Top Book News provided by The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• How Universities Should Deal With the Trump Administration
  Higher education needs clear rules of engagement: no honorary titles, no named lectures, no keynote speeches.
• The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual
  So you’re on Twitter. That doesn’t make you a public intellectual.
• Is Higher Ed Omnivorous or Sucked Dry?
  A recent description of the university’s self-destructive “appetite” simply isn’t accurate for the majority of American institutions.
• Historians Just Don’t Get Archivists. Here’s Why.
  Changes within the archival and historical professions in the past 30 years have created a gulf.
• The Delicate Art of Dealing With Your Archivist
  Your career depends on getting along, sometimes for months or even years. It pays to know the types. Here’s a rundown.
• Why the University’s Insatiable Appetite Will Be Its Undoing
  It’s time for higher education to do less.
• Archiving While Black
  How archives marginalize black scholars.
• History in an Age of Fake News
  How to stop pseudo-historical grift from taking over the field.
• Elite Colleges Have No Monopoly on the Liberal Arts
  This polarizing vision of higher education serves politicians and profiteers, not students.
• Why We Need a More Activist Academy
  Impartiality bolsters a dangerous status quo.
• Higher Ed’s Real Productivity Problem
  Scholars have absorbed administrators’ obsession with measuring and ranking, and it’s keeping us from taking intellectual risks.
• All Things Ill-Considered: NPR’s Sexist Blunder
  A public-radio segment on a book by two scholars omits any mention of the female co-author. Oops.
• The Self-Helpification of Academe
  How feel-good nostrums cover up the university’s cruelty.
• The ‘Two Cultures’ Fallacy
  Stop pitting science and the humanities against each other.
• In Lieu of Executions, Graduations
  The inside story of education on the inside.
• The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What?
  After previous crises, they bounced back. This time is different.
• When Neo-Nazis Love Your Book
  Can a liberal education create enemies of liberalism?
• Was a Renowned Literary Theorist Also a Spy?
  The strange case of Julia Kristeva.
• How to Keep Violent Speech Off Campus
  A common-sense proposal.
• Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities
  Arguments that they’re useful are wrong, anti-humanistic, and sure to backfire.

The New York Review of Books©

• Seeing Red? Think Blue
  In 1980, I wrote my college newspaper endorsement of a man named Barry Commoner who was running for president. He was the candidate of the Citizens’ Party, a kind of precursor to the Greens, and since I was disgusted with both Carter and Reagan, and because he was an environmentalist well ahead of his time, I thought it made sense to back him. It made emotional sense at the time—though it’s hard for me to remember why I was so righteously indignant about poor Jimmy Carter—but it made no logical sense. Since this was a college paper, and since it was in reliably Democratic Massachusetts, it didn’t really matter—but my self-absorption did teach me a lesson I haven’t forgotten.
• V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced
  Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.
• Between Hate, Hope, and Help: Haitians in the Dominican Republic
  Dominican politicians have successfully manipulated anti-Haitian feeling for political gain. Radio shows discuss the Haitian “invasion” that must be stopped at all costs. There is a widespread belief that Haiti is a failed state, and that the world is conspiring against the Dominican Republic to force it to deal with its neighbor’s problems. There is a fear, too, of their country being somehow contaminated by Haiti’s ills. “When you peel back the first layer, the second layer,” said Matías Bosch, a grandson of the DR’s first democratically-elected president, “what you have left, in the end, is pure racism.”
• The Big Melt
  Sometimes, it seems, threats to our future become so great that we opt to ignore them. Yet if we fail to act with the utmost urgency to slow climate change, we will invite catastrophe on all humanity.
• Michael Jackson, King of Pop Art
  An exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery gathers together the work of forty-eight disparate artists exploring the legacy of perhaps the most frequently depicted cultural figure in history, and his fame is their common palette. Michael Jackson is inseparable from this astronomical celebrity. It was his making and his tragedy. It glows with a bright, mournful edge from every one of these artworks, probing the question of what might have been if his enormous success had not in some way required, or at least contributed to, his eventual annihilation.
• In the Review Archives: 1980–1984
  To celebrate The New York Review’s fifty-fifth anniversary, we are featuring one article from each year of the magazine’s history. Today’s selection, from the early Eighties, includes Renata Adler’s infamous critique of Pauline Kael, an essay by Ada Louise Huxtable on modern architecture, Robert Hughes on Andy Warhol, Nadine Gordimer on the dying white order of apartheid South Africa, and Stephen Jay Gould on the life and work of Barbara McClintock.
