Plus: The Mason–Dixon Line; Uganda; A City of Immigrants; Modi's False Promises; Norman Mailer on Iraq
| Today in The New York Review of Books: David Cole deplores Trump’s imperial assault on Venezuela; Nicholas Guyatt measures the legacy of the Mason–Dixon Line; Helen Epstein tells Uganda’s violent recent history; Tanvi Misra looks at the prospects for immigrants in Mamdani’s New York; Christopher de Bellaigue scrutinizes Narendra Modi’s claims of progress; a poem by Maureen N. McLane; and, from the archives, Norman Mailer on the invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Venezuela is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple. How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a long-standing colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom? Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation. The question is less what Zohran Mamdani symbolizes for New York’s immigrant communities than what benefits he might deliver for them. Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies. Free from the ArchivesIn the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—a week after the United States invaded Iraq on a mission of regime change undergirded by a desire for control of oil production—Norman Mailer wrote an “attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.” A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are large enough.
“AI is supposed to create great wealth, but what claim will people in general have on it? Their only part in it all will have been to get out of the way. If we imagine that the problem will be addressed, what redress will be offered but life on the dole? AI will have mowed the lawn and washed the dishes, assuming that some remnant of ordinary life persists. This seems optimistic.” “Ross Douthat prefers to dance, deflect, and obfuscate, so as to better conceal the savageries of actually existing conservatism. Only occasionally will you find him offering a full-throated endorsement of his preferred policies. He is much more likely to billow forth a fog of counterfactual thought experiments and seen-it-all Weltschmerz, or to press the case against the case against whatever he is for.” Special Offer
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