The New York Review

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del periódico incoporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de febrero de 2007.

Nota informativa: Nota informativa: The New York Review of Books es una revista sobre literatura, cultura, y actualidad publicada en Nueva York. Fue fundada en 1963. Tiene implementado un «muro de pago» por lo que es necesario suscribirse para tener acceso a todos sus contenidos. Más información en su página de suscripción.

Ricardo Martinelli, the former president of Panama, under police escort during a hearing over charges that he used state funds to conduct a phone-espionage campaign while in office, Panama City, June 26, 2018. Tito Herrera/AFP/Getty Images

MundoAmérica

On July 17, after a lengthy trial and some six weeks of deliberation, Panama’s former president Ricardo Martinelli was found guilty of laundering public funds while in office. He faces a fine of $19.2 million and over a decade in prison. The prosecution charged that in 2010, a year into his five-year presidential term, Martinelli and others funneled close to $44 million of taxpayer money into a shell company called New Business, which he then used to acquire the Panamanian media conglomerate EPASA. Two days after the ruling, the century-old national periodical Panamá América ran the headline “Verdict Marred by Political Interests and an Attack on Freedom of Expression”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Two domestic workers caring for a baby at Leblon Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2014.AP/Felipe Dana

MundoAmérica,

This past May Brazilian police officers and officials from the Ministry of Labor rescued a sixty-three-year-old woman from the private home where she had worked, without pay, benefits, or vacation time, for forty-seven years. The woman, who had cooked and cleaned for three successive generations of a family living outside the southern city of Porto Alegre, could neither read nor write. The case was reported to state authorities as part of a campaign to crack down on coerced labor, or “work analogous to slavery”, as it is called in the Brazilian Penal Code, which refrains from referring to it by the name of the practice formally abolished in 1888.…  Seguir leyendo »

A man fishing in the Dnipro river, Dnipro, July 20, 2023. Tim Judah

Europa, , ,

From a ruined gas station on a hill in the village of Preobrazhenka, in Ukraine’s southeast, you can hear the sound of outgoing artillery and see plumes of smoke rising in the distance. Armored demining equipment, tanks, and SUVs packed with soldiers rumble or speed past. Six miles south, on the southern Zaporizhzhia front, the Ukrainian Army has punched a hole in the formidable defenses Russia has built along the six-hundred-mile frontline. I was hoping to understand whether Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which began in early June, was failing, succeeding, or just moving a lot slower than expected. But the view was obscured by black swans flying gracefully in V formations.…  Seguir leyendo »

Police officers facing off against protesters at a demonstration called by the collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre and other groups to protest the use of mega-basins in industrial agriculture, Sainte-Soline, France, March 25, 2023. Pascal Lachenaud/AFP/Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía,

For many months, the neoliberal government of Emmanuel Macron has confronted a population that rejects its politics en masse. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age in France provoked opposition across the board—from far right to far left, and pretty much everyone in between—that united squabbling unions, inspired high-profile work stoppages across major labor sectors, and launched demonstrations in cities and towns that set the rhythm of daily life all winter and spring. Antipathy to Macron’s austerity politics, which erupted dramatically in 2018 when the gilets jaunes protested a fuel tax hike, reached a pinnacle in March when Macron, realizing he would lose the parliamentary vote on the retirement reforms, relied instead on executive fiat to push them through.…  Seguir leyendo »

Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, now the head of Sudan’s military government, and Mohammed Hamdan Daglo “Hemetti,” the chairman of the Rapid Security Forces (RSF), attending a graduation ceremony for Sudan's special forces, Khartoum, 2021. Mahmoud Hjaj/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

MundoÁfrica

In June 2019, shortly after directing the massacre of a sit-in outside the army’s headquarters in the Sudanese capital, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo “Hemetti”—the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a mercenary army of over 100,000 men—warned that “Khartoum could become Kutum”. He was referring to a much fought-over little town in North Darfur that Le Monde reported was once “emptied of its inhabitants” by his militiamen. “People will abandon the high houses, only the cats will remain”.

Today Hemetti is fulfilling his threat. Since fighting broke out between Sudan’s army and the RSF in April, Khartoum, a city with a population of close to nine million in its metropolitan area, has been abandoned by well over a million people—including most of the wealthy bourgeois families of the old city, whose comfortable “high houses”, when not reduced to ashes, have been stormed by the tens of thousands of looting young adventurers Hemetti has recruited from the lumpenproletariat of Darfur and the rural areas of Chad, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Mali.…  Seguir leyendo »

Leaders of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) voting to commit to a referendum on independence, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, January 28, 2023. Marc Trilla/Europa Press/Getty Images

EspañaElecciones

At the end of May Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that Spaniards would go to the polls on July 23 to elect a new national government. It was a surprise announcement—the election was not expected until December—precipitated by the heavy losses that Sánchez’s social democratic Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) had just sustained in that month’s local and regional elections. If history is any guide, the coming vote will unleash a lot of political turbulence. In recent national elections neither the PSOE nor its nemesis, the conservative Popular Party (PP), has been able to secure a victory big enough to form a government on its own, making potential kingmakers out of other political forces, including, most notably, the leading separatist parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country.…  Seguir leyendo »