• Hail to the Chief
  The Republican Party has essentially ceased to be a political party in our normal understanding of the term and has instead become an instrument of one man’s will.
• Noel Francisco, Trump’s Tenth Justice
  The sole client of the solicitor general, the Department of Justice lawyer who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court, is the United States. With Noel Francisco at the helm, Trump’s solicitor general’s office has—to a far greater extent than its modern predecessors—aggressively changed the government’s litigating positions midstream, staked out extreme stances in pending cases where the government is not even a party, and made extravagant requests of the Supreme Court. And in several cases, the Court has acceded to those requests. Assuming Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as Justice Kennedy’s replacement, and with a 5-4 conservative majority on the Court all but locked in, Francisco will be in the driving seat to guide a new era of conservative jurisprudence at the high court.
• ‘It Feels Like a Derangement’: Menopause, Depression, & Me
  I took my new boxes of patches, a pump gel of estrogen to top up with on the bad days, my precious testosterone, and went home with hope. It took months, but things stabilized. Now, there is never more than one bad day at a time of these “low moods.” The phrase is belittling. My depression is not simply feeling miserable or glum. I know what that feels like. I know that that can be fixed by fresh air or effort. This depression is dysfunction, derangement. I hate myself so hard. And I miss myself, the woman who didn’t feel like this. On the good days, I am at peace with my age, with what I have done, with who I am, menopausal or not. I delight in what I can do, and when I run, I hurtle headlong down a steep descent with the joy of a child, aged nearly fifty. But on other days, that woman seems like someone else.
• After the Gold Rush
  Dawson City: Frozen Time is nominally a documentary—it is a documentary—but describing it as a documentary is something like describing Ulysses as a travel guide to Dublin. The film is transfixing, an utterly singular compound of the bizarre, the richly informative, the thrilling, the horrifying, the goofy, the tragic, and the flat-out gorgeous.
• What’s the Right Way to Legalize Prostitution?: An Exchange
  Brents: The Nevada brothel industry is small, but it is one workable alternative to criminalizing prostitution. Bindel’s conclusions fly in the face of the majority of the evidence we have. If we want to help sex workers, we should support better working conditions. Bindel: Brents talks the language of workers’ rights, but without backing up the rhetoric with data of her own. In fact, there is extremely low membership in prostitutes’ unions in the legalized regimes of the Netherlands, Germany, and New Zealand. Furthermore, labor unions can’t offer what most women want: economic alternatives to prostitution.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tyranny of Language
  Thirty years after graduating from his missionary-run high school near Nairobi, the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had gained enough distance to reflect on the lasting effect of colonial education policy in Kenya. “Behind the cannon was the new school,” he wrote in Decolonising the Mind, the 1986 exposition on cultural imperialism in which he examined how the colonial classroom became a tool of psychological conquest in Africa and beyond. “Better than the cannon, it made the conquest permanent,” he wrote. “The cannon forces the body and the school fascinates the soul.”
• The Surrealist Eye of Lee Miller
  Gathered together in the excellent new show “Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain” is a selection of candid snaps both Miller and Man Ray took during their Cornish adventure. Most arresting is Miller’s photograph of an all-but-nude Carrington reclining in the sun, eyes closed, a smoldering cigarette clutched between the fingers of her left hand, with Ernst sitting behind her, his veiny hands clasped over his lover’s bare breasts, his head resting lovingly on hers, one half of his face hidden in a cushion of her thick, curly dark hair. This sudden Surrealist invasion is integral to the story told in the Hepworth exhibition.
• Does Literature Help Us Live?
  Generalization is treacherous, but let’s posit that at the center of most modern storytelling, in particular most literary storytelling, lies the struggling self, or selves, of individuals seeking some kind of definition or stability in a world that appears hostile to such aspirations. In short, at the core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s great expectations.
• California Burning
  On the northwestern edge of Los Angeles, where I grew up, the wildfires came in late summer. We lived in a new subdivision, and behind our house were the hills, golden and parched. We would hose down the wood-shingled roof as fire crews bivouacked in our street. Our neighborhood never burned, but others did. We were all living in the “wildland-urban interface,” as it is now called. More subdivisions were built, farther out, and for my family the wildfire threat receded. Tens of millions of Americans live in that fire-prone interface today—the number keeps growing—and the wildfire threat has become, for a number of political and environmental reasons, immensely more serious.
