Top Book News provided by The Chronicle of Higher Education©
- Climate Scientists Should Embrace Public DebateDucking the skeptics only fuels conspiracy theories and increases the credibility of outlandish views.
- Nancy MacLean Responds to Her CriticsâSuch rhetorical bullying would be laughable if it werenât part of a pattern on the right,â says the Duke professor of history and public policy.
- A New History of the Right Has Become an Intellectual FlashpointCritics call Nancy MacLeanâs Democracy in Chains sloppy and ideologically driven. Defenders praise its insights.
- Harvard’s Long History of Going Too FarThe proposal to ban final clubs is illogical, illiberal â and totally in character.
- Choosing Status Over LoveWe all want to be popular, and for good reason. A lot rides on it.
- The Ferocity of FandomSports spectating brings out the bigoted, sexist clannishness in us. Might it bring out something better?
- Writing After AcademeEven though I couldnât land a tenure-track job, I still had the capacity to capture peopleâs attention, offering them some repast that was both pleasurable and provocative.
- Lyft and LearnWhy settle for a ride to the airport when you can also get a lecture on Descartes?
- The Myth of ‘Cultural Appropriation’Arguing that certain people donât have the right to tell certain stories is a distraction from the real menace: inequality.
- Reassessing Thomas JeffersonRemove statues of the nationâs third president? A historian says that would be shortsighted.
- Can Feminist Scholarship Stop Sexism?Sexism is rampant in academe. If only theorizing would provide a remedy.
- Why I Resigned From DukeA professor steps down after a dispute over diversity training.
- How to Avoid a Post-Scholar AmericaAcademics can recapture the trust of the public â but only if they are willing to write for it.
- To My Student, on the Death of Her Grandmother(s)How tragic that she died inconveniently right in the middle of Finals Week.
- What the ‘Conceptual Penis’ Hoax Does and Does Not ProveThe latest academic fake-out making headlines says less about scholarly standards than you may think.
- Higher Education for a Post-Growth WorldSustainability is not enough: Colleges and universities must reorient themselves for a future of limited growth.
- The GadflyCan Jonathan Haidt calm the culture wars?
- Teaching Humility in an Age of ArroganceDemocracy canât function if we donât inhabit a common space where we can listen to one another.
- Our Contributors
- What is the most common misunderstanding that scholars have about university presses?
Ducking the skeptics only fuels conspiracy theories and increases the credibility of outlandish views.
âSuch rhetorical bullying would be laughable if it werenât part of a pattern on the right,â says the Duke professor of history and public policy.
Critics call Nancy MacLeanâs Democracy in Chains sloppy and ideologically driven. Defenders praise its insights.
The proposal to ban final clubs is illogical, illiberal â and totally in character.
We all want to be popular, and for good reason. A lot rides on it.
Sports spectating brings out the bigoted, sexist clannishness in us. Might it bring out something better?
Even though I couldnât land a tenure-track job, I still had the capacity to capture peopleâs attention, offering them some repast that was both pleasurable and provocative.
Why settle for a ride to the airport when you can also get a lecture on Descartes?
Arguing that certain people donât have the right to tell certain stories is a distraction from the real menace: inequality.
Remove statues of the nationâs third president? A historian says that would be shortsighted.
Sexism is rampant in academe. If only theorizing would provide a remedy.
A professor steps down after a dispute over diversity training.
Academics can recapture the trust of the public â but only if they are willing to write for it.
How tragic that she died inconveniently right in the middle of Finals Week.
The latest academic fake-out making headlines says less about scholarly standards than you may think.
Sustainability is not enough: Colleges and universities must reorient themselves for a future of limited growth.
Can Jonathan Haidt calm the culture wars?
Democracy canât function if we donât inhabit a common space where we can listen to one another.
The New York Review of Books©
- A Possible KeatsA year before leaving Enfield—the Georgian-style school building would later be converted into a train station and then ultimately be demolished—John Keats discovered Books. Books were the spoils left by the Incas, by Captain Cook’s voyages, Robinson Crusoe. He went to battle in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical myth, among the reproductions of ancient sculptures and marbles, the annals of Greek fable, in the arms of goddesses.
- The Nose of the Master“Henry James and American Painting,” a compact but wonderfully heterogeneous show at the Morgan Library, includes a comprehensive selection of Jamesian portraits along with other paintings of and by his friends. James liked sitting, and the exhibition includes a round dozen of his many portraits; more probably than have ever been gathered in one place before.
