By Paul Hockenos

When the sixteen-year-old pieced together a resistance cell in April 2022 to harass the Russian forces occupying his hometown in southeastern Ukraine, he scrupulously concealed his intentions—not least from his parents.

Two months earlier, Russian forces had barreled into the country, launching a sweeping invasion from Belarus in the north, Russia in the east, and Crimea in the south. Fighter bombers and attack helicopters, naval warships and submarines, and over 3,000 tanks and 140,000 ground troops battered Ukraine’s cities. Within days, they had captured a long swath of territory in the southeast that comprised about 12 percent of the country’s land. That included his Dniprorudne, a Soviet creation from the 1960s that sits on the left bank of the Dnipro River.

To protect his safety, the young man, who I’ll call Ihor Kuznetsov, has asked me to use a pseudonym. Over four interviews earlier this year—in a café, a restaurant, and my Kyiv apartment—he spoke Russian throughout, even as he described turning against the country that shares his first language. Unlike his mother and father, Ihor, slightly built and wiry with short-cropped hair and a gap-toothed smile, pitted himself against the occupation from the start. He detested the Russians, he says, his tone turning bitter—and so, by the time Dniprorudne fell in March, did most everyone in the city, even though half its population, including his own family, spoke Russian at home. Too young to enlist in the Ukrainian army, the teenager had been excluded from the city’s civil resistance, too. But when “orcs,” the Tolkien-derived slang the Ukrainians use for Russian soldiers, trundled into Dniprorudne in an armored convoy, he vowed to fight them in his own way.

Ihor’s partisan subterfuge, arrest, and flight from occupied Ukraine amount to more than another story of Russian brutality countered by determined civilians. His life is also a case study in just how profoundly twelve years of conflict have turned the country inside out, remaking the demographics of vast territories and fracturing families. Ukraine’s ultimate form will only emerge when the guns go silent—on whatever terms—and elections follow. The Kuznetsovs’ story, though, reveals contours of the new country that are already becoming visible.

In February 2022, Dniprorudne was spared the brunt of the initial assault. A city of just eighteen thousand, it lies some forty miles south of Zaporizhzhia, the industrial metropolis Russia targeted with particular fury in the war’s first days. Dniprorudne’s perch along the Dnipro is even further from the east-west main highway that connects the Azov Sea port cities of Melitopol and Kherson. Still, from their cubicle apartment in a Soviet-issue housing block, Ihor’s family could hear the rumble of artillery and explosions, and they anxiously followed events on newscasts and Telegram, Ukrainians’ preferred source for real-time news and instant air-raid alerts. Dniprorudne lacked defense forces of its own; members of the police force, armed only with light weaponry, either scrambled to Zaporizhzhia to enlist in the territorial defense there or hung back in the city, shedding their uniforms to blend in should the Russians break through.

Yet Dniprorudne’s relative calm in the war’s earliest days belies its significance. The iron ore clawed from its deep mines is among the finest in the world, so pure it requires minimal processing to fabricate steel. During the Cold War, Soviet planners built an entire city around that promise, erecting prefab apartment blocks, a rail spur, a hospital, schools, a house of culture, sports facilities, a museum devoted to the mining heritage, and, of course, the mines themselves. Dniprorudne’s iron was so lucrative that Ukraine exported the lion’s share rather than process the lode at Zaporizhzhia’s steel works. The city was an asset that Russia would gladly possess.

Unlike almost everyone else in Dniprorudne, the Kuznetsov family—bone-poor, even by Ukrainian standards—had next to nothing to do with the mines. In the 1990s, Ihor’s parents had moved to Dniprorudne from Zaporizhzhia, where his father, a trained mechanic, worked as a truck driver until ill health forced him out. Two stints in prison for theft and the rigor of military service had taken their toll, and he had been unemployed for years. His mother’s salary as an untrained elder care provider was so meager that Ihor had worked odd jobs since he was fourteen to put food on the table. The family never took vacations; they hadn’t even traveled to the Azov Sea, seventy-five miles to the south. But like any family, they had their fun when they could: in a weathered snapshot Ihor showed me, a three-year-old Ihor rides atop his swimsuited father’s shoulders, the two clowning around on a spit of Dnipro beach.

