Uvrón’s Reviews > The New York Review of Books > Status Update

"To encounter an octopus is to be implicated in a question about being that engulfs you both."
—‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’, Verlyn Klinkenborg

I want to move into Octopolis. Human life has been so unbearably stressful lately.

the void adores us and that’s why
it keeps on petting our faces
like they’re lyres.

—[To a Strange, Hollow, and Confused Noise, They Heavily Vanish],
Devon Walker-Figueroa
24 Jul 2025

'A twenty-first-century Russian child asks a parent, “Who was Brezhnev?” The parent replies, “Wasn’t he some kind of politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn?”'

Robert G. Kaiser, Unraveling a Repressive Regime

“Ethnography comes with a price,” De León writes... “a hangover that lasts forever.”

Hopping Across the Line, John Washington, reviewing Soldiers and Kings, Jason De León

'I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation and displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door.'