- The Artist’s ClosetWhen I was a senior in high school, I wrote to one of my favorite artists, Maira Kalman, and asked if she had interns and if she'd like one. She said I could come reorganize her moss collection, walk her dog, and meet her mother. It was like peeking behind the curtain and finding the thing you'd both hoped for and dreaded: the actors still perfectly in character.
- A Test for Consciousness?Parks: You can’t prove, scientifically, this idea of experience being buffered or delayed in neural eddies.
Manzotti: At this stage, no. Neuroscientists can’t disprove it, or prove that the experience is “generated” in the head. But let’s remember, we do science by forming a hypothesis, making predictions in line with that hypothesis, and inventing experiments that prove or disprove the hypothesis.
- Hacking the Vote: Who Helped Whom?In the waning days of the 2016 campaign Trump’s data team knew exactly which voters in which states they needed to persuade on Facebook and Twitter and precisely what messages to use. The question is: How did the Russians know this, too? Largely ignored in this discussion is one possibility: that the Russians themselves, through their hacking of Democratic Party records, had better information than Trump.
- An Elusive Cold War StarWhen Van Cliburn died in 2013, he was by far the most famous concert pianist in American history, although he had effectively retired from performance decades before. His had been a strange and complicated life.
- Birds Like Us“Quentin Blake: The Life of Birds,” drawn from the archive held by the House of Illustration in London, is a tiny exhibition, but one of pure, quirky joy. Blake is best known as an illustrator of children’s books, including most of Roald Dahl’s. Oddly, the human traits that Blake illustrates seem clearer and sharper in these birds than in his drawings of people, perhaps because without the human features we see only the revealing shorthand of gesture, expression, and movement.
- The Making of the Tabloid PresidencyJoshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain, argues that Trumpism is best understood through the president’s partnership with Stephen K. Bannon, now his chief political strategist. Green has been writing about conservatives since the George W. Bush years. It is a testament to his adroit intertwining of Bannon’s story with Trump’s that we’re not certain which of the two figures has sold the bigger part of himself to the other. In the broader sense, they are coauthors of our moment’s tabloid conservatism.
- Raphael Up CloseAlthough Raphael for much of the last five hundred years has been celebrated as a prince of painters, today he is widely dismissed as no more than a kind of chief courtier: supreme in grace and rhetoric, yet mannered and unnatural, even insincere. But Raphael seems so abstract and remote because we have so little direct contact with him. "Raphael: The Drawings," on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, provides a rare chance to see up close a wide array of the artist’s works from throughout his life, and the effect is thrilling and revelatory.
- Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who StayedLike late-nineteenth-century scholar Tan Sitong, Liu Xiaobo threw his weight behind a cause that in its immediate aftermath seemed hopeless—in Liu's case, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But with time, history vindicated Tan; I wonder if it will do the same for Liu.
- The Passion of Liu XiaoboLiu Xiaobo felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died. His “final statement” at his trial in December 2009 opens: “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life.” In October 2010, when his wife Liu Xia brought him the news of his Nobel Peace Prize, she reports that he commented, “This is for the aggrieved ghosts.”
- Waking Up to the Trumpian WorldAfter months of talk about what it would take to get Trump impeached, analysts are calling this the “smoking gun” that could actually bring his downfall. Why does the occasion feel so momentous (other than because we want it to be)? After all, we learned only that Don Jr. said in confidence roughly the same thing that his father said for all the world to hear. But the news has been as shocking as it has because, after all this time, we still have not learned to take Trump’s public utterances seriously.
- The Radical Success of Comme des GarçonsKnown for her voluminous, monochromatic, and architectural silhouettes, Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo makes designs that appear to be more concerned with novelty and sparking interest and dialogue than with straightforward attraction or luxury. One gets the sense, wandering the Met and walking the streets of New York City alike, that her label, Comme des Garçons, is one of the few that have built a viable business while truly challenging industry norms.
- Save Louis Kahn’s Concert Boat!Launched in 1976, the ship Point Counterpoint II, designed by Louis Kahn, has travelled America’s rivers, lakes, and intercoastal waterways; the Caribbean, Baltic, and Irish Seas; and the rivers of northern Europe. Anchoring in large cities and small towns, in busy shipping lanes and at public parks, the barge opens like a clamshell to reveal a glittering concert stage. It sails as a powerful, living testament to American creativity and to the elemental role that culture plays in human life. Yet unless a new guardian is found for it, this remarkable, mobile cultural institution will be broken down to scrap in a Louisiana shipyard.
