The New York Review of Books (December 28, 2023) – The latest issue features Ben Tarnoff on Elon Musk, Julian Bell on Peter Paul Rubens, Fintan O’Toole on the American gerontocracy, Anjum Hasan on recent Sri Lankan fiction, Matthew Desmond on America’s Covid-era experiment with a social safety net, Francine Prose on a vampiric celluloid Pinochet, James Gleick on the science of free will, Frances Wilson on Tove Jansson and the Moomintrolls, Álvaro Enrique on indigenous Americans in Europe, Katie Trumpener on Alexander Kluge, two poems by Jack Underwood, and more.

The Fate of Free Will

By James Gleick

In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell

Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.

Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic

Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?

By Matthew Desmond

The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure by Scott Fulford

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19 by Zachary Parolin