Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©

• Delighting in Ross Gay, One Essay at a Time
  I put off beginning the poet Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which was published earlier this year, because I was afraid it would end too quickly. I felt sure that the book’s 102 essays, most between one paragraph and three pages in length, would be kin to his poems, which are tender, tactile, and human, whether he's celebrating the spastic joy of listening to a good song or articulating a swelling fury. Gay wrote the book's essays over the period of a year, one each day, for the simple reason that he thought it would be nice to write about delight every day. The handful of rules he set out for himself included composing the essays quickly and writing them by hand. I decided to read one entry from the book each day, to follow the model of how he’d written them and to give each entry its own space to unfold in my mind—to let it warm me, I’d come to realize, like sunshine.
• Data Leviathan: China’s Burgeoning Surveillance State
  Today, in Xinjiang, a region in China’s northwest, a new totalitarianism is emerging—one built not on state ownership of enterprises or property but on the state’s intrusive collection and analysis of information about the people there. Xinjiang shows us what a surveillance state looks like under a government that brooks no dissent and seeks to preclude the ability to fight back. And it demonstrates the power of personal information as a tool of social control that is both all-encompassing and highly individualized, using a mix of mechanisms to impose varying levels of supervision and constraint on people depending on their perceived threat to the state.
• El Lago
  We called it El Lago. The Lake. As kids, growing up in the Guatemala of the 1970s, we spent most weekends and holidays of my childhood there, jumping off the wooden dock, learning to swim in the icy blue water. One early morning, we all woke up to find two indigenous men floating face down by the wooden dock. They were naked and bloated. Guerrilleros, my father said, his tone far from compassionate or even sympathetic. Guerrilla fighters, probably from one of the surrounding villages. I was still too young to understand that the military used to dispose of some of their enemies there, dumping the dead and tortured bodies into the water. A few weeks later, my grandparents sold the chalet.
• The Fight Against Trump’s Other Family Separation Policy
  This week, on August 14, a federal appeals court will hear oral argument from attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security, on one hand, and Temporary Protected Status holders, on the other, as to whether the terminations should occur as originally scheduled. For Maribel Hernández Rivera, the litigation is personal: her husband, Giddel Contreras, is a TPS holder. A native of Honduras, Contreras has been in the United States for nearly twenty-five years, but was undocumented until he got TPS. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Madison, Hernández Rivera’s stepdaughter, is a US citizen. “We’re going to fight,” Hernández Rivera told me. “We’re going to do everything we need to do.”
• Kashmir on the Edge of the Abyss
  Narendra Modi, once disallowed a visa to the US as a punishment for the massacre of Muslims that took place in 2002 under his watch as chief minister in Gujarat, is today feted as a statesman not afraid to take tough decisions: an Indian mixture of Trump and Netanyahu. Modi has said that what he is doing is the only rational “Kashmir solution.” For him, it is the final political solution, and if the Muslims of Kashmir object, they will simply be crushed. Non-Kashmiri entrepreneurs are licking their chops in anticipation as they plan opening up the last frontier with all legal obstacles removed. And disgusting tweets from Brahmins (upper-caste Hindus) are celebrating the idea of settling there and “marrying Kashmiri girls,” and worse.
• ‘So Huge a Phallic Triumph’: Why Apollo Had Little Appeal for Auden
  When I asked W.H. Auden what he would like to hear Armstrong say, he replied at first with a mischievous chuckle: “I’ve never done this before!” adding, “What else should he say? It would be a true statement.” But when I went on to ask if he would not prefer something more elevating, perhaps about world peace, he grew sober. “Well, that’s a little different,” Auden said. “We all know that the chief reason for their going there is military, so I don’t think you should ask them to say much about that!”
