February 3, 2025 Bookmarks We Are Meek and We Shall Inherit No Earth By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket): Chimpanzee societies wage war against each other. Crows make and use tools. Dolphins talk to each other and talk about us. They have different dialects and various synonyms for “human” (some of them are slurs). Language, as such, is not what distinguishes us from other creatures that roam the earth. Nor is it intelligence. Sentiments—complex, sophisticated sentiment—it is said, are what make humans unique. How we refine or distort our emotions, codify them into structures, how we systematize our layered and recursive interior lives, how we immortalize our fleeting expressions into art, policy, or poison is what makes us stand out. Or so we tell ourselves. In the framework of humanization, Palestinians are not entirely deprived of “uniquely human emotions,” however, the Palestinian’s affective allowance—the range of sentiments one is permitted to express openly—is extremely restricted and shrinks with every perceived “wrongdoing.” We are allowed to be hospitable (Yosef Weitz, the “Architect of Transfer,” wrote in his diary about the unsuspecting Palestinians who served him food and welcomed him in homes he later stole). We are implored to be peaceful (or submissive) and forbearing, and we are tolerated when we are. We are meek and we shall inherit no earth. What we are not allowed is the future: we cannot be ambitious or cunning; we cannot aspire to sovereignty or revenge. We are robbed of the right to complexity, to contradictory feelings, the right to “contain multitudes.” Our sadness is without teeth. Perhaps we can be bitter (see: “Palestinian Rejectionism”), but belligerence and hostility—foreign concepts to our oppressors, apparently—exile us outside of humanity once more. The only thing we are permitted to look forward to is the day’s end. Read More
January 31, 2025 At the Gym A Journey Through Four Gyms By Vivian Hu Public gym in Taipei. Screenshot from Google Maps. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. The Instagram Trainer I met him online, at a vulnerable moment, during one of the worst winters of my life. It was a year into the pandemic and I had just moved to Upstate New York for graduate school, which was being held over Zoom, and I was going through a breakup. A friend of a friend had been working out with him IRL and had reposted a few of his stories. Out of curiosity, I’d clicked on his profile—@bootiesbyarthur. “NJ’s PERSONAL TRAINER, Hour glass specialist ⏳🍑,” his bio read. His profile was full of videos of ample-buttocked women doing jump squats and hip thrusts. “TRANSFORMATION WEDNESDAYS 🔥💪,” one post read, featuring before-and-after photos of a young, ethnically ambiguous woman in a bikini. Men lie, Women lie, RESULTS DON’T LIE. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending #tranformationwednesday #fitnessmotivation #personaltrainer #girlsthatlift #slimthickfit #gymmotivation Arthur worked primarily out of a shared gym space in New Jersey where he trained dozens of people regularly, but he also did online and in-home coaching around the tristate area. Because I was not local, he recommended I sign up for his online program. For $200 a month, I received a weekly workout plan (“DAY 1: LEGS, DAY 2: UPPER-BODY DAY, 1 DAY OFF,” et cetera), diet plan, and one thirty-minute combined check-in and workout session over FaceTime per month. I could purchase additional workout sessions at a cost of thirty dollars per meeting. In Arthur’s workout plan, “LEG DAY” meant goblet squats, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions (via a leg-extension machine), and hamstring curls. “UPPER-BODY DAY” included dumbbell shoulder presses, dumbbell bicep curls, single-arm dumbbell low rows, planks, and leg lifts, and each exercise was customizable. I ordered a set of dumbbells, and when I told Arthur that the university gym was still shut down, he gave me substitute exercises—Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells instead of the leg extensions and step-ups instead of the hamstring curls—that I could do at home instead. Arthur told me to text him anytime with questions—“Legit 24/7 at your service : )”—and to let him know each time I completed a workout. Before my first session, I sent him my “before” photos, as instructed. Using the self-timer on my phone, I photographed myself in my underwear from the back, side, and front—and in response he emailed me a motivational message. “First day today ! Video your workouts and tag meeee i wanna see how you’re form and tempo 🙂 kill it .” Read More
January 31, 2025 At the Gym At the Sauna: Dispatch from Eternity (Age Thirty-Two) By Jordan Castro Infrared reflectogram detail of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. As a teen, the distance between the present and future was mysterious and unbreachable. Parental appeals to the future didn’t work. “Think of the future,” they said. But I couldn’t. I could picture a red bird. I could picture a lampstand. But the future? It was a phenomenological impossibility. Once the prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction in the brain have developed, it’s easier to imagine the mental states of others, or to imagine what your perspective, as a fictional Other, might be like one day. But in young teens, this capacity is still developing, so the future is a rush of action and anxiety—the future is the present moment—always unfolding as it’s being lived out, experienced in hazy and semi-articulate ways. When you are thirteen, you are not thirty-two. But when you’re thirty-two, you’re also not thirteen. And this is similarly hard to understand. Read More
