IN OUT OF PLACE: A Memoir (1999), Edward Said recalls that after graduating from Princeton in June 1957, he was torn by “differing impulses”: he could pursue a fellowship from Harvard for graduate study or return to Cairo to work at his father’s stationery company. Eventually, Said deferred Harvard for a year and returned to “sample the Cairo life.” Said claimed that he had no interest in his father’s business, and in the memoir, he recalls how he spent his afternoons in his father’s office: “I would either read—I remember I spent a week reading all through Auden, another leafing through the P ..read more

WRITING A BOOK on Taiwan meant for a general audience is a deceptively difficult task. According to the logic—or illogic—of contemporary geopolitics, Taiwan is a subject of both great and troubling interest. It seems to contain within it the potential for war or peace, making it taboo to discuss squarely, for fear that doing so might trigger global conflict. To write a book that aims to introduce Taiwan to as broad an audience as possible is thus to declare that Taiwan should not be off-limits. It can be analyzed using many of the same empirical tools that are brought to bear on other places i ..read more

This is the introductory essay to Legacies of Eugenics, a series of essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Berkeley Public Health. ¤ WHEN ROBERT G. EDWARDS won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) decades earlier in 1978, many members of the scientific community sighed ..read more

LOSS, A LOVE STORY: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters (2024) is a combination of thematic memoir and literary essay that Sophie Ratcliffe sets rolling on the tracks of various train journeys across time, place, and reading. Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2019 as The Lost Properties of Love: An Exhibition of Myself, the book organizes, according to a train’s timetable, Ratcliffe’s preoccupations with (among many subjects) loss, affairs, handbags, messiness, and domestic boredom. Amid the pages of a work divided into headings like “Ferriby to Brough” and “Finchley Central to ..read more

THE PATRICIANS OF ROME lived the good life in 494 BCE. They had slaves and plebeians to do the hard work and forced debtors into bondage. They made up only about five percent of the population but held most of the wealth and power—until the plebeians retreated to a nearby hill, Mons Sacer, and let daily life in Rome grind to a halt. The strikers negotiated for the establishment of plebeian-led tribunes, which acted as a counterweight to elite power in the Republic. This “Secession of the Plebs” was followed by more such strikes over the next two centuries, some of the earliest recorded. By the ..read more

BILLY WOODBERRY’S BLESS Their Little Hearts (1984), written and filmed by Charles Burnett of Killer of Sheep (1978), follows a Black family living in Los Angeles. The husband, Charlie (Nate Hardman), has been unemployed for 10 years, and during that time, his wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore), has been carrying the couple and their three children. In one scene, Charlie works as a day laborer, scything down a hilly tangle of weeds. Once he’s finished, he climbs aboard the rickety pickup truck of the man who hired him and they drive down South Central Avenue, rolling past block after block of rubble ..read more

IN HER ESSAY “Inventing the Crisis: The Anti-Trans Panic and the Crusade Against Teachers,” Kay Gabriel writes that when conservative coalitions complain about teachers promoting queer and trans identification (by, say, respecting students’ gender expression without consulting their parents), theirs is fundamentally a campaign against public education. She argues that, in being “explicitly opposed to teachers’ power to set learning conditions for young people and to control their own working conditions,” conservatives are “sadistically mobilizing the anti-trans panic to isolate, destabilize, a ..read more

BY THE TIME 8 Mile opened in theaters in the fall of 2002, Eminem was the biggest rapper on the planet. But he had already begun to mutate into the sort of pop star he so gleefully skewered on his first two albums, The Slim Shady LP (1999) and The Marshall Mathers LP (2000). The uncomfortable transformation had started early: on MMLP’s “The Way I Am,” Eminem is incensed with his label, Interscope, who he feels had him “pigeonholed into some poppy sensation / To cop me rotations at rock and roll stations.” Then, just as he started to “mature” (or at least to examine his own celebrity the way he ..read more

To the memory of Paul Cantor IS ARISTOCRACY the natural condition of mankind? Mark Twain, who loved democracy as much as any major American writer, feared that it was. Twain concluded that humans are eternally in love with badges and ranks and desire their own subjection. In his autobiography, he observed: “Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our nature: we are all alike,” he went on, “and in our blood and bone, and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are ..read more

THE GREGORIAN CHANT “Media vita in morte sumus” (“In the midst of life, we are in death”) is a poignant reminder to the faithful that, despite God’s displeasure with our sins, he is the believers’ only source of succor, the only one able to “deliver us not unto bitter death.” Argentinian author Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst—published in March 2024 in Heather Cleary’s translation, following its original publication in Spanish as La Sed in 2020—presents a similar view of the postlapsarian world. It portrays a cemetery, for example, as “a field sown with corpses,” noting that “the whole world is, thou ..read more