Plus: Algebra; Tyriek White; The French Empire; Israel's Attack on Health Care; Math
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Adam Hanieh assesses the damage Trump’s war is doing to the global economy; Dan Rockmore sings the praises of algebra; Omari Weekes reads Tyriek White’s debut novel; David A. Bell digs into the origins of the French empire; Neve Gordon investigates Israel’s attacks on hospitals in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon; a poem by Timothy Donnelly; and, from the archives, Ian Hacking on the genesis of math. Now that the Gulf states have become diversified industrial giants, blocking the Strait of Hormuz will have catastrophic effects on trade networks and food systems across the globe. The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it. Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded. A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation. Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern. Free from the ArchivesIn today’s newsletter, Dan Rockmore writes “In Defense of Algebra.” A little more than forty years ago, in the Review’s February 16, 1984, issue, Ian Hacking preempted algebra to ask: “Where Does Math Come From?” Hacking teases out the history of the discipline, from Plato to Newton to Leibniz to Kurt Gödel, as well as the nature of the “abstract mathematical structures” humans have invented to “[discern] features of the world upon which we model them.” In a demystifying mode not unlike Rockmore’s, Hacking writes: “Mathematics has unexpected applications because of the brute fact that structures that occur in one field of experience crop up in others.… There may be ground for awe at this fact, or admiration for the Author of Nature, but the widespread applicability of pure mathematics should not be a source of philosophical perplexity.” There really are innumerable pairs and triplets of distinct things (such as oranges) that can be put together to form collections of five objects. Such facts are at the empirical core of arithmetical beliefs. Yet not all twos and threes can be assembled, in any literal sense, to form fivesomes. Oranges in an orchard, yes, but stars, no, not even, except at great expense, two oranges in a Moroccan souk with three in a Californian supermarket. Droplets of mercury tend to fuse while rabbits multiply.
Private Life: A New York Review Podcast Mark Polizzotti joins host Jarrett Earnest to discuss André Breton, translation, and surrealism. Listen and subscribe at the link below. New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. You are receiving this message because you signed up
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