• What Russia Understands about Trump
  The notion of Trump in certain precincts of the media as a Manchurian candidate, a Russian asset owned and run by the Kremlin, is ridiculous to Burton Gerber, a thirty-nine-year veteran of the CIA. He says, "Trump is basically a man with low self-esteem, which he has worked against by being a bully and a narcissist... The Russians would never want to recruit him, just continuously have access to him and be able to influence him." Gerber compares Trump to Harry Hopkins, an architect of the New Deal whom the Soviets cajoled because of his closeness to Roosevelt, rather than to Alger Hiss, whom the KGB actively recruited as a spy within the US government. “If you’ve got someone like Trump, an agent of influence,” he asks, “why would you then try to make him more than what he is? It would be irresponsible from an intelligence point of view.”
• In the Review Archives: 1975–1979
  To celebrate The New York Review’s fifty-fifth anniversary, we are featuring one article from each year of the magazine’s publication. Today we survey the end of the 1970s, with Saul Bellow on boredom, Elizabeth Hardwick on Billie Holiday, Simon Leys on Maoist China, Susan Sontag on illness, and Michael Wood on Apocalypse Now.
• The Queen of Rue
  In introductory studio art classes students are often assigned a negative-space drawing—that is, they are asked to draw everything surrounding a figure, filling up the page, until the blank shape of the figure emerges. This has been Rachel Cusk’s technique in her last trio of novels—a trio referred to appropriately as the Outline trilogy—and it is a little puzzling that more people haven’t thought to write novels in this manner before. Perhaps we go to fiction for the solitary inner life of one character and her actions against the confining tenets and structures of her society (though Cusk’s trilogy manages this as well) rather than for everything surrounding her—in this case, linked and paraphrased soliloquies of secondary, even tertiary, characters upstaging and downstaging the ostensible protagonist.
• Flynn, Comey, and Mueller: What Trump Knew and When He Knew It
  In an effort to persuade the American people that the president has done nothing wrong, Trump and his supporters have blamed those they identify as their political adversaries—from President Barack Obama to Jim Comey, and including entire institutions such as the FBI and CIA, and an ill-defined “Deep State.” But the most compelling evidence that the president may have obstructed justice appears to come from his own most senior and loyal aides. The greatest threat to his presidency is not from his enemies, real or perceived, but from his allies within the White House.
• Pakistan’s Promised Day?
  Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer turned playboy turned right-wing politician, swept Pakistan’s elections last week. Pakistanis, drained after the drama of electoral vigils, delayed results, and allegations of rigging and meddling, will likely cleave to the promise of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry. They console themselves by believing that they’ll one day “see that day that has been promised” them, as Faiz's famous lines go. That they do not have a united vision for this future day seems not to be of Imran Khan’s—or anyone’s—concern.
• Singapore Sham
  There are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. Or the president knows that he got nothing. In that case, when he bragged on his way home that “this should have been done years ago” and later tweeted “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he was simply being fraudulent in the way that works so well for him at home. Stripped of its made-for-TV trappings—the walk, the flags, the solemn handshake, and the breathless talk of history being made—nothing was actually agreed to at the summit.
• The Ascetic Beauty of Brancusi
  For years, Brancusi made hardly enough money to eat. In 1926, a version of one of his most extraordinary subjects, Bird in Space, was famously held up at the US border because customs officials didn’t think it was art. Sometimes, he even baffled his own cohort. Picasso (or perhaps Matisse) is said to have likened Brancusi’s 1916 Princess X, a glistening bronze torso of Princess Marie Bonaparte, to a large phallus. Yet, by the time of his death in 1957, the increasingly reclusive Romanian was regarded as one of the century’s greatest sculptors. Peggy Guggenheim, who began buying his work in the 1940s and took artist-worship seriously, called him “half astute peasant and half real god.”
• The American Nightmare
  Lauren Markham is everything that Donald Trump is not—empathetic, honest, painstakingly factual, thoughtful, and fair. Her beautifully written book, The Far Away Brothers, follows Ernesto and Raúl Flores, seventeen-year-old twins, from a Salvadoran village ruled by gangsters from MS-13 to a high school in Oakland, where she served as their counselor. It can be read as a supplement to the current news, a chronicle of the problems that Central Americans are fleeing and the horrors they suffer in flight. But it transcends the crisis. Markham’s deep, frank reporting is also useful in thinking ahead to the challenges of assimilation, for the struggling twins and many others like them.
