“Chickens and other poultry comprise 70 percent of all birds by weight. Chickens are the most numerous farm animal. As a global tribe, human beings could be called the People of the Chicken.” —Ian Frazier

“Between 200,000 and 500,000 people are thought to have stayed” in Darfur’s capital before it fell on October 26, writes Jérôme Tubiana. “Close to 100,000 fled the city and surrounding villages.… Where are all the others?”

“Trump is so focused on profiteering that he is apparently willing to sacrifice long-term American competitiveness, while Xi is so obsessed with control…that he may be willing to sacrifice near-term Chinese competitiveness.” —@juliangewirtz.bsky.social

“The history of slavery functions differently on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the US it’s a fundamental part of our racial identity.… Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade reside within the chain-link fence of American race.” —Nell Irvin Painter

“Yoko Ono doesn’t impose, she invites; she doesn’t restrict…she offers. This is how she plays the music of the mind.” —Anika Banister

In Bangladesh, “the army is now stronger than ever. Though it has denied that it wants to take over directly...it is intent on keeping its power and resisting accountability for the crimes of the past.” —Cyrus Naji

“If musical genius is a myth, as is often claimed, it’s worth remembering that a myth is more than a falsehood. It is a story through which people try to articulate what they can express in no other way.” —Nathan Shields

On McNamara, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Gaza, and finally Trump. "Once you allow yourself to play by a set of rules that’s different from everyone else’s, the rules themselves are made brittle and ultimately break." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

'Recalling executives who were also disinclined to discuss “the potential future implications of the technology they were building,” Witt concludes that “they were more afraid of Jensen yelling at them than they were of wiping out the human race.”': www.nybooks.com/articles/202... @nybooks.com

"With all that gravitas, you might not realize it, but Toni Morrison was funny as hell." -- @namwalien.bsky.social via @nybooks.com

“Death in its modern guise is often cruel instead of impartial, and unlike its medieval counterpart it offers no suggestion of redemption.” —Beatrice Radden Keefe on the Gothic

“If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.” —@fotoole.bsky.social

Gertrude Stein “always nurtured a lingering feeling that she had not been properly or adequately recognized. Posterity would make up for it, she was sure.” —Hermoine Lee

"With all that gravitas, you might not realize it, but Toni Morrison was funny as hell. Many of her friends reminisce about her sense of humor; according to some, it bordered on the bawdy." -- Namwali Serpell | The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Our 2/26 issue is now online, with @fotoole.bsky.social on the murders in Minneapolis, Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison’s sense of humor, @juliangewirtz.bsky.social on the new microchip race, Vivian Gornick on Arundhati Roy, @rhodesben.bsky.social on Robert McNamara’s sins, and much more.

I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

🇮🇹⚡Malaparte argues that in the seizure of power, ideology only goes so far, and if a handful of skilled operatives manage to commandeer the mechanisms of the state—infrastructure, communications—a leader can take control without mass support or even favorable circumstances...

Rachel Donadio (@racheldonadio.bsky.social) on the contradictions of Curzio Malaparte

Julian Gewirtz (@juliangewirtz.bsky.social) on the US–China rivalry over the future semiconductors for AI

Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison’s sense of humor

“To watch KPop Demon Hunters,” writes Kevin Power, “is to recognize that the corporate entertainment industries and the fandoms that they solicit and serve have now entered into a sort of closed loop.”

“The failures of the interim government [in Bangladesh] have allowed charismatic politicians, both old and new, to step into the power vacuum.” —Cyrus Naji

Jane DeLynn’s “underlying subject” is “the relentless self-consciousness of [her] first­ person narrators.… Each is a lesbian Prufrock, preparing her face to meet the faces that she meets.” —Regina Marler

“How many of us would have the presence of mind to act the same way—to recognize when it’s time to flee our country forever, without hesitating like Lot’s wife on her way out of Sodom?” —Adam Kirsch on Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers

“Two of our people have been shot dead while protesting ICE’s antidemocratic actions. They are martyrs, heroes of American democracy, and should be venerated as such.” —an interview with @josephoneill.bsky.social