• ‘A People’s Cry of Indignation’: A Dispatch from Puerto Rico
  Puerto Rico is a colony, and as such, its government has only those powers the US Congress grants it. Puerto Rican legislators might protest the closing of their schools, the cutting of their pensions, or the gutting of the great university that has produced so many of the island’s most subversive and iconic leaders, but ultimately, the Fiscal Control Board appointed by Congress overrule them. When I asked about what it would take to get rid of this junta, as activists call it, they offered me two options. First, the 5 million-strong Puerto Rican diaspora now living in the US could make Puerto Rico a political issue, advocating for their families on the island, who, as colonial subjects, are not allowed to vote in federal elections. Second, Puerto Ricans can make the island ungovernable. 
• Keeping Up Appearances
  The Supreme Court today has five conservative justices and four liberal ones. Since 2010, for the first time in US history, all the conservatives have been appointed by Republicans, and all the liberals have been appointed by Democrats. If the justices voted like members of Congress, almost all significant cases would be decided 5–4, with the conservatives prevailing. But the justices are not members of Congress, and that matters. It matters even more after the deeply partisan fight over Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination. A striking number of the recently completed term’s cases were decided by majorities that included at least one conservative justice joining the liberals, or at least one liberal justice joining the conservatives—almost as if the Court were seeking to reassure us that it is nonpartisan.
• ‘To Get Things More Real’: An Interview with Ira Glass
  Claudia Dreifus: Who were some of your influences in those early years? Ira Glass: Roland Barthes. At college, we were assigned Barthes’s S/Z , which made me understand what I could do in radio. In S/Z, Barthes takes apart a short story by Balzac, line by line. He asks: How does this story pull you in, engage, and give you pleasure? He names things that are helpful if you want to make stories about people. Barthes explains: here’s how to structure a narrative by creating a sequence of events that will create forward motion that will create narrative suspense, planting questions along the way that can be answered. That turned out to be an enormously useful way to think about how to do an interview.
• The Daily Alchemy of Translation
  What is translation if not an intimate act between two people, away from the eyes of the world? It might be the mirth of two sisters, suppressed at table: a mutual tautening, hands flitting to faces until the effect of the secret subsides. It might be an embrace. It might even be an angry struggle. The nature of the relationship between translator and writer depends on the text. But it is always a close one. I wanted Sylwia Siedlecka—whose circumstances seemed so near my own: she was about my age, also a linguist and an academic—to teach me the balancing act she had already mastered, wanted to get inside her defter imagination to plumb my own heartbreak. I decided to translate her book.
• Toni Morrison in the Review
  A life in literary criticism: how Review writers read and responded to the novels of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).
• America Is Not Rome. It Just Thinks It Is
  Back in the dying days of the Roman Republic, it had pleased the conservative senators who defined themselves as “optimates,” the best, to disparage their opponents as “populares”: populists. Yet the popularis tradition was one which, no less than their own, had long been part of the fabric of Roman politics. That it came to be weaponized by a succession of notorious Caesars—Caligula, Nero, Commodus himself—did not mean that it was necessarily incompatible with the functioning of a republic. The realization that mockery of elites and the trampling of political convention might be transmuted into popularity with the plebs had not inevitably doomed Rome to autocracy.
• The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On
  The culture industry of the late-capitalist era has metastasized to such a degree that even resistance is easily co-opted by the market and what passes for criticism circulates in forms pre-packaged for consumption. In an environment saturated in social media and ruled by the tweet, critical reflection can barely survive, and it should hardly surprise us that the brute simplicities of authoritarian rule have gained new currency. It was Adorno who helped to identify this trend. For this reason alone, we cannot afford to ignore his critical legacy. Fifty years after his death, Adorno still resists fashion and category. But his ideas sustain the utopian thought that there might be a right life, after all.
• Burning Down the House
  I’m not the only writer to wonder whether books are still an appropriate medium to convey the frightening speed of environmental upheaval. But the environment is infinitely intricate, and mere articles—much less daily newsfeeds or Twitter—can barely scratch the surface of environmental issues, let alone explore the extent of their consequences. Ecology, after all, is about how everything connects to everything else. Something so complex and crucial still requires books to attempt to explain it.
