As I’ve written and as most who know me, I love the New York Review of Books. I don’t read fast enough to justify actually subscribing to it. I usually work my way through the issue in a couple months. It’s published every 2 weeks so the math doesn’t really work. My experience with the last issue was then a bit of a milestone – I finished it in 4 weeks. Not sure how it happened, but I wanted to do something different here – just a couple notes on each of the articles in it.

Goethe

An important writer about whom I know nearly nothing. I did read Dr. Faustus many years ago but don’t recall a lot of detail. It feels like yet another person whose work I should know better but, alas!

The essay itself reflects on a translation of a piece that was essentially an end-of-life set of conversations between Goethe and someone named Eckman. Much like what I would have said about Goethe, the writer, Michael Hofmann, meanders about seeming to try and find something insightful the translation has to offer. He’s cognizant of this, its clear and obliquely becomes his essential criticism. I would have expected a NYRB essay to have touched a little more on the subject of the subject, as it were, giving me framing sense of why Goethe is or was important. I wonder if the author’s sense of Goethe is as weak as my own is. To the extent there is reflection there, it hints at a person with broad and diverse interests. I wonder too, if the lack of a central pillar of accomplishment holds one back from appreciating lives of some humans. DaVinci is acclaimed everywhere, but Galileo is more remembered in Science, and despite the Mona Lisa, people know the painting itself better than the painter I think. Quite the opposite compared to, say, Raphael.

Biotech

The article here is a review of a book that is essentially a case study of how finance and biotech and personalities roll with each other, focusing on a pill-based treatment for a class of cancers. It’s a well written essay that doesn’t shy from identifying ugly incentives but doesn’t anthropomorphize and then demonize pharmaceutical companies. It hews to a nice balance that is needed to give some nuance to why the prevaling incentives are there and how understanding them can be tripped up by personalities that are problematic without being “evil”. For me, these assessments are critical because if we want to solve the problematic facets, it needs to be done with a clear eye toward the nuances. The immediate moral need for a solution to problems like affordable medicine can be sometimes simply solved but with a willful blind spot imposed on side effects. For my part, I think people are short sighted to toss out advances from medical science in the interest of making general healthcare more broadly accessible – even thought that is a critical need. I have to admit a certain enjoyment of reading about the industry in a light that is not a morality play.

‘Seven Steeples’

The only essay from which I felt unable to recall anything a few weeks after having read it.

William O. Douglass

It’s a timely story about a recent Supreme Court Justice who made a point of enabling his position to put a finger on the scales to protect his vision of Western Environmentalism. It was a (to me) good cause. Tangential to the question of how we should treat good artists who are awful humans, how do we handle the case of doing good by evading our guard rails that stop those who would do harm?

Hillsdale and The 1619 Project

What to say here? First, the pairing of Hillsdale and their righty wackos with The 1619 Project seems unfair with regards to evaluation in their relative contexts. The 1619 Project is something that, for multiple reasons, has a capacity for a truly national audience in a way that nothing from Hillsdale ever will. So there is some importance in calibrating the criticisms differently. It felt like the reviewer (Adam Hochschild whose own works I’ve very much enjoyed) wasn’t capable of anything other than very gentle criticisms of 1619 with lots of dewey-eyed comments on why it is important. One of Hochschild’s comments is on the connection between minorities being ‘enslaved’ in working for Amazon and actual enslavement. I’ve seen a couple others offer perspectives on this analogy. I think it’s a subject worth delving into- I’m not so sure that capturing the ‘dehumanizing’ sense of chattel slavery is equivalent to the way that people are ‘dehumanized’ in Amazon warehouses. There is a connection though- in the sense that for too many marginalized people these jobs are a big part of the spectrum of ‘careers’ that they are likely to engage with. I think that is not the same as the implication that I get that the analogy in 1619 is meant to suggest dehumanizing people in Amazon warehouses is because of racial animus on the part of business owners. The heavier burden is, I believe, on minorities, but the reasons are more complicated.

Labor and Fair Wages

This was excellent. I especially enjoyed the peak at what substantively goes on behind the work of grass roots organizers.

‘The Lost Wife”

Art, Museums, and Fairness

Germany as a colonial empire was not pleasant. But I do worry that the effort to appraise colonial empires (and their kindred) leads to an inability to study ourselves, humans and human society, with a cold-eyed scientific outlook.

Omar

What a neat story. I loved the connection to Opera, despite its ultimate irrelevance to the story.

Samuel Pepys

This was an off-beat essay about the story about the Gloucester, a ship that was being used to take English deposed pretender to the throne ‘elsewhere’. I say ‘off-beat’ because it wasn’t clear that the essay was about the historical event itself.

Zachary Lazar

Money and the Civil War

This is a topic that is not really appreciated as it should be I think, but also a bit of a struggle to distance itself from ‘Team of Rivals’ in that while Samuel Chase is a very interesting figure, that was plenty discernible in ToR first. So the novelty of the essay (meaning the book) has to come out of the details of business, not the person. That in itself is fine and the essay does a nice job of it. ToR really dove into the person.

Limits of Language and recent works on MeToo and Feminism

I have the strongest immediate reaction to this essay – obviously related to being the most recently read. It was a really nice read from which I took away 1) a lot of interesting films I want to see and 2) a nuanced discussion around the complexity of word usage in issues of a community. That second one is interesting to me because the core of it is not solely tied to the issue at hand (abuse of women) but generalizes, I think. Kudos to Elaine Blaire (the author) and I’d like to see “Women Talking” in particular.