An online-only review of books and arguments about books.
August 14, 2023
There will still be addictions, relapses, traumas, betrayals, interpersonal dramas, and sudden deaths the day after the revolution. Comrades will still let us down, and we’ll still hold grudges and harbor resentments. Parents will still be uncomprehending or oppressive or worse, and we’ll still wish that we’d never said that to her or walked away that night or gone home with him again or fought with them or failed.
July 10, 2023
I’ve had an equally hard time shopping recently at supermarkets and at bookstores.
June 15, 2023
Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a “memoir with recipes.” If Reichl’s development as a person can be traced from her aunt’s potato salad to her first taste of foie gras, Johnson’s development flourishes under a narrower lens—a single red sauce.
January 10, 2023
Interviews aren’t the same as sworn testimony, but they rhyme.
July 13, 2022
Punctuated by Watergate, the Nixon Administration has been evacuated of its historical import
The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II. Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment.
January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
December 20, 2021
Did Eggers mean to write an op-ed, instead of a novel?
Read MoreDecember 9, 2021
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Read MoreDecember 6, 2021
He was a Black nationalist sympathizer who advocated for integration and a reformist who argued for revolution.
September 20, 2021
Revising Said’s “out of place” self-image is a project worth pursuing further
Although Brennan’s book prioritizes Said’s English-department dramas, his longstanding anti-militarism is arguably at least as interesting a thread to follow, and one that seems destined to stay interesting longer.
May 10, 2021
How did the revolutionaries of 1989 become the nativists of the 2010s and 2020s?
Migration shapes nativist politics, but does not suffice to explain the wider crisis of liberalism. Exclusionary policies on immigration are being pursued in most European countries (with some notable exceptions, such as Portugal). Yet despite general anti-immigrant sentiment, it is only in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary that nationalist governments have actively turned away from the European Union, and only in Budapest and Warsaw that open season has been declared on liberal civil society and the rule of law. Kaczyński and Orbán are special among Europe’s nationalists not for their chauvinism, but for their authoritarian actions against domestic opponents and the EU.
March 24, 2021
What’s the matter with left-populism?
The New Deal is the ultimate horizon of Frank’s political imagination. In the 1930s, Frank argues, the Great Depression finally forced the American ruling class to rethink its unabashed elitism, leading inevitably to the rediscovery of the virtues of the populist tradition. The New Deal was at its heart, then, a cultural and rhetorical phenomenon with downstream economic consequences. He devotes orders of magnitude more attention and detail to poets like Carl Sandburg (whose epic The People, Yes gives the book its title), filmmakers like Orson Welles, and the oratory of FDR at his most fire-breathing than to the substantive economic policy of the President and his postwar successors. Frank even quotes, approvingly, labor secretary Frances Perkins’ remark that the New Deal was “basically an attitude.”
