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...

In the basement of LAX:

Can you imagine telling your staff they need to read more and then having AI suggest made-up business books?

Sue Prideaux's new biography of Paul Gauguin is terrific:

Reminded of how Adam Becker, in his recent book "More Everything Forever," lays out really clearly how the only thing LLMs can do is hallucinate. They have no actual understanding of the connection between words and the things in the world that those words are suppose to signify.

In his new book "Empty Vessel," the historian Ian Kumekawa landed on an ingenious way to make the abstractions of globalization feel more concrete: Tell the story of neoliberalism from the perspective of a barge. (The pic is from its stint as a "floating jail" in the East River in 1992.)

It is time to open the strategic doll reserve.

The New York Times pieced together the most complete account yet of the U.S. arrangement with El Salvador and the March 15 deportations from internal government documents, court filings and interviews with 22 people familiar with the operation or legal challenges. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/u...

We believe many things. How do we know that they're true? And how do we convince others that they're true? I reviewed PROOF, a new book that I found especially useful in these surreal times:

In October 2016, John Jeremiah Sullivan met with Pope Francis, who declined to speak directly about the upcoming presidential election but made the point that a society could be highly “politicized” yet utterly bereft of a “political culture.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/m...

Richard Kreitner's "deeply researched and unsparingly honest" "Fear No Pharaoh," reviewed by @jonfasman.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

Coincidentally I just reviewed a great new book about this very subject: How the fears and fantasies of tech billionaires distract them from the more urgent problems at hand.

Quinn Slobodian’s excellent new book on the socio-economic darwinism of the hard-right helps explain our chainsaw-capitalist moment.

There are a lot of myths about homelessness, and Brian Goldstone's deeply reported new book demolishes a number of them. He shows how how five Atlanta families found themselves in the direst of straits yet statistically invisible: “They literally did not count.”

“A question running through Webster’s book is why such obvious reminders of our shared vulnerability—whether because of Covid or climate change—have yielded so little by way of solidarity.”

Feel like this applies to a whole slew of Intellectual Debates,™️ in which guys kibitz and quarrel among themselves while paying negligible attention to the women who have been writing and thinking interesting things for years.

since she was 8 months old www.jsonline.com/story/news/l...

WaPo's Ron Charles, in his Book Club newsletter, on Meta's repeated questions about his plans to review Sarah Wynn-Williams's "Careless People": "In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me."

Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.

In her new book "Seven Social Movements That Changed America," the historian Linda Gordon includes a chapter on the 1920s KKK, pointing out that even as it collapsed, it had already succeeded in normalizing and intensifying a culture of bigotry. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/b...

can't believe it's 2025 and i'm stressed about tariffs and measles, like am i a character in an american girl book