The elder Kuznetsovs, born in the late 1970s under Soviet rule, looked back with warmth. They remembered—or thought they remembered—a time when everyone had a job; childhoods involved summer holidays organized through their parents’ trade unions. Their own families hadn’t greeted Ukraine’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991 with much sympathy, and had hoped Ukraine and Russia might join in a federation. As in many former Soviet republics, the cultural world of the Kuznetsovs was Russian pop music and Russian-language television, some produced by Ukrainians and others broadcast from Russia. Ukrainian remained a second language, though they spoke it well enough. Still, they understood themselves as Russian-speaking Ukrainians, as did most people in the southeast—including, notably, Rymma and Oleksandr Zelensky, whose son, Volodymyr, now serves as Ukraine’s wartime president.

Ukraine’s native Russian speakers may not have cheered the new order as enthusiastically as their counterparts in the country’s west, but in a 1991 referendum a majority everywhere in the country backed independence. Ever more confidently, Ukraine staked out convictions distinctly anathema to Russia’s, casting Ukrainians as an independent, determined people who belonged firmly within Europe. Over time, the Ukrainian polity grew on many Russophones, despite its chronic graft and oligarchic structures. The state, mindful of Ukraine’s heterogeneity, adopted a broad-minded national narrative. The 1996 constitution defines Ukraine as a civic state whose citizens are equal regardless of ethnicity, language, or religion. This presented Russophone Ukrainians and ethnic Russians (a legal minority within Ukraine) with an open door to national belonging without abandoning their native tongue or roots. This offer, Ukraine scholars Olga Onuch and Henry Hale argue, pulled Russian speakers toward a blended identity centered on the republic, democracy, and civic obligation.

Read the whole essay on BR’s website.

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By Johanna Winant

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced. Some beneficiaries were identifiable: upper administrators were paid much better than those at comparable institutions when just about everyone else was paid worse. It was easy to compare the university to its state’s mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.

All of this is true, but it’s not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation—democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together.

This task was very simple as well as very hard. In every course, at every level, every semester—in every single class, multiple times every week—I taught close reading.

On the first day of each new class, I tell my students about the philosopher Donald Davidson’s idea of radical interpretation. To make sense of a foreign language, or indeed any language, Davidson argues, a listener must begin with a stance of good faith by assuming that the person they’re listening to has rational beliefs and is making meaning. This must happen before the listener can begin to interpret what that meaning is and whether she agrees with it. I tell my students this because I want them to read difficult and strange poetry this way too: with the foundational and constant assumption of good faith.

Dan Sinykin and I have written about how students have to care about a literary text in order to notice a detail in it, that the text needs to feel meaningful as a whole for the part to become significant. But teaching at WVU taught me that writing an argument requires good faith as well, though in a different way. My students needed to have good faith when they approach a text’s language, as Davidson describes. But they also needed to assume that they themselves had rational beliefs and could make meaning—that they are capable, that they can do it. I said that I was never tired of reading my students’ close readings if I could see them trying, and of course, some of them didn’t, for any number of reasons. But I could see that for many of them, the anxious desire to say something correct loosened, and they instead took the chance try to say something strong and even useful. In other words, they also have to care about themselves, enough to believe in their own significance.

The years I taught at West Virginia were scarred by despair, but I never despaired about my students, who, when our conditions allowed it, showed me again and again how close reading requires and multiplies both trust and strength. In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way. This is truly and always radical, in a way not too distant from what Davidson meant. This decision had to come before any evidence to support it, because that crucial step of noticing requires the close reader to point to evidence and identify it as evidence, to make it into evidence, to grant themselves the authority to do so. And this is work to do together, and only together.

→ Read the whole essay by Johanna Winant on BR’s website.

