Plus: The Gaza Flotilla; Mathias Énard; Joan Semmel; The Voting Rights Act; Walt Whitman
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Today in The New York Review of Books: M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin take sociobiology to task; Piper French reports on the Global Sumud Flotilla’s efforts to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza; Christopher Byrd reads Mathias Énard’s novels; Regina Marler looks at Joan Semmel’s paintings; David Cole eulogizes the Voting Rights Act; and, from the archives, Walt Whitman on the Cheney Family Singers.
Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.
By sailing to Gaza, activists in the flotilla movement have long tried to pressure their own governments to honor international law.
In Mathias Énard’s many novels, encounters between cultures can lead to transformation—and peril.
Joan Semmel’s work is not just about reclaiming the female body from the male gaze but also about flesh, about carnality.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais deals a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, using reasoning that Congress rejected more than forty years ago.
Tomorrow, June 1, at 5:00 PM EDT
New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.
Free from the Archives
Today is Walt Whitman’s 207th birthday. For many years before the publication of Leaves of Grass he was a freelance journalist, writing for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Broadway Journal, for which, in 1845, he wrote about the Cheney Family Singers, a review that the Review reprinted on May 16, 2015 (making Whitman, quite possibly, our oldest contributor). This singing troupe of four brothers and a sister—“The Cheney young men are such brown-faced, stout-shouldered fellows as you will see in almost any American church, in a country village, of a Sunday. The girl is strangely simple, even awkward, in her ways”—charmed the twenty-six-year-old poet, putting him “in mind of health and fresh air in the country, at sunrise.”
There are two kinds of singing—heart-singing and art-singing. That which touches the souls and sympathies of other communities may have no effect here—unless it appeals to the throbbings of the great heart of humanity itself—pictures love, hope, or mirth in their comprehensive aspect. But nearly every nation has its peculiarities and its idioms, which make its best intellectual efforts dearest to itself alone, so that hardly any thing which comes to us in the music and songs of the Old World, is strictly good and fitting to our own nation.
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