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Today in The New York Review of Books: Aryeh Neier resists Trump’s war on free speech; Orville Schell considers Chiang Kai-shek; David Beal rocks out to Docteur Nico; Catherine Nicholson reads one of the earliest diaries; Mark Lilla profiles a ludicrous protofascist; and, from the archives, Patricia Storace on Persepolis.

Aryeh Neier
The New War on Free Speech

In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.

Orville Schell
China’s Leader Manqué

Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan.

David Beal
The Docteur Is In

The Congolese rumba pioneer Docteur Nico helped define the sound of African decolonization—and became one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

Richard Hell joins host Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike, his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.

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Catherine Nicholson
A Most Particular Life

The diary of the sixteenth-century physician Felix Platter is without precedent in early modern literature.

Mark Lilla
Clown Show

In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès.

Free from the Archives

In our April 7, 2005, issue, Patricia Storace reviewed Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume “graphic memoir” of her life as a young woman in Iran, and as a young Iranian woman in Europe, “the story of the creation of a person, of a way of being in the world, partly shaped by heritage, partly at odds with it.”

As Storace elaborates, Satrapi’s story—which takes her from the Shah’s monarchy to “the smugly xenophobic Catholicism” of a Viennese boarding house and back to the Ayatollah’s theocracy—puts the hard realities of a world seemingly ruled by orthodoxies in the language of comics, a “narrow range of stylized cartoon gestures and expressions,” to ask, “How can creatures pretend to know God with such detail and confidence when they are still in search of their own characters, when they can know so little of themselves?”

Patricia Storace
A Double Life in Black and White

In Satrapi’s work, there are equalities so powerful that they transcend the proscriptions of social convention, age, sex, nationality, the will of law and theology itself. One of these is the shared capacity for cruelty. Another is human vulnerability, brought home to the young Marjane when two of her parents’ friends, released from the Shah’s prisons, in the unguarded joy of their reunion describe the tortures the prisoners suffered, including being burned by heated irons.

TONIGHT:
Sue Halpern in conversation with Marc Elias

Rigging the Vote: Trump’s Threats to Elections
Thursday, March 12th at 5 PM EDT

New York Review contributor Sue Halpern hosts the attorney and voting rights expert Marc Elias for a wide-ranging conversation on threats to American voting rights, including gerrymandering, campaign financing, and the SAVE Act. The event, conducted via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes including an audience Q&A session. This event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register Now!

Recently in the Review

Jacob Weisberg
Tick, Tick…Boom!

“The AI bubble could end up looking less like the dot-com crash of 2000 and more like the asset bubble and systemic financial collapse of 2008—or 1929.”

Marilynne Robinson
Who Speaks for Us?

“It would seem grossly improbable that a billionaire—rich from birth and repeatedly bankrupt yet still a billionaire—could lead a movement of angry ‘populism.’ But here we are.”

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