Plus, other back-to-school reading:

The New Politics of Higher Education

Marshall Steinbaum

The right’s fantasy of left power on campus has never been accurate.

Elitism Can’t Be Democratized

Richard Thompson Ford

Admissions scandals are a symptom that what passes for egalitarian struggle now amounts to desperate individual attempts to ascend a steepening social hierarchy.

The Real Scandal of Campus Protest

Madeleine Baker

It’s not that there has been too much of it. It’s that there has not been much, much more.

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By Zeynep Pamuk, with responses from:

Natalie B. Aviles • • • Jeremy Berg • Robert Cook-Deegan & Arthur Daemmrich • Heather Douglas • Alondra Nelson & Jenny Reardon • C. Brandon Ogbunu • James Owen Weatherall

The second Trump administration has presided over the greatest attack on scientific research since the end of World War II. It has frozen or terminated $2.3 billion in unspent funds at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and $700 million at the National Science Foundation (NSF) across thousands of grants. It has targeted research on cancer, vaccines, environmental protection, climate change, and public health as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It has overseen thousands of layoffs from key scientific agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And it proposed unprecedented budget cuts to both the NIH and NSF, promising to slash them by nearly half or more.

Though Congress rejected the cuts when it passed the 2026 federal budget, these moves have created a climate of such fear and confusion that three-quarters of scientists report they have considered leaving the United States. According to Science, the U.S. government has lost over ten thousand STEM PhDs since Trump took office. Faced with growing uncertainty, universities have paused hiring and curtailed PhD admissions in STEM fields. And the campaign to overhaul science policy hasn’t stopped. In May, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed sweeping changes to the federal grantmaking process, including mandatory pre-issuance review of all grants by political appointees; in late July, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, released a report calling for investment in AI-driven research, tighter integration with the private sector, a deprioritization of “legacy institutions,” and new funding mechanisms besides peer review.

As jarring as these developments are, many have deeper roots than Trump and his controversial appointees: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya at NIH. Every year between 2009 and 2014, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma released a lengthy report arguing that a significant percentage of taxpayer money for science went to “fraud, waste, and abuse.” All the while, conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute have run reports and editorials on “How to Stop Wasting Money on Science,” “The Case Against Public Science,” and “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.” With guidance from Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration is finally carrying out many changes that Republican policymakers, think tanks, and scholars have been advocating for decades.

To understand how we got here, we have to understand the unusual structure that has governed the allocation of U.S. public funding for the better part of a century. The prevailing system, established after World War II, combined the largest amount of public funding for basic research in the world—around $45 billion annually in recent years, or about 5 percent of federal, non-defense discretionary spending—with a high degree of autonomy to scientists in the distribution of funds. While the private sector has been the largest source of overall U.S. research and development spending since the early 1980s, the government remains the largest source of funding for basic research. And few areas of public funding, apart from central banking and certain areas of national security, have combined so much money with such high delegation to nongovernmental experts. While Congress controls total scientific budgets and agency structures, individual funding decisions—through agencies like the NSF—are effectively made by program officers who rely heavily on peer review by independent scientists, based mostly at research universities. Since 1997, the NSF process has evaluated proposals on the basis of “broader impacts” as well as intrinsic scientific merit, but it remains highly insulated from public input and deliberation.

This structure worked to the extent that the public accepted the idea that scientists pursuing their own curiosity brings about the greatest public benefit. But as American politics has become increasingly polarized—often around scientific issues, including climate change and vaccines—that conviction is less certain than ever. There is now a 25-point gap in Democrats’ and Republicans’ trust in scientists, and only 51 percent of Republicans say that science has had a mostly positive role in society, down from 70 percent before the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s not to say that all of Trump’s actions on science are popular, much less the result of a democratic mandate. A large majority of Americans continue to believe that government investment in science is worthwhile for society over time, and many of the administration’s attacks contravene areas of rare bipartisan agreement. To defend American science and chart a new vision for its future, we should build on the public’s enduring support for public funding while addressing real democratic deficits. The truth is, there never was a convincing democratic justification for the postwar scientific compact. But by learning from more democratic paths not taken, we can build a system that more fully serves the public.

