Hong Kong Hero

The fate of Lai Chee-ying, "Jimmy" Lai, the Hong Kong business mogul who founded the retailer Giordano, the media company Next Digital, and the newspaper Apple Daily, was sealed 30 years ago. It just took another two decades for the Chinese Communist Party to imprison him. Outraged by the CCP’s massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square, he insulted the brutal Chinese premier Li Peng in a regular column he wrote in his own Next magazine in 1994. As the author and Hong Kong democracy activist Mark Clifford tells it in his fascinating new biography of Lai, The Troublemaker, that column in which he criticized the barbarism, corruption, and decay of the Chinese Communist Party marked the beginning of Lai’s open war with Beijing.

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A Freedom Rider Finds His Cause

When I first cracked open David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life, I had one strong concern: Please don’t make him a saint. Past book-length efforts on Lewis, while indeed valuable, wrestled with a clear hagiographic love for the subject, and the last experience I wanted was to read about a man as real as a cloud puff. I’m happy to report that Greenberg’s Lewis is human, fallible, and approachable.

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Who Gives a Cluck?

I'll get right to the best part: In 1945, Colorado farmer Lloyd Olsen was preparing to sell a chicken when he hit a snag. As Sy Montgomery explains in What the Chicken Knows, Olsen "failed to kill the rooster when his ax missed the bird's carotid artery and left one ear and most of the brain stem intact. … He grew from two and a half pounds to eight, and attained national fame as Mike the Headless Chicken on the sideshow circuit from 1945 to 1947." What Mike did on the circuit, presumably, was run around like a chicken with his head cut off.

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I Won't Drink to That

Did you hear the one about the Russian Jew from Minnesota who walked into a Chicago bar to sell the owner Swedish booze? Sure, it sounds like the set-up of a bad joke, but it's a true story and one entertainingly told by journalist Josh Noel in Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit.

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Mesopotamia Through the Millennia

In the years on either side of General Petraeus’s surge (2008) I spent many a month living in Baghdad covering culture for the Wall Street Journal’s arts section. That meant abiding not in the secure Green Zone but out among the locals—very rare for outsiders—unarmed, unembedded, and frequently exposed to the city’s turbulence in search of stories: the last art gallery in Baghdad, the Iraq Symphony Orchestra, the embattled Ballet School, historical sites, and much else. Amid the booms and zings and present dangers, one got a seeping sense of a primevally fertile landscape haunted by ancient time. History had first emerged here (as opposed to prehistory); golden ages had come and gone, each time affecting the known world, acting as its pivot.

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What They Learned From the Last War

When the First World War broke out, Joseph Stalin was as far from the corridors of power as it was possible to be. Exiled in Siberia, this penniless middle-aged Marxist with a flair for bank heists and political assassinations was a failure and he knew it. Likewise, in Germany, another nondescript and undistinguished misanthrope was scraping a living together as an artist. Adolf Hitler greeted the eruption of war with ecstasy, exploiting the chaos to transfer his allegiance from Austria-Hungary to Germany and marching off to the front. In Italy, an enigmatic socialist editor also used the outbreak of war to switch identities. After initially fulminating against the fighting, Benito Mussolini quickly flipped, emerging as an impassioned cheerleader for Italian intervention. When Italy joined the fray, Mussolini was enlisted and witnessed first-hand the catastrophic conflict that he had helped embroil his country in.

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Delusion, Hypocrisy, and the Threat to Democracy

"Ungoverning" is a term invented by Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political scientists respectively at Dartmouth and Harvard, to describe the project of "deconstructing the administrative state [conducted] by a reactionary movement." This would include elected Republican officials and Supreme Court justices, aimed at depriving government of ability to govern. The individual they hold most responsible for this is Donald Trump, who brought decades of preexisting "hostility toward government to a crescendo."

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Whack-a-Mole

With his third novel, David McCloskey has established himself as one of the leading spy novelists now in the game. After seven years with the CIA, followed by a stint as a consultant at McKinsey, McCloskey has become a full-time writer. His first novel, Damascus Station, appeared in 2021, followed by Moscow X in 2023. Both were very good, though Moscow X suffered from bad timing (Putin’s invasion of Ukraine). The Seventh Floor is his best to date, and, like its predecessors, it features CIA wildcard Artemis Aphrodite Procter, who played a part in McCloskey’s first two books and is on center stage in this one.

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Wilsonian Vices

For most of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson was a progressive icon. America’s 28th president was widely regarded by the left for pioneering reforms he enacted over the course of his tumultuous two terms in office. But recently Wilson’s star has lost its luster. In his new book, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, Christopher Cox explains why.

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Blown Away

Upmarket European novelists make American publishers look classy; the emptier American fiction becomes, the more snobbish it gets. Reactionary content in the form of social description is not a problem, either. Reaction is to European writers as hypocrisy is to Americans. When a European says the unsayable, he allows Americans to discuss the unmentionable. This must explain why Michel Houellebecq (pronounced "Welbeck") is published in English, and why Annihilation, his latest and possibly last novel, is, though frequently dull and afflicted by the incompetences of literary fiction, very much worth reading.

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