Medicine’s Descent Into Madness

The Minnesota chapter of White Coats for Black Lives, a medical student group, greeted the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel by saying that Palestinians should "free themselves from their oppressors by any means necessary."

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The Soviet Defector Who Did the Most Damage

During the past 30 years, extraordinary material released from American and Russian archives has enormously expanded our understanding about Soviet espionage directed at the United States and its allies during the 20th century. The Venona decryptions were the product of American decoding of KGB messages. The Vassiliev Notebooks were based on documents the KGB provided to a researcher as part of a negotiated book deal. The only material provided by a genuine spy was the Mitrokhin material, several thousand pages of notes made surreptitiously by a KGB archivist. While British historian Christopher Andrew collaborated with Vasili Mitrokhin to write two books based on his notes, Mitrokhin himself has not received the attention he merits. Venona and Vassiliev exposed a great deal about Soviet espionage from the 1930s and ’40s. Mitrokhin’s information covered more recent operations and did far more damage to Soviet intelligence than any other defector.

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Witness to the Great Unsettling

The poet Marianne Moore is credited with describing what poets do as "the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Perhaps that is why it has taken a poet, Paul Kingsnorth, an Englishman who now lives in Ireland, to craft a compelling portrait not of a toad in an imaginary garden, but of the relentless march of the machine in the human world. In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Kingsnorth offers a fresh take on an old question: How can we know when the technologies we have built to serve us instead end up enslaving us? Or, what happens when the toad destroys the garden?

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A Founding Document Finds Its Principles

Akhil Reed Amar's Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920 covers a period of American history that most of us learned as a series of familiar episodes: the crisis of the 1850s, the Civil War, Reconstruction's rise and fall, the boom of the late 19th century, and the reforms of the Progressive Era. In the standard telling, the Constitution is the province of officials in the federal government—amended in dramatic fashion after the war, interpreted by courts in a mostly linear fashion, grappled over by men with names like Clay and Calhoun until the Progressives came along to say they no longer had any interest in it. (In my family we joke that there were no presidents or Supreme Court decisions between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt—our high-school and college U.S. history curricula pivoted hard to economic history for those three decades.) The business of the American people was business; obsession over constitutional text and foundational promises belonged to a small cadre of elites until it went underground and reappeared at the nation's bicentennial.

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Ted’s Excellent Adventures

It cannot be said that Theodore Roosevelt has suffered from historical neglect. Harvard's collection of Rooseveltiana boasts 14,000 works by or about the man. A casual perusal of Amazon's Top 100 Audiobooks on Presidents and Heads of State turns up no fewer than 10 dealing with TR, more than any of the executive fraternity with whom he shares Mount Rushmore. A celebratory Roosevelt biography by Fox News anchor Bret Baier is currently ensconced on the New York Times bestseller list.

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Rushdie on Death and Dying (While Remaining Alive and Well)

Through no fault of his own, the author Sir Salman Rushdie has become the English-speaking world’s premier purveyor of writing about death. The brutal reason for this is that, on August 12, 2022, Rushdie was stabbed several times in Chautauqua, New York, while preparing to give a talk—about, ironically enough, the United States as a place of safety for writers fleeing their home countries. Rushdie survived, miraculously, but lost an eye and the use of one hand in the process. His attacker, Hadi Matar, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder, and now faces federal charges of terrorism under the auspices of Hezbollah.

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The Price of the Party at Barneys

To become a man in the Jewish tradition, a 13-year-old boy must have a bar mitzvah, a puberty rite in which a rabbi declares a child's adolescent faculties fully developed. And if the bar mitzvah boy lived in New York in the later 20th century, chances are he bought his suit at Barneys.

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Tolstoy's Last Novel

Leo Tolstoy is the greatest writer in the Western world—greater, yes, than Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. In evidence I would submit his two masterpiece novels War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878), and 20 or so magnificent novellas and short stories, among them "The Death of Ivan Ilych," "The Kreutzer Sonata," "Father Sergius," "Hadji Murad," and "Master and Man."

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I’ll Have What He’s Having

If you’ve never heard of Drew Nieporent, it’s okay, even if you’re something of a foodie. Stick with me to the end of this review, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll want to read this delicious memoir from a pioneering figure of the New York restaurant scene. Once you’ve read the book, it’s all but certain you’ll wish you could have dinner with him.

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Cuckin’ in the Free World

The sun rises also. God's taunt: the relentlessness of repetition; the unyielding promise of possibility. So gentle, yet so violent. A brown box lingers on the front steps, aching for evisceration's gift. Begging to unburden itself. A soul ensconced within—laid bare in literary flesh, fixed in ink, and marketed for mass consumption. A cry for help. The sound of an American flag being raped.

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