Al Birah Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine, June 2023. Molly Crabapple

MundoOriente Próximo,

I spent the end of May and the beginning of June in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, first as a guest of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and then documenting daily life in my sketchbook. It had been eight years since my last trip to Palestine, and on the face of it, everything had gotten worse. The contradictions that plague any ethnonationalist project had all come to a bloody head with the reelection of Netanyahu last fall and his appointment of openly fascist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have been encouraging settler rampages across the West Bank.…  Seguir leyendo »

A camp inhabited by migrant laborers next to the greenhouses where they produce fruits and vegetables for export, Níjar, Almería, Spain, April 2023. Carlos Gil

EspañaSocial, ,

In 1956 Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain’s most influential contemporary writers, took a bus to the eastern part of Almería, a province in Andalusia. Under Franco, this was one of the country’s most impoverished regions, exploited by mining companies and neglected by the government. Goytisolo had come to tell the stories of the people who lived in its slums. “I remember clearly the impression of poverty and violence provoked so dramatically by Almería when I first took route 340 into the province a few years ago”, he wrote in Níjar Country, which was published in 1960 and subsequently banned, like many of his books.…  Seguir leyendo »

A party from the village of Kambo, led by Elfinesh Tegene, approaching the cave of Ametsegna Washa, Menz Keya Gebreal district, Ethiopia, November 2022. Frederic Wehrey

MundoÁfricaEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

In the fall of 2021, as military forces from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) swept south toward Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, they encroached upon a swathe of highland territory known as Menz. A blue-green land of deep ravines, terraced hills, and imposing flood basalts, Menz is sometimes seen as a place apart. In his classic midcentury ethnography of the area, Wax and Gold, the University of Chicago scholar Donald Levine observed among its inhabitants—most of them farmers of barley, sorghum, and teff—a potent mix of martial prowess and piety. This “land of fighting and fasting”, as he called it, served as the cradle for a dynastic line of Amharic rulers that included Menelik II, the founder of the modern Ethiopian state who dealt a shattering blow to the Italian colonial army at the battle of Adwa in 1896, and also Haile Selassie.…  Seguir leyendo »

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). Limbo Films/Netflix

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

When Alejandro González Iñárritu’s most recent film premiered last fall, he made a point of calling it not an autobiography but an “emography”, a representation not of his life but of his emotions. This was an understatement. Everything we see in Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths occurs in the theater of the protagonist’s mind. Silverio, a US-based, US-celebrated Mexican filmmaker, is Iñárritu’s stand-in; he replicates his creator’s personal life and professional trajectory and gives voice to his desires and fears. Over more than two and a half hours, we witness Silverio’s life on both sides of the border: we go back to his childhood, forth to his death, and back again in a loop of anxiety and memory.…  Seguir leyendo »

Brenda Meaney as Pascuala, Ricardo Vázquez as Barrildo, and Paco Lozano as Ortuño in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, 2023. Gerry Goodstein/Theatre for a New Audience

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The plays of Spain’s preeminent Golden Age dramatist, Lope de Vega, come across on the page as compressed and quick off the mark, agile in tracking actions and consequences, nimble in slipping from comedy to tragedy and back as needed. They make room for set pieces of all kinds, bantering wordplay, elegant verbal duets for lovers, satirical digression and philosophical quibbling, not to mention singing and festivity, without ever slackening the tension of their inexorable plotlines. In their structure they lay out a recognizable template for modern dramatic storytelling, while extending earlier traditions of balladry and folkloric chronicle. Working in the same era and in a mode parallel to what the Elizabethans were doing, but distilling a culture quite distinct, Lope embodies theatricality.…  Seguir leyendo »

Photographs from 2021 of boxes of documents in storage at Mar-a-Lago, included in the Justice Department’s indictment of Donald Trump. Department of Justice

MundoAmérica,

Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman selling vegetables on a boat in a floating village, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, 2013. Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images

MundoAsia

On her bank’s loan sheets Ban Sophear looks like an ideal borrower. At forty-seven, she runs a small business buying fish on the southern edge of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake and also owns some farmland. In the past Sophear borrowed a small amount of money—a microloan—to build up her business. She managed to pay it back in full, qualifying her for larger microloans, which are issued by banks that have turned lending to the poor into a lucrative business. In 2022 Sophear borrowed $3,000. She used the money for her business and to pay her son’s school fees. The interest rate is 18 percent—standard for microloans in Cambodia.…  Seguir leyendo »

King Charles III waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on Coronation Day, London, May 6, 2023. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/Getty Images