• Casablanca’s Gift to Marrakech and the Birth of Morocco’s Modern Art Movement
  Fifty years ago, in the Atlas mountain city of Marrakech, a group of leading Moroccan artists hung their dazzlingly experimental abstract paintings in the Jemaa el-Fna, the great market square in the oasis city at the crossroads of Saharan trade routes. The small artists’ group behind it, the Casablanca Art School, whose influences ranged from Bauhaus and New York Hard-edge painting to Islamic Sufism and Berber rugs, has now been rediscovered and is gaining recognition as one of the great Modernist moments of the global South. Their 1969 market-place show has become a touchstone for contemporary artists and curators across the Arab world and the African continent—where new art museums seek ways to connect with a local public.
• How Rodin Kept His Feet on the Ground
  The Thinker is not my favorite Rodin sculpture. But then something brought me closer to The Thinker. In a glass case at the Musée Rodin, displaying preparatory studies, my attention settled on a terra-cotta fragment identified as “The Thinker’s Right Foot.” His foot! Suddenly, I had a completely different feel for The Thinker. And I found myself wondering whether Rodin, too, had felt that the success of the sculpture might depend in some crucial way on getting the feet right.
• On the Beat with Harper Lee
  How do you write the history of a book that was never written, by an author who, if not exactly a recluse, was more determined than most not to publicize her life or writing process? And how do you make that mystery worth reading when its conclusion is widely known? These questions loom in Casey Cep’s remarkable, thoroughly researched Furious Hours, an account of the true-crime book that Harper Lee intended to write but ultimately abandoned more than two decades after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird had made her a household name.
• My Travels with Oliver Sacks
  We were close for a long time. I was his photographer, colleague, friend, subject, and occasional collaborator. He used to say that he wanted to take off his white doctor’s coat and see Tourette’s in real life, outside a clinic or hospital. I facilitated this not only as a photographer, but also as someone with access to others with the same condition. In my travels with Oliver, I photographed the lives of patients, beyond the confines of the doctor’s office or examination room. Some said I was his “Tourette pet,” which I found endearing or insulting, depending on how it was said.
• The Dying Art of Instruction in the Digital Classroom
  This year will be my last year teaching at the university; I’ve decided to throw in the towel three years before retirement age. There are a number of reasons behind this decision, but one is definitely the changed situation in the classroom. Even at post-graduate level, it is getting more and more difficult to feel that one has the attention of students or that something really useful is happening during the lessons.
• An Iranian Dissident’s Tale
  Kian Tajbakhsh wanted to own his punishment—to see himself as part of a struggle, alongside millions of other Iranians, that may have been fruitless but had been worth fighting for. His interrogators had been coaching him for his appearance at the trial, but when he took the stand, Kian diverted from the script in a small but crucial way. He told the judge his real crime had not been treason, but the naivety to believe that the Islamic Republic could ever be compatible with Western-style democracy.
• Real Americans
  The cornerstone assertion of the Declaration of Independence is that government exists in order to secure the equal, inalienable rights of persons. This is the formal raison d’être and official ideology of the United States. It follows that those who fully embrace those rights—liberals—have political and patriotic legitimacy, and those who reject them lack legitimacy. Psychically, liberals often don’t seem to believe this. A deference to “Americans” inheres in their worldview, even if the Americans in question aspire to subvert our democracy.
• Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation
  The rot may have set in decades ago, but it has taken Modi only five years to dismantle the idea of India as democratic and secular. The opposition movement is fragmentary and local. India under Modi was no longer the world’s fastest-growing economy. And whatever upward mobility was anticipated thanks to social welfare programs implemented by earlier governments could no longer be taken for granted. The prime minister’s opponents fought for a more equal society, but Modi himself, like strongmen elsewhere in the world, could only prosper in an unequal and divided one. And yet, Modi won again: a divisive and ineffectual prime minister returned to power with a historic mandate.
