Maraú Península: Zadie Smith on Campus Protests

In today’s newsletter, Zadie Smith on shibboleths, and then:
• Luka Dončić breaks the model
• Frank Stella’s indestructible art
• “Evil Does Not Exist,” reviewed

Illustration of a missile made from words.

Essay

The Role of Words in the Campus Protests

In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

An illustration of a book with leggings that are running.

From the News Desk

C.D.C. signage outside the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Comment

Should We Be Worried About Bird Flu?

According to the C.D.C., the risk to public health remains low. But the country’s initial approach has had an unsettling resonance with the first months of COVID.

By Dhruv Khullar

A photo of Luka Dončić, of the Dallas Mavericks, with his hand on a basketball, defended by James Harden, of the Los Angeles Clippers.

The Sporting Scene

There Was a Model for Luka Dončić. Now He’s Broken It

For years, the Dallas Mavericks star was compared to James Harden, whose footsteps he seemed to follow. But Dončić plays with a different kind of freedom.

By Louisa Thomas

Tents with Palestinian flags on top of an open book.

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at One American University

Not since the Vietnam War has a protest movement reached college campuses with such fury. We look at the reverberations at one school, Harvard University.

With David Remnick

An illustration of a book with a knife sliced through the spine, with fallen paper shavings.

Editor’s Pick

Postscript

The Indestructible Art of Frank Stella

The artist, who has died at eighty-seven, rattled standards of modernist abstraction rather as Bob Dylan did those of folk music.

By Peter Schjeldahl

An illustration of three books on a windowsill with an eye and a cloud appearing through the window.

Culture Dept.

The Current Cinema

The Beautifully Unnerving Gaze of “Evil Does Not Exist”

The Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi follows his Oscar-winning “Drive My Car” with a hauntingly ambiguous drama of nature and capitalism in conflict.

By Justin Chang

A still from the film “The Boy and the Heron.” At center, there is a frowning boy with a bandage on his head.

Cultural Comment

Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-Comfort Movie

“The Boy and the Heron” finds the filmmaker revising—and sometimes upending—the themes that have defined his career.

By Moeko Fujii

Poems

“Second Nature”

“I lived / An invisible life.”

By Paul Tran

Poems

“Laundry”

“Who can watch a child and not feel fear / like static in the background or a tinnitus you try to ignore.”

By Ellen Bass

An illustration of a crossword puzzle wrapped around the arms of a person.

Fun & Games Dept.

Shouts & Murmurs

Horoscopes Written by My Mother

With Saturn rising, you might feel the astrological pull of stubbornness in your sixth house. Like when Bess waited thirteen hours before she got the epidural.

By Bess Kalb

A top hat with long legs on a beige background.

Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play our trivia game »

P.S. In an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published diary, W. H. Auden declared the novel “To the Lighthouse”—ninety-seven years old today—one of her best books, and reflected on Woolf’s prolific and inspired production. “Though she took extraordinary pains over each book, she was a born spontaneous writer who never seems to have known periods when she was without a fresh idea,” Auden writes. “Even while she was in the middle of writing one book, she got ideas for the next, and her output shows a greater variety than she is sometimes credited with.”