“The dollar plays a similar role to that of the English language in global commerce”, writes Edward Chancellor in his lead review of three books devoted to American financial supremacy. “Both enjoy network effects: the more they are used, the more others are obliged to use them.”
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour
Letters
Galen Strawson, Rachel Hammersley, Colin McArthur, Jeremy Whiteley, Richard Davenport-Hines, Terry Hanstock, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, George Anderson, Koldo Casla, Martin Rose
Ed Kiely
Short Cuts: University Finances
Susan Pedersen
Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Neal Ascherson
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis by Norman Lewis, introduced and selected by John Hatt
His friend and fellow cop killed himself. Then he nearly became a statistic as well. Why do more police officers die by suicide than in the line of duty? By Jamie ThompsonCreditDanny Wilcox Frazier for The New York Times
The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.
The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel
An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker
Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home
The treatment, which aimed to block production of a mutant protein, reduced the frequency of infant’s seizures, but did not improve neurological impairments.
THE EUROPEAN REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 1, 2025): The latest issue features …Around the world in strawberry red. Schengen’s pseudo-borderless « Europe ». A day in Minsk & an eternity at the border. A trip through Syria’s now-uninhabited terror apparatus (archivists needed). Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, agricultural-novelists in Switzerland & France, tree-huggers in The Hague…
Our first piece from Issue Eight, out from behind the paywall! « It’s best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction. by George Blaustein
Boomers Daily 