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Today in The New York Review of Books: Nic Johnson pins down the bloodthirsty idiom that brought a mixed martial arts fight to the White House lawn; Madeleine Schwartz investigates the case of the stolen papyri; Gary Saul Morson explains Mikhail Bakhtin; Christian Donlan counts the books at Cambridge’s Parker Library; a poem by D. Nurske; and, from the archives, Martin Filler on Duane Michals.

Nic Johnson
Planet UFC

Mixed martial arts have become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.

Madeleine Schwartz
Paper Trail

The investigation into the origin of papyrus fragments that the owners of Hobby Lobby purchased from an Oxford scholar underscores papyrology’s long history of shady deals and ulterior motives.

Gary Saul Morson
Reassembling Bakhtin

Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.

Christian Donlan
The Archbishop’s Library

An audit against entropy

The Immortals

a poem by
D. Nurkse

When I was old I became close
to my death.
He slept next to me snoring like a
freight train,
his bony elbows digging into my ribs; once
he left a filament of saliva on my wrist.
We ate together, equally voracious:
he snatched
a strand of clam linguine from
my open mouth…

Free from the Archives

The photographer Duane Michals died on Tuesday, age ninety-four. In 2019, on the occasion of a new show of Michals’s work at the Morgan Library and Museum, Martin Filler wrote for the NYR Online about the photographer’s “remarkable old-age efflorescence.”

Martin Filler
The Ceaseless Innovation of Duane Michals

Duane Michals is something of a superannuated Huck Finn, an incorrigibly subversive and inimitably American scamp always lighting out for new creative territories.

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