Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 5
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in the parliamentary elections of September 2022 through the coalition of her right-wing party, the Brothers of Italy, with Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia. Although the Italian far right has always disavowed its links to Fascism, Meloni began her career in the openly neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed in 1946 by erstwhile supporters of Benito Mussolini. Her party retains the MSI logo and is happy to proclaim a slogan heard everywhere in the Mussolini era: Difenderemo Dio, patria, e famiglia (We will defend God, country, and family).
CONTENT
Jenny Uglow
Fascism’s Poster Girl. Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?
Andrew O’Hagan
Bigger, Deeper, and More ‘Fucked Up’. When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”
Charles Glass
Disenchantment and Devastation in Syria. The civil war may be over in Damascus, but the mood in the city is one of resignation.
Meghan O’Gieblyn
The Life of the Mind. The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker’s new novel, dramatizes with rare vibrancy an economist’s preparation for a talk on John Maynard Keynes.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Laughs and Smiles. Frans Hals’s animated paintings allow viewers to feel the presence of an artist whose life is largely unknown.
Colin Grant
Far from Jamaica. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You explores the unsettling shifts in identity for two generations of a Jamaican family in Florida.
Lauren K. Watel
The Island. a poem
Francisco Cantú
An American Story. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s latest book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.
Anjum Hasan
Endless Trances. With a wordy, inventive style, in Tomb of Sand the Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree lets language take the lead.
Sarah Schulman
Red Lights, Blue Lines. Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”
Will Harris
Cuttlefish. a poem
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Trees in Themselves. The oldest trees prompt us to think about how embedded we are in time and could help us recalibrate our perspective on the geologic past.
Magda Teter
Reckoning with a Troubled Past. Two European museum exhibitions made good-faith efforts to bear witness to their towns’ early libels against Jews, while not always avoiding the pitfalls of historically loaded discourse.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Bloody Panico. The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened?
Letters
Mark Hussey, James Heffernan, Edward Mendelson
Respecting Second Thoughts