What We're Reading This Week

Zaib un Nisa Aziz, Yale University

Thomas Meaney, “Like ordering pizza,” London Review of Books

Thomas Meaney distills the meaning of the war in Afghanistan and the consequences of its bitter end for America and for the world. 

Anand Gopal, “The other Afghan women,” The New Yorker

Visceral and haunting, Gopal’s story sheds light on the harrowing experience of the American occupation for people living in rural Afghanistan; providing an explanation for why the Taliban were able to gain strength and why they faced little resistance. 

Samuel Moyn, “Michael Ratner’s tragedy, and ours,” New York Review of Books. See also, “Executive director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth's comment and the reply by Samuel Moyn.” 

Can the effort of activists and lawyers to limit the access of modern warfare counterintuitively lead to the prolonging and the perpetuating of those wars? Sam Moyn argues that tragically it can, as shown by the life and work of constitutional lawyer Michael Ratner. 

Collin Bernard, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jason Allen-Paisant, Gaia Benzi, Nicolò Crisafi, and Antonio Montefusco, “Dante ai Caraibi,” Jacobin Italia

This round-table discussion explores the “global turn” in the scholarship on the work of Dante Alighieri, 700 years since his death. Specifically, the discussants reflect on the reception of Dante’s work in the Caribbean by Anglophone writers. Themes and issues raised in works like “The Divine Comedy” like that of exile and the relationship between power and language have invited postcolonial readings in the 20th-century of this famed medieval text.   

Nicolas Guilhot, “Bad information,” Boston Review

This article by Guilhot provides an intellectual-history-informed analysis of contemporary discourse around conspiracy and conspiracy theory in politics today. The author reflects on what is and is not new about conspiracy in the present movement and highlights the political implications of certain intellectuals’ understandings of conspiracy.  

Jan-Werner Müller, “Prussian Disneyland,” London Review of Books

In this article, Müller uses the recent completion of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum—a reconstruction of a historic Prussian palace built on the plot of land where the East German Parliament once stood—in order to analyze the politics of memory in Germany. Through enumerating the many controversies, like critiques of imperial era nostalgia and problematic “otherizing” of colonial artifacts, Müller draws larger conclusions about contemporary German politics in the last days of Angela Merkel’s chancellery.   

Heather Ann Thompson, “Honoring Attica after half a century,” The Nation

This article recounts the history of the 1971 Attica State Correctional Facility uprising, fifty years after this most historic prison uprising in the United States. Thompson highlights this history in order to make a larger point about contemporary politics around policing, reminding those concerned about brutality about the violence faced by those in prisons every day.