the Trump administration is driving that value down to zero.

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