Books
Briefly Noted
“The God of the Woods,” “Gretel and the Great War,” “They Called It Peace,” and “The Friday Afternoon Club.”
The Original Bluestockings Were Fiercer Than You Imagined
In eighteenth-century England, a cohort of intellectual women braved vicious mockery. But when it came to policing propriety, they could dish it out, too.
By Margaret Talbot
1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing
A new book claims that a few big summer movies heralded an epochal shift in the motion-picture industry, but is that really how cultural history works?
By Anthony Lane
The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories
“Consent,” by Jill Ciment, and “Change,” by Édouard Louis, revisit the past with an eye for distortion and error.
By Parul Sehgal
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
By Jennifer Wilson
Briefly Noted
“The Silence of the Choir,” “In Tongues,” “Woman of Interest,” and “The Museum of Other People.”
How to Start a War Over Taiwan
American efforts to deter Chinese belligerence could easily provoke it.
By Ian Buruma
The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman
A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.
By Casey Cep
How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity
Enlightenment liberalism fragmented the world by neglecting the social nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.
By Adam Gopnik