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Today in The New York Review of Books: Adam Hochschild considers the children of the Weather Underground; Joelle M. Abi-Rached traces the history of Lebanese Jews; Kathryn Hughes champions George Sand; Daisy Hildyard reads Saul Leslie’s Tesco novel; Joel Smith looks at Baldwin Lee’s lonely New York; a poem by David Plante; and, from the archives, Prudence Crowther needs your support.

Adam Hochschild
Out from Underground

Fifty years after the last Weather Underground bomb exploded, former members and their children reassess the costs of the group’s violent struggle.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached
‘Natives of the Country’

By taking up the cause of Lebanon’s murdered Jewish leaders, Israel threatens to detach them from their history and absorb them into its own.

Kathryn Hughes
Rebel Rebel

George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.

Daisy Hildyard
Privatized Stress

Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want to Change, a satire about the British supermarket chain Tesco, joins a spate of recent novels about people trying to survive the gig economy.

This Week on the New York Review Podcasts

Fintan O’Toole and Dan Chiasson talk about Bernie Sanders’s lifelong emphasis on the pursuit of happiness as a political goal.

Listen to Endgame

Elaine Blair joins Jarrett Earnest to talk about the evolution of feminist thinking in the last few decades, Lena Dunham, and sex.

Listen to Private Life

Joel Smith
A City All His Own

In his view camera pictures of New York in the late 1970s, Baldwin Lee made the photographic tradition of the city as empty stage set his own.

Poem

a poem by
David Plante

No, no, I don’t believe in my poems,
Not really, but I defer to the poet in me
Who belies belief with a fact that
Requires no belief, to write a poem
In which fire is the poetic
Element, fire burning in a wood…

Free from the Archives

As the midterm elections draw ever nearer, each day delivers a cascade of aggressive and desperate emails from candidates across the political spectrum begging for money. In November 2019 Prudence Crowther shared with the NYR Online a cheerfully deranged fundraising plea, studded with DONATE NOW! buttons and appeals to hazy Americana.

Prudence Crowther
A Message from Your Candidate

Friends, what we are proving together in this campaign is that running for president doesn’t need to involve sucking up to deep pockets and taking under-the-table selfies with fat-cat donors.

It can involve nothing more than simple email bludgeoning of people holding down two/three jobs, folks on fixed incomes—people like yourself, Purdence, whose average contribution is actually below some of the most frugal donations we’ve received—and yet we’re just so grateful for your generosity.

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