Europa,

Is the third time the charm? Charles’s first coronation was at Gordonstoun school in November 1965, when he played Macbeth. There is a photograph in the Royal Collections of him in a get-up nearly as strange as those he is wearing at Westminster Abbey almost sixty years later, sporting a bad fake beard and what seems like a horse harness around his neck and chest as a breastplate. The recently updated online catalog describes the “people involved” in the image as “Charles III, King of the United Kingdom (b. 1948)” and “Macbeth, King of Scotland (c. 1005-1057)”, as if this seventeen-year-old boy is floating somewhere between the eleventh and twenty-first centuries and between real and theatrical performances of kingship.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian books from the collection of Izyum Central City Library are stacked in bundles to be recycled, Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast, February 28, 2023. Alex McBride

Europa, , ,

At a recycling facility outside Kyiv, the face of Vladimir Lenin gazed from the cover of a discarded biography among Russian copies of Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Pushkin about to be funneled into a shredder. The books, eventually to become egg cartons and toilet paper, came from both private citizens and public libraries across Ukraine. Last June the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture published new guidelines advising libraries and cultural institutions to purge Russian-language books and Russian literature from their collections. It is now illegal to import or distribute books published in Russia. Expanding the national “de-Russification” efforts that began in 2015, the guidelines have received widespread support in parliament and among the public.…  Seguir leyendo »

Joos van Cleve: Detail, Virgin and Child, ca. 1525. Metropolitan Museum of Art

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The child couldn’t tell the time. It was 1953, and she was looking up at the clock hanging on the wall in the vast, shadowy, central rotunda of her new school in Brussels, and couldn’t read the hands. Why she’d been asked to leave the classroom and find out the time is unclear; surely the classroom had a clock of its own—perhaps it was broken? That child was somber and earnest, eager to obey, keen to shine, and determined not to cry as she twisted one of her thin plaits round her fingers and stuck her thumb in her mouth, hoping someone would come and tell her the time so she could give her teacher what she wanted.…  Seguir leyendo »

Las AR-15 ocupan un lugar funesto en la vida estadounidense

MundoAmérica,

Además de las espeluznantes imágenes de las cámaras de seguridad de la persona que mató a seis personas, entre ellas tres niños, en la Escuela Covenant de Nashville la semana pasada, aparecieron algunas imágenes menos publicitadas pero no menos desconcertantes: fotografías, al parecer obtenidas de las redes sociales, de armas de asalto pertenecientes a la atacante.

Las armas estaban adornadas con lemas adolescentes (“fuego del infierno”) y decoradas con calcomanías que podrían haber estado en una patineta: el logotipo de la casa de moda Stüssy, una ilustración azul y roja similar a la obra del artista gráfico conocido como Kaws, un globo granate de procedencia incierta.…  Seguir leyendo »

Striking TotalEnergies workers protesting the French government's new pension plan outside a refinery, Gronfreville-l'Orcher, March 24, 2023. Lou Benoist/AFP/Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía,

For every retiree in France, there are 1.7 people in the workforce. In 1970 the ratio was one to four. By 2100, the number is projected to be one to one. Ostensibly in response to this looming crunch, on March 16 President Emmanuel Macron used a constitutional lever to push through a pension reform plan that raises the basic retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. The fallout has been dramatic: millions of protestors of all ages and across unions, garbage fires on the streets of Paris, blocked highways, and alarming police violence during the protests.

Macron and his defenders have called the reform a necessity.…  Seguir leyendo »

Olivier Faure addressing reporters at the Socialist Party headquarters the day he became the party's presumptive first secretary, Paris, March 16, 2018 . Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images.

EuropaUnión Europea,

In the early morning hours of January 20, Olivier Faure, the leader of France’s Socialist Party, announced that the party’s members had reelected him. The vote, he said, was “clear”. Around the same time, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the mayor of the northern city of Rouen and Faure’s opponent, announced that, actually, he had won. A few hours later the party sided with Faure, putting out a press release claiming that, according to an initial count, he had triumphed by 393 votes, but Mayer-Rossignol remained unsatisfied and threatened legal action to prevent the election from being “stolen” from party members. A Faure ally accused Mayer-Rossignol of Trumpian tactics; the two camps traded allegations of irregularities, including ballot-stuffing.…  Seguir leyendo »

Supporters of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr protesting the US occupation, Baghdad, 2008. Moises Saman/Magnum Photos

MundoOriente Próximo,

I first visited Iraq in October 2002, barely a year after the United States attacked Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I went there as a photojournalist, invited by the government of Saddam Hussein to cover the presidential referendum in which, according to Iraqi officials, 100 percent of the population voted to extend his rule. It was my first experience working under the supervision of government minders, without freedom of movement, only allowed to cover pro-regime events. The US invasion already seemed inevitable after the passage that month of the joint resolution authorizing “use of military force against Iraq”.

Over the next two decades I covered conflicts big and small in Afghanistan, Haiti, Nepal, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I spent more time working in Iraq than anywhere else.…  Seguir leyendo »