Plus: Tories During Wartime; Trump's Economic Nonsense; Uzbek Art; The Sichuan Labor Camps; Robert Johnson
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Sari Bashi inspects the UN’s “peace plan” for Gaza; Ferdinand Mount reevaluates the wartime Tories; Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson discuss the Trump administration’s senseless economic planning; Sophie Pinkham goes to Uzbekistan’s inaugural art biennial; Ai Xiaoming retraces the life of a political prisoner in China; a poem by Sylvie Kandé; and, from the archives, Greil Marcus on Robert Johnson. By putting the possibility of reconstruction out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the current UN-endorsed “peace plan” may make it impossible for them to remain. Understanding Britain’s postwar reforms like the National Health Service requires peering into the “lost world” of wartime conservatism. How has the Trump administration broken from the past century of American political economy? Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism? Ruins of Mao-era “reform-through-labor” camps remain scattered throughout the mountains of Sichuan. Five years ago I decided to retrace one former prisoner’s path. Free from the ArchivesEighty-nine years ago today the blues musician Robert Johnson commenced the first of the two studio sessions that produced the entirety of his recorded output. Over three days at a hotel in San Antonio, he laid down sixteen tracks, including “Terraplane Blues,” a modest hit at the time, and “Sweet Home Chicago.” In the Review’s December 3, 2020, issue, Greil Marcus wrote about Johnson’s life and music, from Mississippi, where legend holds he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical genius, to Depression-era Chicago and Harlem, where he proved that genius, and finally back to Mississippi, where he “was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint.” “Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.” “The amplitude, the riot and hoot…of One Battle After Another make for cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially unconfronted.” “Beckett pared language down and reconfigured it into a strange new register to produce effects of absurdity and alienation: too intensely sincere to be ironic or parodic, but too bizarre and blasé to be tragic.” A New York Review Online Event The State of the Left
Fintan O’Toole in Conversation with Congresswoman Pramila JayapalDecember 8, 2025, 5:00 PM EST Join Fintan O’Toole and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of progressive politics. This online event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of ten dollars) and open to the public. Registration is required. The event will last for approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. Special Offer
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