FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Why We Argue (and How We Should), Vanderbilt University philosophy professors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse set ground rules for the kind of productive, democratic disagreement that they say is fundamental to a civil life.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it,” writes Lorrie Moore in her collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Elaine Weiss’s The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote is a riveting history of the battle to secure voting rights for American women.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In the bestselling Bloodlands, which has been critically acclaimed and widely translated, Timothy Snyder argues that the systematic killings in the Nazi death camps were part of the same arc of violence as the mass starving inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1930s and the extra-legal killings perpetrated by Germans and Russians alike during their occupation of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “I hate writing,” Edmund White told a newspaper last year, but he has nevertheless been turning out celebrated titles since the 1970s, writing novels and nonfiction to wide acclaim and drawing on his life as a gay man for all but a handful of them. White moved from New York to Paris in 1983 and stayed in the City of Light for fifteen years, an experience he details in his latest book, Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan apprentices himself to four culinary experts: a barbeque pit-master, a brazier, a baker, and a fermenter. By mastering their techniques, he writes, we can wrest the kitchen away from Big Food and reclaim both our food chain and our selves.
