Mental Anchors for Information Overload
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs. Penguin Press, 2020. Hardcover, 192 pages, $25. Reviewed by Kevin Holtsberry An old man in an Italian farmhouse muses to his friend: “What brings tranquility? What makes you...
Kierkegaard Is for Lovers
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Hardback, 339 pages, $30. Reviewed by Asher Gelzer-Govatos It is relatively easy, if perhaps a bit crude, to draw a dividing line between two groups of...
Innovation Through Constraint
How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok. Princeton University Press, 2020. Hardback, xv + 185 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Stewart Scott Newstok has written a delightful book about modern education in the guise of a Shakespearean analysis. He succeeds in...
Properly Dangerous Ideas
Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.00 Chris Butynskyi Ideas are dangerous. Most people would agree that a certain level of danger and harm can take root in ideas. Culture, too, is dangerous....
"A more than occasional glutton for punishment, Field dips into and out of conservative conferences, the better to enable herself to assert herself into this story. No doubt those on the left will be mostly pleased by what they read in these pages, while those on the right will
[F]or all their handwringing about the red-state barbarians at the gates, Chemerinsky and Gillman cannot or will not see what their own argument and their own evidence of student, faculty, and administrator behavior show to even a mildly attentive reader: The greatest enemies of