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Today in The New York Review of Books: Adania Shibli examines indifference to Palestinian pain; Liana Fink writes a dialogue; Christopher Benfey reflects on the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Randall Jarrell; and, from the archives, Darryl Pinckney on Juneteenth.

Adania Shibli
Dead Lands

Rather than letting ourselves tire of repeated stories, how might we allow them to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise?

Liana Finck
No One

There are things I’m terrible at. One of them is writing dialogue.

Christopher Benfey
Variations on Broken Eggs

When Hannah Arendt suggested that democracy consists, in part, in how we talk with one another, I’m guessing she was thinking of her friendship with Randall Jarrell.

Free from the Archives

Last Friday marked the fifth year that Juneteenth has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States. In the summer of 2020, one year before President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Act into law, Darryl Pinckney went looking for mention of the holiday in the historical record and his personal life. His search brought him to a silent film shot in Oklahoma City in 1925; Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; and, finally, the window of his home in Harlem, watching a Juneteenth celebration during the summer that “young America blew the lid off lockdown.”

“This was protest, defiance, keeping the movement going; celebration, misbehaving, power,” Pinckney wrote. “This was the 24/7 of twenty-first-century talking drums.”

Darryl Pinckney
‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

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