Field “also reminds the intellectuals of the New Right of something they all too easily forget: They can indulge in fantasies of an authoritarian regime because of the freedom and security afforded by the liberal democracy they loathe.” A terrific review of @lkatfield.bsky.social ’s “Furious Minds.”

"Field detects a strain of decadence underlying the fanaticism, with soft, comfortable men mistaking cruel titillation for insight and trying their mightiest to look tough: “It is unseemly, and it is unmanly, and some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/b...

Wrote about “Furious Minds,” Laura Field’s excellent new book on how right-wing intellectuals helped the fringe become the rug

Wrote about reading Hannah Arendt 50 years after her death, why we keep invoking her, and what it is we keep wanting her to tell us. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/b...

“They put handcuffs on us, a chain over our waist and our feet, like criminals. They transported us in the kind of van that you put dogs in. We were all sitting in a row facing a white wall.… We boarded the plane and it was full…. A lady in her 70s kept throwing up.“

On the one hand, the Jeeves stories; on the other, “The Remains of the Day.”

"Modern dentistry is great. But your dentist doesn’t insist you worship him.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/t...

The 4-month-old infant in this photo was being held by his mother at her green card interview when she was arrested by ICE.

What Clara said. Always struck by how so many smart people — who otherwise decry the deterioration of the discourse — will take the (rage) bait.

Wrote about the argument that cultural stagnation allowed r-w reactionaries to fill in the vacuum. And now that some of them are at the center of power, what comes next? What might look edgy in the recesses of 4chan looks craven when blasted out from official U.S. government accounts.

“With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence,” Marx writes, “culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” @jenszalai.bsky.social @wdavidmarx.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/b...

“What might look edgy in the recesses of 4chan looks craven when blasted from official U.S. government accounts.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

Even better:

Sometimes a bare recitation of the facts yields a devastating parenthetical: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/u...

An insightful essay. A few years ago I wrote about the literature of shame, including questions about shamelessness, salutary kinds of shame and what shaming can (and cannot) be for: www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/b...

And one more thing: It’s good to see a Hungarian who isn’t Orbán make international news.

I said this when Krasznahorkai won a National Book Award for translation several years ago, and I’ll say it again: This can only encourage Americans to learn how to pronounce the “sz“ sound, and I am here for it!

László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel! Here’s an essay I wrote about him in 2012: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

I was struck by that line too. I reviewed Walter’s book “How Civil Wars Start” when it was published way back in 2022. her analysis was incisive; I was hoping it wouldn’t be prescient: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/b...

Philippe Sands‘s excellent new book traces the links between the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and an old Nazi named Walter Rauff — two men who embraced the deployment of state power to torture and murder human beings.

I highly recommend Philippe Sands’s absorbing new book about Pinochet, a Nazi hiding out in Patagonia, and impunity: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/b...

Took a break from writing about political memoirs to review a big new biography of Bruce Lee [gift link] www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/b...

“But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.” — Nicole Hemmer www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...

I thought Ross Douthat's recent explanation of how late night became more political was off. So I dug into the history. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/a...

"Any personal details we do get are titrated just so." @jenszalai.bsky.social on Amy Coney Barrett. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/b...

He was brought to the US when he was 12, on a green card. Now, at the age of 62, after serving his time, instead of being sent to his birth country of Jamaica—which was willing to repatriate him—he was sent to Eswatini, a country he has no connection to, and where he might be detained indefinitely.

... and the online proliferation of fake Arendt quotes is one of the earliest and most telling signs of ... what?

this sucks, but it will suck much less when some smart editor snaps up Richard

Just seeing this now. Really fascinating. Hungarians apparently still had measurable Yakut ancestry in the Middle Ages but by now are genetically indistinguishable from others in Central Europe, while Finns are still 10% Yakut

This book was so astute and prescient, and then its lessons were ignored for decades by laissez-faire ideologues who ignored the key role played by social ties. I first read Polanyi in the late ‘90s, when neoliberalism seemed unstoppable; his work was a bracing antidote to so much easy triumphalism.

I reviewed Robert Reich’s new book, in which he argues that “the central struggle of civilization” is “fighting bullies.” Relentlessly bullied as a kid, he says institutions that constrain the bully’s will to dominate are key: “I would not survive a minute in a society based on brute force.”

Worth reading again: John Lanchester's profile of the BLS (which also appeared in Michael Lewis's recent book, "Who Is Government"). Gift link: wapo.st/4l7AJjR

Jon Lee Anderson and Scott Anderson are brothers who try not to be in the same war zone at the same time, but I caught up with them while they both happened to be in New Jersey. We talked about their unconventional lives and their unconventional upbringing.

As a timeline cleanse, I highly recommend this delightful story about bookstore pets by my colleague Elisabeth Egan:

There is so much to read but don’t miss this supremely well-researched and powerful new book by Haley Cohen Gilliland called “A Flower Traveled in My Blood.” Very grateful to have finally read it. This is an excellent review.

I wrote about something that's contested nowadays: empathy.

"The term is often associated with Latin American military dictatorships from the Cold War era that abducted their own citizens."

If you don’t live in California, you might be unaware of all the ICE mayhem. Here’s just part of the @latimes.com front page right now

This is a book to read. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/b...

“Memes are how you do politics now. This is how you reach people,” he said. “Intellectualism doesn’t have a place anymore. We’re pushing for real change through memes and jokes.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...

Between 1976 and 1983, thousands of people were disappeared by Argentina's military dictatorship. Many of the desaparecidos were young, and a number of the women were pregnant. They were kept alive long enough to give birth, and then their babies were given away, often to military families. 1/

I reviewed Megan Greenwell's good new book, "Bad Company," about what happens when private equity firms borrow tons of money to buy a struggling company, off-loading all that debt onto the company and effectively turning it into a debt-servicing machine (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/b...