WRB—Apr. 8, 2026

“frozen semantics”

But how can you really care if anybody gets the Washington Review of Books, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along?

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Krithika Varagur on Aramco World, “the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company”:

  But Aramco World’s genius lies in its more gently gonzo offerings, which tend to be unconcerned with either Saudi Arabia or the United States. My favorite article recounts an epic journey to Uzbekistan to ascertain which of the region’s famous varieties of melon may have been the ones mentioned by the fourteenth-century Tangerine explorer Ibn Battuta. Aramco World has a breathtakingly catholic interpretation of what kinds of people, places, and things fall under its jurisdiction. “What would you have eaten in ninth-century Baghdad?” is the premise of one quite typical 2006 article, which considers the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, Kitab al-Tabikh. (Though eggplant is now crowned as sayyid al-khudaar, the lord of vegetables, it was once a suspicious novelty from India, “considered impossibly bitter,” blamed by doctors for “everything from freckles and a hoarse throat to cancer and madness”; nevertheless, writes Charles Perry, the Kitab contains seven eggplant recipes, “probably because a taste for eggplant first arose among the aristocracy.”) A 2003 piece tracks an eighteenth-century silver coin called the Maria Theresa thaler from the Habsburg Empire into Africa and Arabia, where it survived in places like Oman as late as 1970. A 2010 feature narrates the experiences of Tichit women in Mauritania, who lead caravans while managing menstruation and pregnancy in the desert.

  [If the CIA can have magazines Saudi Aramco can too. (It’s supposed to be called the Riyadh Review of Books, though.) (I’ll change the name of the WRB for the right price.) (Or, perhaps, for the opportunity to go on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.) (One thing a lot of the best magazine journalism has in common is that somebody spent way more time and effort hunting something down than would seem reasonable.) (In this it resembles some of the best literary criticism, which documents somebody spending way more time and effort hunting something down in the library than would seem reasonable.) (Somebody send Eliot Weinberger on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.)

  And it had not occurred to me that “Tangerine” is the demonym for residents of Tangiers. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Stanley Fish on insurance and noir:

  Insurance thus conceived or glorified takes on another aspect of religion. It not only establishes regularities; it promises to alter them for the better and bring us closer to the promised land. “Risk makers,” [Dan] Bouk explains, “began pitching their techniques as means for altering fates and not just predicting them.” Soon, statistical writers persuaded their readers that they could construct systems that, as [Theodore M.] Porter writes, “could be presumed to generate large-scale order and regularity that would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals.” An “orderly reign of facts” could replace the “confusion of politics.” Indeed, the whole human race could be improved with the help of the knowledge provided by statistical calculations. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, called for “the establishment of a sort of scientific priesthood,” whose “high duties would have reference to the health and well-being of the nation in its broadest sense.” In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the most famous example of an insurance-themed noir film, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a claims manager at Pacific All-Risk Insurance, elevates the wielder of statistical knowledge to a position of wisdom and near omniscience. “A claims man is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one,” he says. On this view, the skilled statistician can do everyone’s job, including the job of the priest, and do it better.

  [Not just insurance but the statistics that make it possible—the field as we think of it begins with early modern mathematicians thinking about games of chance. In the background of both insurance and statistics is Pascal’s wager, which—if taken at face value—turns life into a game of chance, one in which the most important aspect of the game is specified in the rules and so can be quantified. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to an earlier review there as well.]:

  It’s a misapprehension that literature is inherently threatened by new technologies; novels and poems, themselves kinds of technology, have always been curious about other forms as they appear. The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, showcases the telegraph in enraptured detail (and makes it a key part of the plot); the stories of Tagore explore a world remade by the arrival of the railways. And is there a more charming example of this genre than the essay “Personism,” in which Frank O’Hara describes interrupting himself while writing a love poem, realizing that he can just ring up the object of his desire instead?

  Lerner has always been attentive to how technology mediates communication; Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) contains one of the first convincing renditions of characters chatting online, complete with the lags and awkwardness. I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. Transcription is a chronicle of that confusion.

  • Frank O’Hara in “Personism”:

    But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.

    [Frank, who told you that was the point of a love poem? (Frank, did you make it to the end of any sonnet cycles?) Petrarch tells us otherwise in Rime sparse 60:

    What can a lover sigh if pages

    from my old rhymes provided him

    with some fresh hope she will deny?

    Don’t let a poet touch a limb,

    nor Jove indulge, and let the rages

    of the sun turn its green leaves dry.

    (A. M. Juster’s new translation; the plant under discussion is the laurel tree.) The end of John Berryman’s cycle knows it too:

    The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,

    as I made for the grove, without expectation,

    some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,

    to read her if she came. Presently the sun

    yellowed the pines & my lady came not

    in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.

    When you can’t call up the object of your desire on the phone, you call her up in your memory and your poetry. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I propose a new model for the 800-word book review

• Jim Morrison is a good lyricist, sometimes

• K. T. on a Poem by Isabelle Baafi and fairy tales

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]