• Of Badgers and Bunnies: Jeremy Thorpe’s Career in the Closet
  Upon the release of his book about the rise and fall of the Liberal politician, John Preston observed that “If homosexuality had been legal, none of this would’ve happened.” In an ideal world, where homosexuality was not only never legally proscribed, but also never the target of intense and widespread social stigma, this would be true. But to emphasize the repressive power of the closet minimizes the responsibility of Thorpe, who, superficial charm aside, was a deeply unsympathetic figure. Unlike other public figures who used the unwelcome exposure of their homosexuality to fight for gay acceptance and legal equality, Thorpe never contributed much to that cause. Indeed, he denied being gay all his life.
• The ‘Witch Hunters’
  The Deep State, to Trump, is a secret brotherhood of military and intelligence officers secretly manipulating the body politic, and is still run by the leaders of the American intelligence organizations under President Obama, along with unnamed sinister forces still resilient within the Justice Department. These are the same people who revealed a brazen covert operation by Vladimir Putin and his spy services to help elect Trump in 2016. To the president, they are not defending the republic but running a slow-rolling coup d’état. Trump may be paranoid, but he has real enemies among the emeriti of the intelligence establishment, and among them are the authors of three new books that collectively have sold up to a million copies: James Clapper, Michael Hayden, and James Comey.
• Sure It Can
  To the Editors: Please add me to your list of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of readers flummoxed by this line from Cass Sunstein’s “It Can Happen Here”: “With our system of checks and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here.”
• Justice Is Not Blind
  To the Editors: Two comments on Noah Feldman’s observation that a “liberal democracy requires a liberal populace that is prepared to vote for the policies it wants.” First, many times a liberal populace “wins” the popular vote and loses the election, e.g., Bush vs. Gore and Trump vs. Clinton. In this regard, second, Feldman does not address the critical role the Supreme Court plays in ensuring the integrity of the political process itself.
• More Cake?
  To the Editors: Given David Cole’s long-standing involvement in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it is odd and a little disturbing that he avoids even mentioning core issues of the case in his recent piece, “This Takes the Cake.” Cole never once mentions the issue of compelled speech.
• The Art of Falling
  An aging, beautiful, woman with a height of sixty-five inches, roughly the same as the canvas, slipped in front of a Jackson Pollock. It was Madame Moreau falling down, her limbs splayed across the floor in every direction. I am unable to trace now the trajectory of Pollock’s random drips dried on the canvas, but I will never forget the portrait of seduction that lay sprawled before me. She wore a gray wool skirt, a crow-black cardigan, and a cloche hat with a flamboyant silvery bow. Her tender feet, which I discovered that very same afternoon, were covered in elegant hold-up stockings.
• The Challenge of ‘Chronic Lyme’
  That chronic Lyme exists in the realm of experience doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When medicine does not acknowledge the reality of the subjective—the thick reality of lived experience—we fall laughably short in our efforts to serve patients. When it comes to tick-borne Lyme disease itself, we all need to expand our horizons. That suffering is real. It must be attended to. But to insist beyond all plausibility that one’s suffering is related to a tick bite is not feminist; it’s absurd. And to prey on suffering people who crave that certainty, offering them expensive, intensive, and dangerous treatments is worse than absurd; it’s cruel.
• Russia’s Responsibility in the Syrian Reconquest of Idlib
  The endgame of the war in Syria is likely to come down to the northwestern province of Idlib, on the Turkish border, where some 2.3 million people are now trapped. As Russian-Syrian forces now finish retaking the smaller southwestern province of Daraa, Idlib will be the last significant enclave in anti-government hands. Russia clearly has the necessary leverage over the Assad government to avoid a bloodbath there. The key is getting Russia to use that leverage. Assad’s reputation is beyond repair—his main aspiration is to stay in power and avoid prosecution—but Putin still aspires to be treated as a respected global leader. He must be persuaded that he will fail in that quest so long as he continues to underwrite Assad’s atrocities.
• Lovers of Wisdom
  Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy.
• Football, Free on the Streets
  Football invites you to lose yourself in other people’s stories; their play becomes yours as you follow the ball and intertwine your enthusiasm with theirs. The ritual of watching bodies at play draws us to them and allows us—our bodies—to join a shared rhythm. Football is therefore not just competition, but is generous, collective participation. The photographer Andrew Esiebo is preoccupied with rituals of the everyday—the myriad ways they show creativity, empowerment, and survival. As if in gentle rebuke, he turns his lens to activities that highlight how simple daily experiences carry the shine of magnificence, revealing the significance of the overlooked and the dignity of the excluded.