- Shakespeare’s Pornography of PowerMeasure for Measure invites updating, but it’s in the nature of the work that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. The play is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort.
- The Class RenegadeThose of us who move from the provinces pay a toll at the city’s gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place. More than thirty years ago, when I was in Egypt, I met a cultivated English couple who invited me to stay in their house in London on my way back to Ireland. They could not have been more charming.
The only problem was that they had an Irish maid who, as soon as I arrived as their guest, began to talk to me in the unvarnished accent of home, as though she had known me all of her life.
- The Perennial StudentWhat is a shadow? Nothing in itself, you might say: a mere local lack of light, in a space that is otherwise lit up. Light, which allows us to see and know the world, is the normal precondition for picturing things. Cast shadows may help us interpret a picture by indicating where light comes from and where objects stand, but if you survey art history, you find the majority of painters giving them minor parts at most. A minority, however, turns these assumptions upside down, treating shadow as the preexistent condition and light as its shock interruption.
- South Korea’s Real FearThe primary worry in South Korea has not been its bizarre and militaristic neighbor to the north; most Koreans are by now long used to living within close firing range of Pyongyang and do not think it will attack unless provoked. What really worries them is that the new US president doesn’t know the complexity of the situation—and is too contemptuous of the State Department to be instructed.
- The Snake in the SchoolhouseDon Siegel's 1971 The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood, is a masterpiece of misogyny. Sofia Coppola has remade it, and where Siegel’s Beguiled was an expression of male hysteria, Coppola’s version is a dark comedy of manners. In Siegel’s movie the women are vivid types; in Coppola’s they are humanized.
- Macron’s California RevolutionAmong the many ideas put forward by Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, was to institute an annual speech to the French parliament, a sort of State of the Union à la française. He also introduced a raft of bold proposals for streamlining government. But even bolder than his proposals was the speech itself, and the American-style executive it seemed to usher in.
- America On Two WheelsComics lend themselves to representing the experience of cycling: the flatness of the bird’s-eye-view map set in contrast to the scene-by-scene illustrations of Eleanor Davis’s daily experience biking from Arizona to Georgia. We are pulled into Davis’s perspective, seeing from her position on the road as well as from a close third-person view as if slightly above.
- Iraq: The Battle to ComeISIS’s military defeat, which Western officials believe will come sometime later this year or early next, will hardly put an end to the conflicts that gave rise to the group. For much of the battle against ISIS has taken place in a region that has been fought over ever since oil was found in Kirkuk in the 1930s. The deeper conflicts here will only escalate.
- Tigers, Horses, and StripesEllen Berkenblit’s striking new paintings at Anton Kern Gallery are a riot of luminous colors. Each layer of paint reveals shapes and colors, both painted and sewn, as if simultaneously pre-existent and made anew. In other works, the layers within Berkenblit’s paintings seem to display the history of their own making.
- The Brave New World of Gene EditingIn recent years, two new genetic technologies have started a scientific and medical revolution. One, relatively well known, is the ability to easily decode the information in our genes. The other, which is only dimly understood by the general public, is our newfound capacity to modify genes at will. These innovations give us the power to predict certain risks to our health, eliminate deadly diseases, and ultimately transform ourselves and the whole of nature. This development raises complex and urgent questions about the kind of society we want and who we really are. A brave new world is just around the corner, and we had better be ready for it or things could go horribly wrong.
- Myth-Maker of the BrothelOf all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation. Hokusai was perhaps the greatest draughtsman, Hiroshige excelled in landscapes, and Kuniyoshi had the wildest theatrical flair. Utamaro (1753–1806), whose work is featured in an exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, was the lover of women.
- How Far Will the Court Go?The travel ban won’t be the only big case before the Court next term. It's a heady line up, and the news that Justice Anthony Kennedy will not retire—at a time when, given the Oval Office’s current occupant, the judiciary’s check on the executive branch is more essential than ever—is important.
- The Nineteenth-Century TrumpDonald Trump has often been likened to Andrew Jackson; this is welcomed and encouraged by Trump himself. An important parallel between Trump and Jackson lies in their efforts to reshape the political organizations of their time, though Trump does not seem to have Jackson’s knack for political decision-making. The most important parallel between Trump and Jackson lies in their rallying the white working class against ethnic minorities.
