In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana. Read more
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Category: New Books
Humanism Is a Frail Craft: On Sarah Bakewell’s ‘Humanly Possible’
In an age variously described as posthumanist, transhumanist, or anti-humanist, an age where inhumane rulers hold sway over large swathes of the globe, an age where artificial intelligence threatens to render humanism a quaint relic from the past, Bakewell makes clear what we risk losing should we fail to connect with our humanist heritage. She distills this credo into three principles: freethinking (which emphasizes our moral conscience and duty to others), inquiry (which privileges reason over dogma as a guide to our lives), and hope (which insists that, though our lives are brief and fallible, we can achieve meaningful things). Read more
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The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic
University of Texas law professor Vladeck debuts with an expert study of how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has increasingly used “obscure procedural orders to shift American jurisprudence definitively to the right.” Unlike the “merits docket,” where justices issue lengthy, signed opinions months after hearing oral arguments, rulings handed down on the “shadow docket” are unsigned, unexplained, and often released in the middle of the night. Read more
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Everything, Everywhere, in One Big Book
In “All the Knowledge in the World,” Simon Garfield recounts the history of the encyclopedia — a tale of ambitious effort, numerous errors and lots of paper. Read more
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‘Small Mercies’ by Dennis Lehane
The book has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring. Read more
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Alexandra Petri’s US History
On Petri’s deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Ayn Rand rewrites The Little Engine That Could. Nikola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain–who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated–offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie. Read more
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‘The Garden of Seven Twilights’ by Miquel de Palol
…upon its publication in 1989, Garden of Seven Twilights was hailed as a masterpiece and showered with accolades—the Serra d’Or Critics prize, the National Prize for Catalan Literature, and many others. Critics blessed Palol with comparisons to Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Perec, dubbing his work “the postmodern Decameron.” Garden especially earns this last epithet—it is a frame-narrative monolith, a monstrously pregnant matryoshka doll of nested stories, and a cerebral, ludic, and unapologetically pulpy affair. Read more
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The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century
Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind. Read more
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‘White Cat, Black Dog’ by Kelly Link
Link has a boundless imagination and a sharp sense of humor, but even in tales filled with vampires, monsters, and a menagerie of talking animals, she never forgets the humanity of her characters, even when she puts them through their paces. She’s no sentimentalist, to be sure, but she writes with a seemingly limitless compassion, which anchors the stories in something enduring, something more real than real. Read more
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How Poetry and Performance Combined to Become a New Genre
In “Spoken Word: A Cultural History,” Joshua Bennett traces the roots, rise and influence of a movement that continues to reverberate. Read more
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