Today in The New York Review of Books: David Quammen takes a microscope to our genome; Ratik Asokan watches the World Cup at a mournful saloon; Jarrett Earnest eyes Carol Rama’s eye-filled abstract art; Travis Diehl revisits Eliza Douglas’s reworked paintings; and, from the archives, Kwame Anthony Appiah on Franz Boas.

David Quammen
Song of Our Cells

Though a mystery to Darwin in his lifetime, the constant mutation of our genes is what allows for life’s magnificent diversity.

Ratik Asokan
Sodade

“All the claptrap that the commentators…say about the ‘power of belief’ must actually mean something. How else to explain the way that Cape Verde rallied against an adversary ranked more than sixty places higher? Long throws and long balls gave way to spells of possession…. A flurry of corners and quarter chances were met with poorly suppressed shrieks and curses in the bar.”

Jarrett Earnest
The Eyes Have It

Carol Rama’s abstractions from the late 1960s conjure burned, brutalized bodies.

Travis Diehl
Is the Artist Present?

By transforming her own old paintings into new works of art, Eliza Douglas raises questions about sincerity and cynicism.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

In this episode of Private Life, the poet and writer Eileen Myles reads Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay on Frank O’Hara, “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street,” from The New York Review’s December 2, 1993, issue. Listen and subscribe at the link below.

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Free from the Archives

Today is Franz Boas’s 168th birthday. In the Review’s May 28, 2020, issue, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote about the adventurous life and pioneering work of “the father of American cultural anthropology…who taught generations how to think about human diversity without hierarchy.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Defender of Differences

“Culture” was once regarded as something that one group might have more of than another. Boas and his students demonstrated how to use the word in the plural: different peoples had different cultures, and while the idiosyncrasies of a foreign culture were patent to us, we’d do well to recognize the arbitrary aspects of our own.

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