Zadie Smith on the Point of Art
Inside our June 11 issue
Art for Our Sakes
Zadie Smith
This essay was delivered in a slightly different form as a lecture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, in May.
I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets? I’m going to answer the question as best I can, but I’ll say first that when I looked at the list of previous speakers and spotted the name E.M. Forster—and the year 1949—I was curious. I wondered what he could possibly have had to say to a room full of artists in the wreckage of World War II.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Damming the Big Ocean
Quinn Slobodian
For decades the term “chokepoints” has referred to places, usually narrow maritime passages, through which a great deal of traffic needs to move: the Panama Canal, the Bosporus, the Strait of Malacca. In the over-quoted words of Sir Walter Raleigh: “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.” Despite the technological revolutions of the past centuries, this remains true: over 80 percent of world trade by volume travels by sea, and disruptions such as the Ever Given container ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal—or the blockades of the Strait of Hormuz—still send ripples through the global economy. For a century American naval strategy and geopolitical dominance have relied in part on control over important maritime routes.
The central contention of Edward Fishman’s book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is that the era of hyperglobalization has spawned new, more abstract kinds of chokepoints alongside the traditional ones. These bottlenecks appear in the opaque circuitry of finance: the online balance sheets of banks, the transactions of payment systems, and the servers filled with account data. Because a huge share of global finance is either denominated in dollars or runs through US financial institutions, international banks cannot afford to lose access to the American economy. As an extension of its foreign policy, the US can freeze deposits and Treasury bonds held by other nations—as they did to Russia in 2022—or levy penalties on foreign institutions that do business with adversaries.
Building on the influential work of the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Fishman argues that the chokepoints of what they call an “underground empire” are an almost accidental outcome of the process of American-led globalization. As it set out to connect the world in a post–cold war era, the US ended up with new tools at its disposal, from sanctions to investment bans. US policymakers realized that they had their hands on the spigot of a global system of trade and exchange that ran on the dollar; the power to let it flow could also be the power to seal it off.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Navalny’s Unfinished Work
Benjamin Nathans
No matter what form it has taken—land of the tsars, nucleus of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or today’s All-Russian Federation—the place known as Russia has displayed an enduring capacity to spawn dissidents and an equally striking inability to tolerate them. This is not unusual for authoritarian systems, but in Russia’s case what stands out is the persistence of the phenomenon across centuries and widely varying types of rule, as if “loyal opposition” were a foreign substance rejected by generation after generation of the host organism. “We are a nation of optimists,” Zhores Alferov, a 2000 Nobel laureate in physics, once joked, “because the pessimists have all left.”
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, nearly a million people, mostly young and well educated, have fled Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some (men) sought to avoid the military draft, others (men and women) feared arrest for criticizing the war—or for simply calling it a war, as opposed to the farcical official designation of “special military operation.” According to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, over 20,000 Russian citizens have been detained since 2022 for expressing antiwar opinions, including online. Russia currently has an estimated 2,142 political prisoners and an additional 4,710 individuals under criminal prosecution for political activity.
Prominent opponents of the Putin regime have left Russia for Almaty, Berlin, London, Tbilisi, Tel Aviv, and Yerevan. They too belong to a tradition that stretches across Russia’s historic incarnations: an émigré diaspora of unfettered speech, intense infighting, and political impotence.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most outspoken antagonist and a relentless optimist until his death at age forty-seven in a Siberian prison on February 16, 2024, refused to become an émigré. The title of his posthumously published memoir, Patriot, positions its author as representative of a loyal opposition—loyal not to Putin but to the patria, Russia. Published simultaneously in over two dozen languages, Navalny’s testament is a postmodern mélange in just about every way imaginable. It combines long-form autobiographical exposition with fragments of Instagram posts and diary entries. Its cultural references ricochet between high and low, East and West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Amazing Spider-Man. Its protagonist’s coming of age is propelled by a ceaseless contest between hope and disenchantment. Patriot leaves one with the impression of a work unfinished—like Navalny himself.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Mighty Real
Clair Wills
The new exhibition devoted to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin, currently at Tate Modern in London, is her biggest yet, with over ninety works on view, and the first since her recovery from major surgery for bladder cancer in 2020. In a series of winning interviews, she has talked openly about the impact of being given six months to live, her life-changing surgery (she now has a stoma and uses a urostomy bag), her recovery, and her entry into what she gladly calls her “second chance,” her “second life.” When she was made a dame commander of the British Empire in 2024 she had just received the four-year all-clear from her oncology team, and she said the news made her feel “like being born again.” Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see, she laughs, just how much she is “thoroughly enjoying the second part.”
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
More from the June 11 issue…
Suzy Hansen on the kind of society that produces Pete Hegseth
M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin on the slippery slope of “sociobiology”
Sanford Schwartz on a revelatory Paul Klee show
Rumaan Alam on a memoir about a delivery job in Beijing
Joanna Biggs on Makenna Goodman’s exhilarating and naughty myths
Jonathan Mingle on the methane miasma
Martin Filler on Tristan und Isolde
David W. Blight on reclaiming American history from Trumpist ideologues
Neal Ascherson on the death of Hitler
Christopher Byrd on Mathias Énard’s cultural exchange novels
David Cole on the death of the Voting Rights Act
Walker Mimms on Emily Kraus at Luhring Augustine in New York
Carolina A. Miranda on Magdalena Suarez Frimkess at David Zwirner, Los Angeles
a poem by Marianne Boruch
