Today in The New York Review of Books: Amir Ahmadi Arian focuses on the south of Iran, currently bearing the brunt of Trump’s war; Aryeh Neier defends the International Criminal Court; Geoffrey O’Brien watches Spielberg’s latest; and, from the archives, Geoffrey O’Brien on Minority Report.

Amir Ahmadi Arian
The War of the South

For most of its modern history, the south of Iran has been subject to two forms of colonialism, one from the land and the other from the sea.

Aryeh Neier
‘So-Called International Law’

The US has long held the International Criminal Court in suspicion—but never before has an administration tried to destroy it altogether.

Geoffrey O’Brien
They Knew Too Much

Steven Spielberg’s new film is a discordant, ambiguous errand into the maze of ufology.

Free from the Archives

This week in the NYR Online, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Steven Spielberg’s latest science fiction movie, Disclosure Day. Twenty-four years ago, in a season that seemed to predict the future—like this year, the summer of 2002 also featured a Spider-Man movie, a Star Wars movie, and a Christopher Nolan movie—O’Brien reviewed another Spielberg sci-fi epic, Minority Report.

Geoffrey O’Brien
Prospero on the Run

“Minority Report is not so much a work of elegiac or satiric anticipation as it is an acknowledgment that it is already too late to turn back. Even if the screenplay raises moral issues about free will and advance knowledge, insisting somewhat stridently that one can always choose a better course of action, the dazzling and enveloping stylistic maneuvers imply that such independent renunciation is henceforth likely to occur only in the movies.”

Recently in the Review

David Cole
The Freedom to Be Woke

“Florida’s position, if accepted, would be the end of academic freedom in public colleges, because no university can function as a center of learning if politicians micromanage what faculty can say to their students in class.”

Omer Bartov
The Judeo-Bolshevist Target

“When Western historians took stock of Nazi ideology,…they tended to downplay how thoroughly entangled antisemitism was both with the regime’s anticommunism and with its expansionist designs on the East. Many of them therefore minimized or neglected the claim, endlessly repeated by Nazi propaganda and the Wehrmacht’s high command and generals in the field, that fighting ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ was the fundamental mission of the war.”

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