• The V&A Makes a Meal of It
  The V&A could usefully have taken a leaf out of its own history. In the catalog foreword by the museum’s director, the historian and former Labour Party parliamentarian Tristram Hunt, we learn that the V&A boasted the world’s first “purpose-built museum refreshment rooms,” designed by William Morris’s firm. The V&A also included, Hunt goes on, “an early food museum, alongside displays of working fish hatcheries—installed by the eccentric, visionary zoologist Frank Buckland.” To be sure, the Comté cheese made using microbes taken from chef Heston Blumenthal’s pubic hair is as playful as it is subversive, but the theme of this scatter-shot show remains elusive: Is it about food really, or is it a show of food-related conceptual art?
• Paula Rego’s Wild Women
  As in so much of her work, the phantasmagoric takes on something of the real, a nightmare brought to life, or the turmoil of a psyche revealed. Paula Rego’s well aware that women’s bodies are sites of trauma. She recounts her own birth, for example, as a horror story: her mother labored for three days, at the end of which she, the baby—“this carcass,” as Rego pointedly describes herself—was “dragged” out, ripping her mother’s bladder in the process. Rego’s work is dense with symbolism, but all in service of portraying the realities—as unpalatable and grotesque as they sometimes are—of the female body.
• ‘Between Hospitality and Hostility’: An Interview with Michael Rakowitz
  Marisa Mazria Katz: Why did you position the Lamassu this way?  Michael Rakowitz: I decided there was no way that I was going to allow for this Lamassu to look like it is one more piece that is going to be sheltered in this Western museum. I’m very happy to say that the Lamassu stands there with its ass to the museum and it’s actually looking southeast toward Parliament, and toward the Foreign Office where the decision to enter the Iraq War was made. It’s also looking past them, toward Nineveh, toward Iraq, hoping that it will return one day.
• Moon Fever
  First it was a heavenly body—a beacon, or a world, a place where no one could possibly go. Then, from 1969 to 1972, twelve people landed there in spaceships. On behalf of all humanity, they said. Is it time to go back? Moon fever is rising. The fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing has stirred dormant memories and produced a bounty of books, films, and exhibitions. Meanwhile, technocrat billionaires have helped catalyze a new moon race. Elon Musk is marketing moon trips to the superrich, and Jeff Bezos says we should colonize the moon to save the earth. China landed a robot called Jade Rabbit 2 on the far side in January, and India is trying to get a water-seeking rover, Chandrayaan-2, to the lunar south pole.
• Clarification
  To the Editors: In my “The Rules of the Game” I wrote that the 15 percent of Democrats who identified as conservative “were probably mostly older, white union men who vote Republican for president as often as not, and a smattering of older Latino men as well.” But according to Kathleen Frankovic, what mostly sets them apart is that they are more religious than other Democrats.
• Lincoln The Hack?
  To the Editors: James Oakes writes, “It is a commonplace among historians that...in his early career [Lincoln] was something of a Whig Party hack.” I find this statement amazing. How in the world do those words apply to the brave, eloquent, and politically costly words and actions undertaken by the first-term congressman Lincoln in opposition to James K. Polk’s mendaciously undertaken war of conquest against Mexico?
• Worlds Apart: Sci-Fi Visions of Altered Reality
  Living in an era when we can easily tweak the small (delete a sentence, crop an image) but feel helpless when facing the large (political turmoil, climate change), it’s hard not to fantasize about reworking our histories. But this inclination is not new. Attempting to rework the past, at least on paper, has been the outlet of artists and authors for as long as people have been wishing for different endings. “As If: Alternative Histories From Then to Now,” an exhibition at the Drawing Center, presents eighty-four works from 1888 to the present that “offer examples of how we might reimagine historical narratives in order to contend with the traumas of contemporary life.”
• ‘A Compelling Power’: When Mesmerism Came to America
  Between 1836 and the late 1850s, mesmerizing another person—or seeing someone get mesmerized, or denouncing mesmerists as charlatans—became a way of stockpiling control for one’s own use. The direct encounters between clairvoyants and the men who mesmerized them seem less like collaborations than like competitions over who would set the terms of the session and whose interests it would serve. The subjects’ flashes of insight have a sharp-edged, glinting tone. They become ambushes against the mesmerist’s authority, ways of struggling for dependencies that gave the somnambulist’s mind more room to move.
