Why Is Trump Doing What He Is Doing?
Let me give you my conclusions first, so you know where I am going with this. I think Trump is being paid by Putin to conform American foreign, economic, and military policy to what Putin thinks are Russia’s interests. This is not the only possible explanation for Trump’s behavior, but it seems to me the most plausible. The principal items of evidence on which I am basing this conclusion are Trump’s trade war, his efforts to undermine NATO, his acceptance of Russia’s reabsorption of Crimea and effort to control Ukraine, his scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal, and somewhat more atmospherically his efforts to rehabilitate Putin as a respected player on the international scene.
Robert Paul Wolff asks why Trump is acting towards Putin like he is.
She Was Never Here
Images of crumpled paper covered in stricken-through lines and painted over fragments of text, photographs of the manuscript bought by and housed in the Princeton University library, accompany this collection of autobiographical aphoristic poems. These illustrations manifest the unfulfillable desire of the editor and translators to evidence the selection, transcription, and translation process each artifact underwent. My own repetition of the words printed on her blackboard is an attempt to salvage an intact posthumous text from the wreck that is the oeuvre of a poet who not only died before her time, but also overedited and disowned much of her work.
Elisa Taber reviews The Galloping Hour by Alejandra Pizarnik.