The Uncertain Power of Blackness

A new book reveals how Du Bois wrestled with many of the questions that trouble Americans today: the difficulty of discussing the connective bonds of race without reifying it, the challenge of rooting the concept of blackness in the history of slavery, and the struggle against racial injustice without reducing it to a narrative of sorrow and suffering.

Dilemmas of Healing

A new book on medicine's front-line workers takes readers deep into an intense, dangerous world still largely dominated by women. It is also a world where their professional concerns are left unaddressed.

The Lady is a Champ

At the time of that 2012 election, Claire McCaskill and her campaign were circumspect about the motive behind taking out ads during the Republican primary accusing Akin of being too conservative for Missouri, but she lays it all out in her very readable, and revealing, political memoir.

How the Homeless Listen to Music

Until I could find an apartment, I rode the No. 6 bus up and down Highway 99 most of the night, from downtown to Aurora Village, listening to muffled, skewed robotic drum beats of fellow travelers from behind the earphones of turned-up Walkmans, looking out into the dark. No, scratch that, looking at myself in the reflection of myself on bus windows in the dark.

Blog: Newsome Speaks

Brittany “Bree” Newsome gets down to Earth after scaling South Carolina's Capitol-grounds flag pole.

The Common Reader’s Presidents’ Day Review: “No Quiet on the Southern Front”

Beyond the photo, there is little known about Private Lewis Martin, also known as "Louis Martin," but Heyworth seems to have found what little there is, and that little is actually of some importance.

The Big Delve

Documentary filmmaker Peter Yost—who has covered topics from North Korea to the increasing relevance of drones to solitary confinement—talks about balancing curiosity with an eye for care.

A Law Supreme

The Roberts Court elevates the “how conservative?” question to a heightened pitch. The conservatism meme, though, presents a problem for serious analysts like Tribe and Coyle. The court is not supposed to be a political actor. We expect the justices to provide reasoned grounds for their decisions. That expectation is not wrong—judicial reasoning is a real thing—but neither is it simple.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

To say a work of thorough research “reads like a novel” can be a dubious accolade. But it is true, and true only in good ways, of A Spy Among Friends. It does read like a novel—or, perhaps more appropriately, like a thriller.

Hue, Eye and Tongue

Few linguists share comparable command of the plethora of languages that are vividly and routinely on display throughout Deutscher's text. The work is bold, ambitious, and strives to combine insights from history, classical studies, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, biology, and physiology, to address the recurring intellectually perplexing conundrum regarding ways that language may shape thought. In the final analysis, however, this book is an argument in favor of multidisciplinary approaches to analyses that strive to examine the inevitably complex relationship between language and cognition.

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