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This week on nybooks.com: The rise of killer jellyfish, Egypt’s agony, the political dysfunction of the states, a fresh look at the New Deal, an education in Italian cooking, unchanging India, a modernist master of photography, and forty years of reading Seamus Heaney.

From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field” that covers over 30,000 square miles.

The country couldn’t have continued for three more years under Morsi’s rule, but neither can it continue with the alarming rage and polarization that has been unleashed. On my street this week, I watched as a shop owner pointed a pistol at a man serving tea at a street-side café. “Terrorists like you have no place here,” he screamed. The man’s beard was his crime.

As a result of the centrifugal forces that have taken over our politics, we have ended up with warring political blocs, not with the federal system envisioned by the Founders. Instead of cooperative interaction among the states and the federal government, we have a series of struggles between them. Federal laws are blocked or degraded in many of the states, and state obligations are unmet.

The New Deal made two great Faustian bargains: one with Stalin and one with the Jim Crow South. The new political system the United States devised during the period was profoundly shaped by these unsavory alliances.

Anka Muhlstein on the French courtesan Marie Duplessis, Joyce Carol Oates on animal de-liberation, Jonathan Freedland on Margaret Thatcher, Francine Prose on Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies, Helen Epstein on the woman who launched a public health revolution, Michael Tomasky on political Washington’s culture, Sanford Schwartz on L.S. Lowry, Jason Epstein on publishing, and more.

I don’t need to be put under hypnosis in order to recover the memory of the first bowl of spaghetti I ever ate. I came to Italian food late. My grandmother and mother made noodles and macaronis, but nothing else that could remotely be described as Italian. In my mother’s family, garlic and olive oil, two of life’s peerless delights, were regarded with horror.

Every visitor who goes to India knows how the country refuses to conform to plans or international expectations; the only way to survive is to give yourself over to its way of being. Fight against the Indian way of doing things and the only result will be tears.

Bill Brandt “is to photography what a sculptor is to a block of marble,” wrote Lawrence Durrell. “His pictures read into things, try to get at the hidden presence which dwells in the inanimate object. Whether his subject is live or not—whether woman or child or human hand or stone—he detaches it from its context by some small twist of perception and lodges it securely in the world of Platonic forms.”

Diane Ravitch discusses her new book and how to implement a better school system (Judson Memorial Church, New York)

J. Hoberman says these silent films are “at least as modern (which is to say, as zippy, alienated, and weird) as the paintings upstairs.” (MoMA)

Philip Gossett recommends this performance, the first in the US of the uncensored edition of Verdi's opera. (Chicago Opera Theatre)

The collages of poet Mark Strand, Russian Ark at Film Forum, Robert Walser at 192 Books, a celebration of Kingsley Amis at McNally Jackson, home movies of Richard Nixon’s aides, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern’s No Ordinary Men, a celebration of the avant-garde composer-activist John Zorn at Anthology Film Archives, the complete works of Howard Hawks, and much more in our calendar.

The Irish writer and Nobel laureate, who died on August 30, was for the last forty years both a contributor to The New York Review and one of its frequent subjects. Fifteen of his books were reviewed in our pages, and we present several of the pieces here, in his memory.