January 30, 2025 At the Gym The Equinox on Orchard Street By Cara Schacter It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. I’m on my hands and knees in the stretching corner of the Equinox on Orchard Street, doing a fifteen-minute full-body low-impact workout from goop’s YouTube channel, posted in the spring of 2020, which is when G. Sport collaborated with Proenza Schouler to make chafe-proof leggings, so, at the end of the video, after the instructor says “Namaste,” she adds, “and I just want to point out this cute set that I’m wearing.” But first, at the beginning, she says: “Everyone look down at your fingers. Press the floor away.” I’m in dolphin shorts and a front-closure sports bra with a ruched design that’s hard to explain: a gathering—a pinching—of fabric, not exactly in the interval between my breasts but on the verge of it. This is happening on each breast, separately, so there are two gatherings of fabric pinching at this near-interstitial point, radiating away from the sternum toward the nipple—each gathering going toward its own nipple—so the gatherings are mirror images moving in polar directions from the foot of their respective breast, so the effect of each pinched part, the severity of its folds, dissipates over the course of the cup. Think of a seashell. Don’t think of a conch. In fact, forget, for now, about univalve mollusks entirely. Think of Shell, the oil company, and The Birth of Venus, how incremental calcium deposits create a ribbed surface to stabilize the scallop on shifting sand with radial undulations progressively tightening in a quickened up-down pattern until its downward dips disappear, the ridges becoming a briefly singular swollen point as the shell folds into its umbo. Read More
January 29, 2025 Diaries Running Diaries By Kim Beil Photograph courtesy of Kim Beil. My running diary is a stack of 8 ½ x 11” papers printed with a calendar grid. The small boxes demand brevity. Cryptic penciled notes represent dates, times, distances, elevations, routes, and sometimes strangers’ names and course records. There are codes for heart rate (HR), physical-therapy exercises (yoga and single-leg squat: YSS), and personal records (PR). There’s space for an occasional comment: “Hard!” or “OK!” I would schedule my workouts weeks in advance, only infrequently crossing them out and altering the plan. I created this calendar when I started running, and kept it through my late thirties. After a few months of exhausted frustration, I learned that I was anemic and probably had been for years. As supplements pumped iron into my blood, I found that I could run faster and farther. I felt like I was getting younger; it was like alchemy. The calendar helped me look forward to my fortieth birthday, a milestone I’d been taught to fear. The data prove that I love going over hills. A few months into 2020, half a year after my birthday, the diary changes. In place of record times and podium finishes, there are notes about pain, walks, pills. I stopped labeling the years. But somehow the diary kept going, even when I had to stop running. These excerpts map my route through pain. Initially, I liked that the codes made the diary look like a scientific dataset. Keeping track of the numbers seemed like an objective measurement of myself, a way to gain a little distance from what it feels like to run—and to be unable to run. Later, I stopped keeping the diary, in order to collapse that distance again. Read More
January 29, 2025 At the Gym The Last Day of His Life By J. D. Daniels Photograph by Santeri Viinamäki, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. My father wanted to be a gym teacher before his life drove him down another path. The ghost of his ambition has played a part in how much the gym and my gym teachers have meant to me. Two examples: One. Have you read J. G. Ballard’s 1968 short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”? When Ronald Reagan, whom I would actually prefer not to fuck, revived the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, the chin-up requirement was an intimidating challenge for the kids at my elementary school. But my father had been the pull-up champion of his Air Force unit and I’d always had a bar and brackets in my bedroom doorway, not for exercise but as something to play on and have fun with. Fat Geoff and Tall Jeff and Eric and Dena and Tony and Jenny and Jamie and Matt and Amy and Ryan and Janelle (who was as tall as a giraffe, hence her nickname “Girelle”) and Little Brad and Sara and Big Peaky and Little Peaky and Chad and Brooke would come over, and when we weren’t playing Atari we would do skin-the-cats or Tarzan swings on a sturdy yellow tie strap my father had brought home from the dealership. I was not intimidated by the bar. Read More