Omnivore
Nuclear weapons complex
From Congressional Research Service, a report on the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Overview of Department of Energy Sites. How Obama made it easier for Trump to launch a nuke — maybe we should talk about this? Meet the nuclear weapons nerds. Cynthia Lazaroff on the dawn of a new Armageddon. The vanishing nuclear taboo? Nina Tannenwald on how disarmament fell apart. Why the arms race is still white hot decades after the Cold War ended — and how to stop it. Can Trump abrogate the INF Treaty without
…
Paper Trail
“In its highest forms, influence . . . derives from courage,” Time magazine editor Edward Felsenthal writes in his announcement of “The Guardians” as 2018’s Person of the Year. “Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization …Syllabi
Outrageous Clarity: The Fictions of Amélie Nothomb
Charlotte ShaneWith Amélie Nothomb’s latest, Strike Your Heart, the Francophone author of twenty-five books seems to have finally found some of the American attention she deserves. (I’m basing this assessment in part …- The Roots of the Alt-right Mike Wendling
- Marriage Reimagined Laura Smith
Daily Review
This Mournable Body
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body follows a single, unemployed young black woman (Tambudzai), as she attempts to escape the entangled forces of neocolonialism, patriarchy, poverty, and history’s ever-present effect on daily life in modern-day Zimbabwe. Tambu, who … 
- We Can Save Us All
by Adam Nemett
Interviews
John Keene
The writer, translator, and poet John Keene has long married a daringly experimental style with a commitment to stories that are usually omitted by history’s ellipses. It’s an approach tangible in his work as a translator, where Keene has long expounded the need for English editions of black diasporic authors.
…- I first heard the name Haruki Murakami as an undergraduate in Madison, Wisconsin, when …
- JOHN MCPHEE WAS BORN in Princeton, New Jersey, attended Princeton High School and …
- “The titles of certain books are like names of cities in which we used to live for a …
- IN HER 2007 MEMOIR, Flying Close to the Sun, radical leftist Cathy Wilkerson describes …
- For the past several decades, the overwhelming majority of Western report-ing about …
- What’s in a name? I ask, though with admittedly far less ardor than Shakespeare’s …
- Heike Geissler, the German novelist and translator, ran out of money in the winter of …
Reviews
Excerpt
The Billy Lee Myth
Tracy Daugherty
The Billy Lee Myth begins with a fact: he was once one of the most engaging young novelists in the country, greeted by some critics as the second coming of F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Brammer’s is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come,” wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker.
…
