History and society

Review: Barry Yourgrau on Nellie Campobello

A tenacious young woman takes hold of history and makes it her own

May 14

Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on ”The Third Reich of Dreams”

A journalist, prompted by her own troubled sleep, starts gathering dreams in 1933

Apr 30

Review: Sarah Ruden on Rebecca West

A writer who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening

Apr 23

Review: Joy Williams on Studying Animal Grief

When scholarship and arrogance converge

Apr 16

Review: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride”

Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs

Apr 9

Review: Michael Robbins on Trash

What “recycling” hides: a lucrative trade in waste disposal that concentrates it among the distant and poor

Apr 2

Review: Mona Simpson on Lewis Hyde

Giving without expectation of return, remembering in order to forget

Mar 12

Review: Adam Hochschild on an Unsung Nazi Resistance

The Gestapo was usually not suspicious of middle-aged people, mostly women, who gathered to do calisthenics

Mar 5

Diary: Wendell Berry, The Writer Going Home

Embracing “the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in”

Mar 2

Review: Christian Caryl on the Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

There may be barely a trace of anti-Soviet dissidence in its birthplace, Moscow, but does its influence linger?

Feb 12

Diary: Laura Kolb, From the Literary Annals of Women’s Deceit

In literature and life, women lie

Feb 2

Review: (2) Ian Frazier, Tales of Adventure for Boys

Is it nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of fortune down in the garage?

Jan 24

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