- Romania: On the Border of the RealThe image of an interior shattered by outside forces could be the emblem for all Cristian Mungiu’s films. He loves to present stories in which someone’s integrity is assailed by external influences, and Graduation offers one of his most melancholy contraptions for testing his characters’ limitations.
A year before leaving Enfield—the Georgian-style school building would later be converted into a train station and then ultimately be demolished—John Keats discovered Books. Books were the spoils left by the Incas, by Captain Cook’s voyages, Robinson Crusoe. He went to battle in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical myth, among the reproductions of ancient sculptures and marbles, the annals of Greek fable, in the arms of goddesses.
“Henry James and American Painting,” a compact but wonderfully heterogeneous show at the Morgan Library, includes a comprehensive selection of Jamesian portraits along with other paintings of and by his friends. James liked sitting, and the exhibition includes a round dozen of his many portraits; more probably than have ever been gathered in one place before.
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote to one of my favorite artists, Maira Kalman, and asked if she had interns and if she'd like one. She said I could come reorganize her moss collection, walk her dog, and meet her mother. It was like peeking behind the curtain and finding the thing you'd both hoped for and dreaded: the actors still perfectly in character.
Parks: You can’t prove, scientifically, this idea of experience being buffered or delayed in neural eddies.
Manzotti: At this stage, no. Neuroscientists can’t disprove it, or prove that the experience is “generated” in the head. But let’s remember, we do science by forming a hypothesis, making predictions in line with that hypothesis, and inventing experiments that prove or disprove the hypothesis.
In the waning days of the 2016 campaign Trump’s data team knew exactly which voters in which states they needed to persuade on Facebook and Twitter and precisely what messages to use. The question is: How did the Russians know this, too? Largely ignored in this discussion is one possibility: that the Russians themselves, through their hacking of Democratic Party records, had better information than Trump.
When Van Cliburn died in 2013, he was by far the most famous concert pianist in American history, although he had effectively retired from performance decades before. His had been a strange and complicated life.
“Quentin Blake: The Life of Birds,” drawn from the archive held by the House of Illustration in London, is a tiny exhibition, but one of pure, quirky joy. Blake is best known as an illustrator of children’s books, including most of Roald Dahl’s. Oddly, the human traits that Blake illustrates seem clearer and sharper in these birds than in his drawings of people, perhaps because without the human features we see only the revealing shorthand of gesture, expression, and movement.
Joshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain, argues that Trumpism is best understood through the president’s partnership with Stephen K. Bannon, now his chief political strategist. Green has been writing about conservatives since the George W. Bush years. It is a testament to his adroit intertwining of Bannon’s story with Trump’s that we’re not certain which of the two figures has sold the bigger part of himself to the other. In the broader sense, they are coauthors of our moment’s tabloid conservatism.
Although Raphael for much of the last five hundred years has been celebrated as a prince of painters, today he is widely dismissed as no more than a kind of chief courtier: supreme in grace and rhetoric, yet mannered and unnatural, even insincere. But Raphael seems so abstract and remote because we have so little direct contact with him. "Raphael: The Drawings," on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, provides a rare chance to see up close a wide array of the artist’s works from throughout his life, and the effect is thrilling and revelatory.
Like late-nineteenth-century scholar Tan Sitong, Liu Xiaobo threw his weight behind a cause that in its immediate aftermath seemed hopeless—in Liu's case, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But with time, history vindicated Tan; I wonder if it will do the same for Liu.
Liu Xiaobo felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died. His “final statement” at his trial in December 2009 opens: “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life.” In October 2010, when his wife Liu Xia brought him the news of his Nobel Peace Prize, she reports that he commented, “This is for the aggrieved ghosts.”
After months of talk about what it would take to get Trump impeached, analysts are calling this the “smoking gun” that could actually bring his downfall. Why does the occasion feel so momentous (other than because we want it to be)? After all, we learned only that Don Jr. said in confidence roughly the same thing that his father said for all the world to hear. But the news has been as shocking as it has because, after all this time, we still have not learned to take Trump’s public utterances seriously.
Known for her voluminous, monochromatic, and architectural silhouettes, Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo makes designs that appear to be more concerned with novelty and sparking interest and dialogue than with straightforward attraction or luxury. One gets the sense, wandering the Met and walking the streets of New York City alike, that her label, Comme des Garçons, is one of the few that have built a viable business while truly challenging industry norms.