• ‘Fiddler,’ Tevye’s Daughters, and Me
  For me, the story of Fiddler on the Roof and Tevye’s casting out of Chava is personal. In June 1963, when I married a nominally Episcopalian professor of French, my parents disowned me, and so did my grandparents, all but two of my twenty-plus aunts and uncles, and all but three of my dozens of cousins. No one from my family came to our wedding, and I did not see them again for fifteen years. I sometimes wonder if I should write a sequel called Chava Returns. In my directorial mind, just one woman appears, and she’s no longer a girl. It’s Chava, but she’s not alone. She’s with her husband and she’s happy.
• Between Regime and Rebels: A Survey of Syria’s Alawi Sect
  The Assad regime’s heavy reliance on Alawis in the army units and militias dispatched to the front-lines, coupled with the community’s relatively small size, have resulted in disproportionate losses of the sect’s young men. In addition, corruption and war-profiteering, mainly benefitting high-ranking regime officers and mukhabarat (secret police) agents, reinforced the image of Alawis as corrupt, privileged and rich, in the eyes of Sunnis. The Alawis are fully aware of this image and are quick to reject it. “We are a community that sacrificed many of its youth, and lived, and is still living, in poverty,” said Samira, a twenty-five-year-old university student. “The ugly, barbaric way people picture us is applicable to barely one percent of us.”
• Dancing with the Ancients
  By its nature, dance poses unique challenges for scholars. There’s no universal notation system, and the various ways we have to document it are incomplete and unreliable. There is no full way to capture the presence of dance except through dance itself. This tension—between dance and the representation of dance—is always at the heart of dance; dancers feel it, too, and so do the people who watch dance and the people who write about it. The recent exhibition “Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes” at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World reminded me how intriguing this tension is.
• Singapore: Laboratory of Digital Censorship
  On May 8, Singapore’s parliament passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), with an audacious aim— to defeat “fake news.” The new law empowers any minister to demand corrections from anyone who has generated content that the minister believes is fake and to dictate the words and phrases of that correction; the government can also ask for the content to be taken down, and require Internet service providers or platforms to prevent access to it. The implications of Singapore’s law, however, go far beyond a family row and even the governance of Singapore itself. Around the world there are plenty of governments that would love to wield such powers. They will be watching how Singapore uses its new law—with keen interest and considerable envy.

New York Times Books©

• ‘Read Receipts’ On: Two Dystopian Novels Predict the Surveillance State
  Caleb Crain’s “Overthrow” and Yoko Ogawa’s “The Memory Police” tell of not-too-distant futures in which our entire lives are monitored.
• Emojis Are Language Too: A Linguist Says Internet-Speak Isn’t Such a Bad Thing
  In “Because Internet,” Gretchen McCulloch explains the accelerated evolution of the English language.
• ‘Pleasure, Obligation, Curiosity, Inspiration’: What’s on Marie Arana’s Nightstand
  Among other things, the author of “Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story” is reading a novel based on a juicy scandal in her own family.
• The Scene of the Crime: A Jury Box?
  Marilyn Stasio’s Crime column features a serial killer who murders his way onto a jury, a wife creeped out by a robotic double and a nasty mental asylum.
• Can the American West Be Saved?
  Two new books — Anthony McCann’s “Shadowlands” and Christopher Ketcham’s “This Land” — explore the forces shrinking the open expanse and destroying unbridled nature out West.
• Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
  Summer’s notable horror fiction includes a story collection and a novel from Paul Tremblay.
• Jia Tolentino on Life With the Internet
  Tolentino talks about “Trick Mirror,” and John Taliaferro discusses “Grinnell,” his biography of a pioneering conservationist.
• ‘The Last Ocean’ Considers Dementia in All Its Uncertainty
  Nicci Gerrard wrote about the disease after it struck her father, but her new book is “full of other people’s voices and stories as well as my own.”
