The Saturday Night Review of the New York Review of Books

 
Highlights from the discussion

A giant snow was coming up from Missouri. The same excitement today as long ago. A new subscription magazine appears thru the mail chute. The New York Review of Books in 2026 as welcomed as Car & Driver in 1966.

In 1966 - that's when I first discovered NYRB. I was working in the Children's Library in Racine, and going up to the adult stacks and periodicals on break. In those days the nickname for the pub was 'The New York Review of Viet Nam" - and it offered a more worldly view than the Racine Journal Times concerning what goes on. Intellectual, for sure. This was going to give me fodder for class discussions. It was my ticket to the elbow patch sports jacket and collegiate-like erudition. An IQ boost. 

Well of course, those were different times. But I'm still trying to hone a world view...as it happens, this is as the present world order is shaking, rattling and rolling. Gee, but the essayists today face a hard task. The world is moving faster. Everyone has a platform [the clever can clone and infinitely expand their clone army]. And we all know what happened ourselves before there is time to analyze. And some force will generate disruptive new brain tweeze before we ever do digest the last.

The main focus of the recent issue of The New York Review of Books led by Fintan O’Toole, with contributors including Lawrence Tribe and a humorous piece on books about chickens by Ian Frazier. Some commentary: 

- O’Toole’s coverage centers on contemporary political dangers: comparisons to earlier political thrillers ala Fletcher Knuble [sp?] and warning that once-satirical visions of 'imperialism, racial purification, and resource extraction now mirror real politics.'

- Critique of U.S. national security posture (Dec 4 Ominous Strategy Directive referenced) and concern that “democracy” is underemphasized [mentioned but thrice]; tension with Europe based on absurd battle between the U.S. tech/political clown car and Modest Mouse European regulation of American social media.

- Worries about powerful tech figures (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison) and Musk’s AI (grok) potentially enabling harmful content, including creation/uploading of pornographic and sexually violent images of you — Such is the Tech Libra view of what they have every right to do.

- Strong criticism of authoritarian rhetoric and actors in the U.S. political scene, with Stephen Miller cited for promoting a “power/strength” doctrine that the speaker links to anarchic authoritarianism or fascist tendencies.

- Additional items in the issue noted briefly: pieces about global political events (a capital falling in Darfur, a coup in the Bengal.  a jewelry/gems essay with scientific angles, a Gertrude Stein/early-20th-century note, and a poem by Kathleen Ossip with craft technique that springs from the same well as mine.

Here are key quotations pulled directly from a transcript of my issue notation:

- [0:00:05] Speaker 1: "The IQ squad at the New York Review of Books these days is in this issue is led by Fintan O'Toole."

- [0:01:22] Speaker 1: "News, sentence, led as it is, by President Trump and major Trump donors such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Larry Ellison,"

- [0:01:50] Speaker 1: "The US has returned to snatching southern South American presidentes."

- [0:03:37] Speaker 1: "Fintan goes back to the days of Fletcher Nubile and political thrillers that minced meatily about on such possibilities as removing a president who's taken on a delirium,"

- [0:04:09] quoting O'Toole: "Neville's Conjuring of an American president's hallucination of imperial expansion, racial purification, resource extraction and disdain for the old European democracies no longer reads like satirical hyperbole. What was once delirium is now the Daily News."

- [0:05:07] Speaker 1: "As he notes, the word democracy is only three times."

- [0:06:44] Speaker unknown: "Musk has worked to forge a large language model that upends any moderate, semi-Objective World model and replaces it with his sickness,"

- [0:07:48] Speaker 1: "Here's an example of the Europeans trying to administer their country the way they think would be sane: They try to curb Elon Musk,AI tool grok  from facilitating the creation and uploading of pornographic and sexually violent [and even animated] images of real children and women. [Maybe you or your daughter] [How] can thus be framed as a threat to democracy that validates an American policy of destabilizing the European Union?"

- [0:11:00] Speaker 1: "At any one time, about 26 billion chickens occupy the planet. At 65 billion are slaughtered annually, and billions more hatch,"

- [0:15:06] Speaker 1: "There's a poem called Childhood by Kathleen Ossip, starts with the surprise when she imagines she dies. 'Dying was like a Venetian blind.' And you ask, 'how so?'a nd she answers: "all parts working together, but not in the same direction." 

And now, to  Rudi Schweitzer and his Spinning Plates ...