Launched in 1976, the ship Point Counterpoint II, designed by Louis Kahn, has travelled America’s rivers, lakes, and intercoastal waterways; the Caribbean, Baltic, and Irish Seas; and the rivers of northern Europe. Anchoring in large cities and small towns, in busy shipping lanes and at public parks, the barge opens like a clamshell to reveal a glittering concert stage. It sails as a powerful, living testament to American creativity and to the elemental role that culture plays in human life. Yet unless a new guardian is found for it, this remarkable, mobile cultural institution will be broken down to scrap in a Louisiana shipyard.
Measure for Measure invites updating, but it’s in the nature of the work that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. The play is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort.
Those of us who move from the provinces pay a toll at the city’s gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place. More than thirty years ago, when I was in Egypt, I met a cultivated English couple who invited me to stay in their house in London on my way back to Ireland. They could not have been more charming.
The only problem was that they had an Irish maid who, as soon as I arrived as their guest, began to talk to me in the unvarnished accent of home, as though she had known me all of her life.
What is a shadow? Nothing in itself, you might say: a mere local lack of light, in a space that is otherwise lit up. Light, which allows us to see and know the world, is the normal precondition for picturing things. Cast shadows may help us interpret a picture by indicating where light comes from and where objects stand, but if you survey art history, you find the majority of painters giving them minor parts at most. A minority, however, turns these assumptions upside down, treating shadow as the preexistent condition and light as its shock interruption.
The primary worry in South Korea has not been its bizarre and militaristic neighbor to the north; most Koreans are by now long used to living within close firing range of Pyongyang and do not think it will attack unless provoked. What really worries them is that the new US president doesn’t know the complexity of the situation—and is too contemptuous of the State Department to be instructed.
Don Siegel's 1971 The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood, is a masterpiece of misogyny. Sofia Coppola has remade it, and where Siegel’s Beguiled was an expression of male hysteria, Coppola’s version is a dark comedy of manners. In Siegel’s movie the women are vivid types; in Coppola’s they are humanized.
Among the many ideas put forward by Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, was to institute an annual speech to the French parliament, a sort of State of the Union à la française. He also introduced a raft of bold proposals for streamlining government. But even bolder than his proposals was the speech itself, and the American-style executive it seemed to usher in.
Comics lend themselves to representing the experience of cycling: the flatness of the bird’s-eye-view map set in contrast to the scene-by-scene illustrations of Eleanor Davis’s daily experience biking from Arizona to Georgia. We are pulled into Davis’s perspective, seeing from her position on the road as well as from a close third-person view as if slightly above.
ISIS’s military defeat, which Western officials believe will come sometime later this year or early next, will hardly put an end to the conflicts that gave rise to the group. For much of the battle against ISIS has taken place in a region that has been fought over ever since oil was found in Kirkuk in the 1930s. The deeper conflicts here will only escalate.
Ellen Berkenblit’s striking new paintings at Anton Kern Gallery are a riot of luminous colors. Each layer of paint reveals shapes and colors, both painted and sewn, as if simultaneously pre-existent and made anew. In other works, the layers within Berkenblit’s paintings seem to display the history of their own making.
In recent years, two new genetic technologies have started a scientific and medical revolution. One, relatively well known, is the ability to easily decode the information in our genes. The other, which is only dimly understood by the general public, is our newfound capacity to modify genes at will. These innovations give us the power to predict certain risks to our health, eliminate deadly diseases, and ultimately transform ourselves and the whole of nature. This development raises complex and urgent questions about the kind of society we want and who we really are. A brave new world is just around the corner, and we had better be ready for it or things could go horribly wrong.
Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation. Hokusai was perhaps the greatest draughtsman, Hiroshige excelled in landscapes, and Kuniyoshi had the wildest theatrical flair. Utamaro (1753–1806), whose work is featured in an exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, was the lover of women.
The travel ban won’t be the only big case before the Court next term. It's a heady line up, and the news that Justice Anthony Kennedy will not retire—at a time when, given the Oval Office’s current occupant, the judiciary’s check on the executive branch is more essential than ever—is important.
Donald Trump has often been likened to Andrew Jackson; this is welcomed and encouraged by Trump himself. An important parallel between Trump and Jackson lies in their efforts to reshape the political organizations of their time, though Trump does not seem to have Jackson’s knack for political decision-making. The most important parallel between Trump and Jackson lies in their rallying the white working class against ethnic minorities.
The image of an interior shattered by outside forces could be the emblem for all Cristian Mungiu’s films. He loves to present stories in which someone’s integrity is assailed by external influences, and Graduation offers one of his most melancholy contraptions for testing his characters’ limitations.
