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The scholars in Relations of Power argue that a method borrowed from literary criticism can shift our historical understanding of medieval women’s spheres of influence.

Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages

edited by Emma O. Bérat, Rebecca Hardie, and Irina Dumitrescu


An Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance

Gayl Jones’s novel Palmares sees the legendary Brazilian slave haven as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas can lay claim.

Palmares

by Gayl Jones

Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho

by Gayl Jones


A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

by Daniel Oppenheimer

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded

by Dave Hickey

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey


A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change

by Thane Gustafson


I, the People

Was Robespierre proof that violent revolution in the name of rights and social justice could only result in terror and authoritarianism?

Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most

by Marcel Gauchet, translated from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise, with a foreword by David A. Bell and Hugo Drochon


Where Does It Hurt?

Three new books attempt to locate the origin of pain and its vocabulary.

The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain

by Haider Warraich

An Anatomy of Pain: How the Body and the Mind Experience and Endure Physical Suffering

by Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen

Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose

by Leigh Cowart


Alban Berg’s Dissonances

Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern.

Berg

by Bryan Simms and Charlotte Erwin


The Birchers & the Trumpers

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism

by Edward H. Miller


Improving Paradise

For Milton, innocence was interesting—a significant innovation on his biblical source material.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

by Katie Kadue

Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England

by Timothy M. Harrison

Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton

by Nicholas McDowell

Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton

by Joe Moshenska


A Camera Light as a Pen

A film series and two recent books expand the canon of the French New Wave.

Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave

a film series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 4–June 5, 2022; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 6–June 19, 2022

The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema

by Douglas Morrey

French New Wave: A Revolution in Design

by Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh, and Christopher Frayling


In Search of Recognition

The philosopher Axel Honneth argues that the act of recognizing one another forms the scaffolding of our personal and social world.

Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas

by Axel Honneth, translated from the German by Joseph Ganahl


Dire Straits

Toxic Debt, Josiah Rector’s history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water, argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

by Josiah Rector


Meet the Parents

In Claudia Durastanti’s autofictional novel about growing up with deaf parents, she is more at ease with her family’s unknowability than her own.

Strangers I Know

by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris


The Rich Get Richer

The law professor Marc Steinberg lays out a series of reasonable proposals for reforming securities law, but Congress is unlikely to act.

Rethinking Securities Law

by Marc I. Steinberg


A ‘Puritan Jihadi’

Oliver Cromwell’s cruelty and fervent, born-again religiosity were extreme, even by the standards of the age.

The Making of Oliver Cromwell

by Ronald Hutton


Health Care Under Fire

The fight to protect medical and humanitarian workers is not new, but we are running out of time before it becomes futile.

Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War

by Leonard Rubenstein

Necessary Risks: Professional Humanitarianism and Violence Against Aid Workers

by Abby Stoddard


Endowed by Slavery

The history of university coffers suggests a centuries-long conversion of blood money into benefactions.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

by Craig Steven Wilder

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies

edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy

The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson

by Lolita Buckner Inniss

Thomas Jefferson’s Education

by Alan Taylor

Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices

edited by John Torpey


Issue Details

On the cover: Maureen Meyer: Untitled [black], 2018.

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