In this piece for the New York Review of Books, I explain how today’s anti-trans agenda doesn’t just target trans people—it quietly (mostly quietly) dismantles the legal foundations that protect cis women from discrimination. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

For Jane DeLynn, a “real-life affair” with a high school teacher “helped establish a principle that recurs in her fiction: the mingling of pleasure with disgust.” —Regina Marler

“I was hardly the first Black American to see the need for escape. We have been peering over chain-link fences for longer than I’ve been alive, for as long as Black Americans have been Black Americans.” —Nell Irvin Painter

“If the murder of Alex Pretti…cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings…making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.” —@fotoole.bsky.social

“For every waterfront revitalization project in Europe or North America, there is a port somewhere else that was not downsized and cleaned up but expanded, often at appalling cost.” —@vanessahistory.bsky.social

Reporting from the Twin Cities, Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (@robinks.com) “kept hearing about the lengths to which ICE is going to ensnare people who criticize the agency or obstruct its terror campaign.”

“Chickens are now the most populous terrestrial vertebrate. At any one time, about 26 billion chickens occupy the planet, as 65 billion are slaughtered annually and billions more hatch.” —Ian Frazier

“A drone flew over Um Baru for five hours and launched six bombs, killing two and injuring five, mostly civilians. I joined many of the villagers in fleeing to the woods near the village, where we hid under what trees we could find.” — Jérôme Tubiana reports from Sudan

“A neglected heiress who watched her city and her family’s wealth collapse in less than a year, a child for whom no thing or person was reliable, [Yoko Ono] turned to her imagination not to escape her reality but to soften it.” —Anika Banister

“In current mineralogical classification, there is no separate category for gemstones. Yet this was not always so.” —Jenny Uglow on Maison Cartier and the preciousness of stones

In this piece forNew York Review of Books, I explain how today’s anti-trans agenda doesn’t just target trans people—it quietly (mostly quietly) dismantles the legal foundations that protect cis women from discrimination. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

You can apply this reading of K Pop Demon Hunters and its basic inhumanity to fiction publishing rn as well. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

"A pope ordered that churches put images of roosters at their highest point as a reminder of our frailty—hence the rooster weather vane." —Ian Frazier for @nybooks.com

With Igor Levit, “the classical music industry” hopes “to recapture the authority of genius without reviving its authoritarian past.” —Nathan Shields

Kevin Power on KPop Demon Hunters and its “dream of perfect neoliberal order”

“A fellow woman student at Hopkins remembered that Gertrude Stein’s ‘idea of argument’ was (figuratively) ‘to throw her shoes at you, pitch you down a flight of stairs...and leave you wordless and for dead.’” —Hermione Lee

“The Trump administration has not been shy about threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of foundations and nonprofits that criticize or oppose it.… A tax measure designed to promote philanthropic freedom can also be a cudgel for control.”

“Seen as German by Germans and as French by the French, the Gothic was revered by those yearning for a lost age of faith and unity as well as by avant-gardes in search of the new.” —Beatrice Radden Keefe

“Silence is not an honorable option for anyone who loves this country and reveres its far-from-perfect but still extraordinarily valuable Constitution, which is now under relentless attack from the law-defying right.” —@tribelaw.bsky.social

Nell Irvin Painter on finding Blackness elsewhere

My Elsewheres | Nell Irvin Painter A lifetime of travel outside the United States has enlarged my sense of history far beyond the prevailing American ideology of race www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

'Effingers does not explain what happened to the Germans and the Jews. Instead it captures an experience that we are increasingly familiar with today: the bewilderment of watching history go wrong without being able to understand or stop it.'

"A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value." As the news cycle rolls on, an excellent piece by Alma Guillermoprieto. @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

I went back home to Minneapolis and St. Paul and reported on the quickly expanding devastation of Operation Metro Surge. I hope you'll give it a read.

From “flags of convenience” to shell companies, the “offshore economy requires such legal abstractions” to ensure “it can be neatly separated from the ‘real’ economy onshore.” —@vanessahistory.bsky.social