• ‘Sorry to Bother You’: Boots Riley’s Trojan Horseplay
  Acting white is the premise of Boots Riley’s raucous new film, Sorry to Bother You. And no one knows better than black people that acting white—putting on the trappings of privilege, speaking as if you belong, as if you deserve to take whatever you want—has always yielded dividends in America. How do you think we got the Huxtables? And acting white is the premise of Boots Riley’s raucous new film, Sorry to Bother You. What tumbles forth from this premise is a wild, campy romp. Indeed, smuggled inside Riley’s rollicking mashup of surrealism and sci-fi is a cutting critique of race and class.
• Why Trump’s Hawks Back the MEK Terrorist Cult
  How an organization that was only delisted by the US Department of State as a terrorist group in 2012 could so soon after win influential friends at the heart of America’s current administration is the strange and sinister story of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, better known by its initials, MEK. Commonly called a cult by most observers, the MEK has a historic record of terrorism, human rights abuses, and murder of US citizens. One would think, then, that senior American officials like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton wouldn’t go near the MEK, let alone fraternize with its members or take its fees. But when it comes to Iran, the usual rules don’t apply.
• Korean Souls
  Han Kang’s novel Human Acts is a work of tremendous intellectual and philosophical ambition. It continues the inquiry into violence and self-determination that Han began in The Vegetarian, in which a housewife resists the strictures of her family life by gradually refusing to eat: a self-abnegation that literally diminishes her body. Han also writes about bodily suffering in harrowing detail throughout Human Acts, but here her characters are above all preoccupied with the nature of the soul. Where does it go after the body is destroyed? How do the soul and body separate? How do souls communicate with one another?
• Ten Questions Brett Kavanaugh Must Answer
  Supreme Court nominees all too often avoid answering questions about their views by simply describing existing Court doctrine and then insisting they cannot say how they would vote on any particular matter that might come before them. But in speeches and writings while a judge, Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly expressed his own views on many matters that might come before him, including whether presidents should be subject to civil and criminal lawsuits; if he could express his views there, he should not be permitted to avoid expressing them on other topics in the Senate confirmation hearing. Here, then, are ten questions I suggest the senators ask Kavanaugh.
• World Cup 2018: Football Sans Frontières
  Social democracy isn’t just the way to win at public health outcomes; it’s the way to win at sport, too. But there is something more potent to recognize, as football now heads home (though not to England, with apologies to fans of Harry Kane). For the game now returns to its roots, which are not in stadiums or on TV, but in vacant lots, on streets, and in playgrounds around the globe. Until recently, the kids playing pickup games, lending their own vocabulary to a universal grammar, were calling themselves Messi. Soon, it may be Mbappé. Wherever they’re growing up, they don’t want to live walled off in a ghetto. They want to live in the world. Football is how they do it.
• The BBC and Brexit: An Exchange
  James Stephenson: The BBC does indeed occupy a unique position in world journalism—as the most trusted international broadcaster. That is why hundreds of millions of people worldwide turn to BBC News each week. Nick Cohen: I am not alleging a conspiracy. The BBC journalists I speak to talk of something less sinister but more pervasive: a fear of the consequences of honest reporting. The BBC has let Britain down because it fears being seen to question the people’s verdict. Fear is killing the BBC’s journalism.
• The Romanovs’ Art of Survival
  Almost all the Romanovs had an artistic bent: they painted, doodled, carved, embroidered, cut jewelry, or sculpted. For many Romanov exiles after 1917—hounded, stripped of their wealth, living under the constant fear of further reprisals—art became, in part, a coping mechanism. Later, as the memory of the massacre gave way in its immediacy, new generations of Romanovs took to art for reasons not so different from the rest of us: to meditate, to understand, and to express. Imaginative, often humorous, and at times fantastical, these artifacts paint a different, more authentic portrait of a family whose life and legacy continue to pique our interest, one hundred years after the Romanovs were swept off the world’s political stage.
• Dr. Death
  The historian Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children is an impassioned indictment, one that glows with the heat of a prosecution motivated by an ethical imperative. She charges Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician whose name has since the 1980s designated a syndrome that forms part of the wider autism spectrum, with a heinous medical crime: sending at least thirty-seven of his child patients to their deaths. Accused with Asperger is the whole of the Nazi ideological apparatus that converted a diagnosis—a highly personal form of human assessment—into the first rung of a routine killing machine.