• Paule Marshall, Influential Black Novelist, Dies at 90
  A child of Barbadian immigrants, Ms. Marshall drew on her upbringing to animate the lives of her characters, many of them strong women.
• What Book Does Ruth Ware Call ‘Truly Terrifying’?
  Ware — whose new thriller, “The Turn of the Key,” enters the list this week at No. 3 — loves haunted-house novels, especially “The Haunting of Hill House.”
• Debut Novels About Families Fractured by Abuse, Displacement or Death
  From Düsseldorf to Paris, Cape Cod to the Sierra Nevada, these four debut novels reveal the range and the universality of loss.
• The Man Who Wrote the Guidebook for Civilian Bomb-Squad Technicians
  At War talked to Tom Gersbeck, a retired Marine Corps bomb-disposal officer, who recently published the second edition of his book, “Practical Military Ordnance Identification.”
• For ‘Diagnosis’ Show, Dr. Lisa Sanders Lets Times Readers Around the World Join in the Detective Work
  A Times Magazine columnist credits Sherlock Holmes and global crowdsourcing with helping her solve patients’ mysterious ailments.
• The Israeli Children’s Book Writer Who Became a Witch
  The illustrator and graphic novelist Rutu Modan offers a homage to Leah Goldberg, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets and children’s authors.
• New in Paperback: ‘Life in the Garden,’ ‘The Mere Wife’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• Revisiting ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ and the Balkan Wars
  In Téa Obreht’s 2011 debut novel “The Tiger’s Wife,” a young doctor untangles the peculiar circumstances of her grandfather’s recent death.
• Sins of Commission (in Michigan) and Omission (in Spain)
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Catch a Buzz With Two New Books About Bugs
  In “The Mosquito,” Timothy Winegard examines the history of man’s “deadliest predator.” In “Buzz, Sting, Bite,” Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson looks at how insects have shaped human civilization.
• The Truth About Koch Industries
  Christopher Leonard’s “Kochland” is a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look at how a family-run business in Kansas grew into an economic and political giant.
• Tales on Two Wheels: Cycling in Fact and Fiction
  From mountain slopes to city streets, four new books celebrate the pleasures and perils of pedaling your way through life.
• Obama Shares His Summer Reading List
  The former president recommended new books by Téa Obreht and Colson Whitehead, as well as well-known works by Hilary Mantel and Toni Morrison.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Announces New Grants
  This round of funding, the final for the fiscal year, totals $29 million and will support 215 projects across the country.
• No Rest for This Teenage Mercy Killer
  Tired of bringing death to the victims of a plague, the heroine of Margaret Owen’s ‘The Merciful Crow’ is out to restore her land’s rightful prince.
• A Lifetime at a Church, Filled With Faith and Drama
  Cara Wall’s novel, “The Dearly Beloved,” is the story of two ministers and their wives, as their lives intertwine over the decades, in love and religious devotion.
• Coming of Age Amid a Limbo of Prejudice and Restriction
  A Chinese-American teenager in Gilded Age Atlanta takes on a secret identity as an advice columnist in Stacey Lee’s “The Downstairs Girl.”
• New & Noteworthy Audiobooks, From Ernest Hemingway to the Baby-Sitters Club
  A selection of books published this week; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• From the Country’s New Poet Laureate, Poems Reclaiming Tribal Culture
  In “An American Sunrise,” Joy Harjo draws on her Muscogee Creek heritage to celebrate indigenous traditions and to mourn their passing.
• A Coming-of-Age as American as Apple Pie
  Tupelo Hassman’s novel “Gods With a Little G” pits a young girl’s self-discovery against her evangelical Christian surroundings.
• Fighting Harassers and Stalkers on the Web, in Court and in Print
  “Nobody’s Victim,” by the lawyer Carrie Goldberg, and “Consent,” by Donna Freitas, recount the authors’ personal experiences with sexual harassment and its lasting trauma.
