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Today in The New York Review of Books: Jarrett Earnest spins the top 40; Raven Leilani revisits Toni Morrison’s Love; Louisa Lim surveys Hong Kong literature since the Umbrella Movement; Nicholas Mulder ponders the future of maritime trade; and, from the archives, V.S. Pritchett on children’s games.

Jarrett Earnest
Pop & Pleasure & Freedom

In his decades of writing about pop music, Jon Savage came to understand its liberatory power.

Raven Leilani
The Work of Feeling

Toni Morrison’s Love is a novel of epiphanies about selfhood, human relations, and the mundane operations of power.

Louisa Lim
Scarred in Hong Kong

Recent fiction by Hong Kong writers explores life in a society traumatized by ever-tightening Chinese national security laws that suppress political discussion and artistic freedom.

Nicholas Mulder
Empires of Flow Control

The modern idea of the freedom of the seas is collapsing in the Strait of Hormuz.

Free from the Archives

In our July 23, 1970, issue, V.S. Pritchett wrote about the surprisingly, charmingly durable traditions of children’s games: “Put a child down anywhere in the world, and at any period of history in the last 2000 years at least he will recognize his game at once.”

Reviewing a book by the renowned folklorists and pioneering scholars of childhood development Iona and Peter Opie, Pritchett roved over the many rules, themes, words, and strategies that have governed play for centuries. “It is curious how old are some of the rules and practices,” he observed. “In the seventeenth century turning a blindfolded figure round three times before starting a chase was general; the choosing stratagem of a pair of straws, sticks, or an orange or lemon is very old. The truce sign of a special word or finger sign seems to be a relic of the age of chivalry.” But lurking in the wings is a familiar trend: “The child’s natural playground has been the street for centuries, but street life is visibly vanishing in our cities; and where it survives, especially in slummy neighborhoods, reformers are dedicated to clearing it away and turning it into the asphalt playground.”

V.S. Pritchett
Street Actions

The peaks of a child’s experience are not visits to the cinema and the family outing but when he “escapes into places that are disused, overgrown and silent.” He likes the wasteland where there are no “play leaders,” no side shows; the bomb site is better than the laid-out park. To young children, as Bertrand Russell once said, “it is biologically natural that they should, in imagination, live through the life of remote savage ancestors.”

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