→ Read the whole forum on BR’s website.

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On Monday Boston Review hosted a panel of three organizers and journalists—Robinson Meyer, Nicholas Rabb, and Astra Taylor—to discuss the growing movement against AI data centers, the political implications ahead of the 2026 elections, and whether community resistance can lead to enduring coalition-building on a national scale. The conversation was moderated by BR contributing editor Lily Hu.

Listen to the conversation on YouTube or via The BR Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The following transcript has not been fully edited and may contain errors.

About the Panelists

is the founding executive editor of Heatmap News and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.

is an organizer with No Data Center Monterey Park and a postdoctoral researcher with the Eco-STEM Project at California State University, Los Angeles.

is a writer, activist, and documentarian. Her many books include Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, The Age of Insecurity, and, most recently, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, coauthored with Naomi Klein.

Lily Hu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale and a contributing editor at Boston Review. Her writing has also appeared in Phenomenal World, the Berlin Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Lily Hu: We are, as everybody now knows very well, at the dawn of an AI revolution, or at least if things go according to plan. The new push to a transformation of society by artificial intelligence depends as ever on real material goods and infrastructure and global supply chains, which themselves depend as ever on politics, geopolitics, and, as we’re increasingly finding here in the United States, local politics. In particular, the AI revolution depends crucially on the buildout of behemoth hyperscale data centers, which are millions of square feet large and take up the amount of electricity of entire cities. And this massive buildout of data centers is increasingly what Americans are wary of. According to a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans would somewhat or strongly oppose a data center being built in their area. And many of these Americans are showing up to the streets, to town halls, and to the ballot box to register their dissent.

By now, in the United States, more than three hundred cities, towns, and counties have already placed bans or moratoriums on the construction of hyperscale data centers. Last month, we saw New York state enacting the first statewide moratorium on new data centers, and some dozen other states, red, blue, and purple, are considering similar bans. This groundswell of local organizing is now growing to a national scale. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in The New Yorker with reference to Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, AI is now a major election issue, and data centers, to use the headline of a Wired article from last week, are breaking American politics. So, what are the big political lessons or non-lessons that we can take from this explosion of grassroots organizing across the country?

I want to start us off with arguably the most notable and perhaps surprising feature of the opposition against data centers that we’re seeing sweep our nation, which is, of course, how ideologically diverse this movement is. This is a surprising level of unity in a country that is marked by partisan division. So, who is in this big tent? What about the construction of new data centers has sent people of seemingly every walk of life to organize and to disrupt at least seventy-five data center projects, worth approximately $130 billion and counting, in the first quarter of 2026 alone? What are people saying motivates them? Maybe we can start with you, Robinson, though I want to hear from all the panelists on this question.

Robinson Meyer: Heatmap, where I work, is a climate and decarbonization and energy news site. When we started in 2023, we did not realize how much time we would be spending on data centers, but since then, of course, data centers have become the biggest story in American energy, the biggest story in American infrastructure, and, as I think has been testified to by what you just said, the biggest physical infrastructure buildout, people say, in American history (it gets hard because nominal dollars are hard to compare, but let’s certainly say within living memory).

We run polls, we monitor the local regulatory environment. We started out doing this just to follow the renewable buildout, and then so many of the lessons and so much of what was happening around renewables kind of ported over to data centers—which I think we’ll talk about later in this panel—that we started following the buildout and the response to data centers as well. What I would note, just to build on exactly what you asked, is just how widespread the rebellion to data centers is, or the backlash to data centers, let’s say, and how fast it has happened. You mentioned this Gallup poll that found 70 percent of Americans would strongly or somewhat oppose a data center being built in their area. That matches our polling too, but I think what makes our polling maybe a little different is we have polled this question several times over the past year. And as recently as September 2025 or August 2025, when we started polling the question—we said, basically, “Would you support or oppose a data center in your area?”—we found Americans were very split on this question. About 43 percent said they would support, 42 percent said they would oppose, and 15 percent weren’t sure. Seven months later in May 2026, when we asked this question again, we found numbers basically identical to the Gallup polling: 71 percent said they would oppose and 21 percent said they would support. That’s a nearly 50 percent shift in American opinion on this.