• This Heroine’s Kind of a Female Millennial Thoreau
  In Amanda Goldblatt’s debut novel, “Hard Mouth,” an aimless 20-something escapes family tragedy in the wilderness.
• What Makes a Red Sky at Night (and at Morning)
  The cartoonist behind the strip XKCD explains how the skies blush and why sailors care.
• Lee Bennett Hopkins, Champion of Poetry for Children, Dies at 81
  In the scores of anthologies he compiled and in his own writing, he sought to teach and expand young imaginations through verse.
• Yoko Ogawa Conjures Spirits in Hiding: ‘I Just Peeked Into Their World and Took Notes’
  The Japanese writer, inspired by Anne Frank’s diary, sought to “recompose” that experience for her new book “The Memory Police,” a dystopian novel about surveillance and erasure.
• Back-to-School Picture Books to Brighten Any Kid’s First Day
  Ready or not, Mo Willems’s Pigeon joins a cavalcade of kids, creatures and teachers heading to the classroom for the first time.
• ‘The Lightning Thief’ to Open on Broadway in September
  The popular Percy Jackson musical will have a limited run at Longacre Theater.
• Téa Obreht Reinvents the Western Novel — and Brings Camels
  Obreht burst onto the literary scene in 2011 with “The Tiger’s Wife.” Her new novel, “Inland,” features a resolute heroine and an immigrant outlaw.
• One by One, Her Neighbors Are Dying. An Elderly Polish Woman Is on the Case.
  Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a funny and philosophically complex whodunit.
• J.D. Salinger, E-Book Holdout, Joins the Digital Revolution
  “The Catcher in the Rye” and other Salinger novels are coming out in digital formats, and the writer’s son plans to release more from his archives.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• Abolish the Business Major!
  Anti-intellectual degree programs have no place in colleges.  
• The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs
  Jeannie Suk Gersen and the fight to save Title IX from itself.  
• State Governments Are Among the Biggest Threats to Higher Ed
  So why don’t more scholars study them?
• Sleep Pods, Plush Carpets, and the Dark Heart of the NCAA
  Where the grievances of professors and the exploitation of athletes come together.
• Too Noxious for Tenure?
  Academic freedom was invented to protect scholars with reprehensible views.
• How Mike Pompeo’s Professors Hijacked a Scholarly Debate
  Human rights and the academic right.
• The College Dropout Scandal
  Forty percent of students don’t graduate. No one is held accountable. No one is fired. That must change.
• Gin, Sex, Malaria, and the Hunt for Academic Prestige
  How the misadventures of Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson shaped anthropology.
• The Fight for Free College Is Your Fight Too
  Whose side are you on?
• ‘Elite Schools Are National Treasures. Their Elitism Is What Makes Them Such.’
  Anthony Kronman on the “aristocratic ethos” in higher education.
• All Along the Ivory Tower
  At the World of Bob Dylan gathering, in Tulsa, amateur geeks and scholarly nerds come together to discuss the man and his music.
• The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas
  Academics pretend to be above cheap and trivial fads. We aren’t.
• A Field Goes to War With Itself
  While medievalists battle, white nationalists try to co-opt the past.
• Meritocracy’s Discontents
  The real problem with meritocracy is not that it’s anti-democratic, but that it’s inseparable from democracy.
• The Unbearable Pointlessness of PowerPoint
  It has become the essential means of academic communication. A less-vibrant academic culture is the result.
• ‘Affirmative Action Is Not About Equality. It’s About Covering Ass.’
  Glenn Loury on race, surviving public humiliation, and why becoming the first African-American to earn tenure in the Harvard economics department was pure agony.  
• The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Postmodernism
  No other idea from the humanities had so vast, if murky, an influence.
• Putting the Political Back in Politically Correct
  Everyone is mad. Is anyone right?
• The Campus Innovation Myth
  A half-century of occasional breakthroughs — and a lot of disappointment.
• The Monograph Is Broken. Long Live the Monograph.
  Does scholarly publishing have a sustainable future?