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Today in The New York Review of Books: Jonathan Lethem blogs about the New York Knicks’ transcendent season; Andrew Arsan asks why authoritarianism took root in the Middle East; Michael Gorra signs with an agent; Arya Roshanian listens to Vincenzo Bellini; Joseph O’Neill does the Democrats’ job for them; a poem by Sandra Lim; and, from the archives, Murray Kempton on the Knicks.

Jonathan Lethem
Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan:
Blogging the NBA Finals

Game Zero

I’ve agreed to blog the NBA Finals—destination, this year, of the possibly transcendent New York Knicks, who’ll face the San Antonio Spurs. A rare destination for the Knicks; they’ve not gone since 1999, and not since 1973 have they gone and won. It is this which has united the city in distraction, adoration, anticipation, and—of course—the unspeakable dread of having to tuck in at the meal of disappointment that is a true sports fan’s regular banquet.

Game 1: He Did and We Did

Jalen Brunson is what shouldn’t exist, but does: a routine producer of fourth-quarter miracles. He only has to do this three more times in the next six games to be vaulted to New York’s sports pantheon, in the company of a very few others recalled by the living: Joe Namath, Tom Seaver, Willis Reed.

Game 2: Oh My Gosh

At the instant Wembanyama gently bumped into Brunson and the ref’s whistle blew, the aperture that had narrowed around the players opened again to take in the arena. The camera found the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco, West Province, wearing their Spurs jerseys, on their feet in excitement at the game’s climax. It was easy to read the lips of the nun who spoke: “Oh my gosh!”

Andrew Arsan
Unmaking the Middle East

In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.

Michael Gorra
Call My Agent

With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.

Arya Roshanian
Nowhere to Hide

The languid melodies of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas look simple and spare on the page, but they are exacting, even merciless for singers.

Joseph O’Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake
If I Were Chuck Schumer

“Democrats must finally treat the Republican Party as the Republicans treat the Democratic Party: not as a partner in ‘bipartisanship’ but as an adversary—an adversary, in the case of the GOP, that will not respect the rules of democracy unless it is forced to by political defeat.”

Summer House

a poem by
Sandra Lim

There was a full shelf of Simenon
and a coral sculpture
that looked a bit like barbed wire
in the family room…

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s February 11, 1971, issue, Murray Kempton wrote about a passel of sports books united loosely around the theme of fandom: “athletes call persons who fawn upon them ‘jocksniffers.’ Jock-sniffing is so fixedly the donnée of sports literature that even the memoirs of professionals are often a protracted sniffing of their jocks.” Among these books, whose subjects include Vince Lombardi and the Cleveland Browns, is Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, “an account of the [1970] championship season of the New York Knickerbockers basketball team” that also happens to be “highly superior jock-sniffing.”

Murray Kempton
Jock-Sniffing

It is curious that none of the Knicks Axthelm celebrates as the apotheosis of the New York style of basketball ever grew up in the schoolyards of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant; but then what child could survive the streets around Saint Peter’s and grow up to be Pope?

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