What’s remarkable, to now finally answer your question, is how widespread this is. Basically, if you can think of a demographic of Americans, they seem to be opposed to data centers. It’s self-identified MAGA Republicans. It’s Democratic progressives. I would say it hews, in the broad terms, toward more liberal demographics. College-educated women are probably among the most opposed to data centers. But it is a remarkably broad-based phenomenon. What’s interesting is, this goes down the board. We also asked Americans in the same polling, “Are you optimistic about AI? How are you feeling about AI? Do you think it’s going to improve your life? Do you think it’s going to improve society?” What we found is that the only demographic of Americans that really believes that AI will both improve their lives and improve society are men who are sixty-five years old and older, which I would say is probably the cohort that owns more stocks than anyone else, and their income is dependent on the future stock market. So, what we found is just that this is a very broad-based phenomenon. I think this has been challenged by some recent elections, which we can talk about. But broadly, if you ask people, “Do you want a data center in your backyard?” people tend to say no.

Astra Taylor: I think Robinson got it. It’s a Bannon to Bernie coalition, which on the one hand is surprising, but there are other populist things that get this kind of support in polls. It’s just rare to see such an active movement on the ground, and so I think that’s part of it. Also, just that it became such an electoral force, seemingly overnight.

Hu: I want to now ask you, Nicholas, about some of that local organizing on the ground. You’ve been directly involved with local data center organizing through a noted data center, Monterey Park—and I have to say here, I have a 626 area code, so 626 shout out—and I want to talk about scale. I want to talk about your experience on the ground. How do you think it has compared to other local organizing happening around the country? With so much opposition unfolding at the community and even neighborhood levels, how are you thinking about the implications of anti–data center organizing for national politics? Are different local groups coordinating? Is there any national infrastructure for capturing this activist energy and channeling it to broader goals?

Nicholas Rabb: Monterey Park is a small-ish city outside of Los Angeles in California. It’s a majority Asian American community. A developer came in a couple years ago and started talking with the city council to try to build a 50 megawatt—which can be classified as hyperscale—data center right in the heart of the community, right next to a bunch of residential homes. We found out about the project this past November, just coincidentally, because someone was at a local council meeting and noticed that it was on the agenda. No one was informed about this, but we found out, started to mobilize, reached out to local community groups, and built this campaign against the data center, and we had an enormous success. I mean, we banned the data center via three municipal ordinances declaring the data center a public nuisance and that none can be built in the city. We held a ballot measure within Monterey Park, a sort of special election in June, that won with over 80 percent of residents voting against the data center project. So this was a massive success. We’re the first city in the United States to have banned data centers in a whole city via both ordinance and ballot measure, so we’re pretty proud of that.

Read the rest of the transcript of the event on BR’s website.

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Mark Bould in conversation with China Miéville

And then, after Railsea (2012), it was like he was gone. There were still traces: a collection, a couple of novellas, a nonfiction book that presented as fiction and another that didn’t. And in Salvage, the Marxist journal “for a communism of the ruins” he cofounded, an occasional essay and lots—lots—of photos. But no novels. The thing we first learned to love him for. And then, vexation for some, for others delight: the unheralded collaboration with Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere (2024).

Now, finally, The Rouse: 360,000 words, twenty years in the making (cut down, thank god curse god, from a penultimate 520,000-word draft). It is a book of the dead and the superpositioned living. A lament configuration that grieves and is aghast. It is monumental and exhaustive yet concise, even at times curt. It is legion and sooner or later you just want it to stop but you never want it to end: you want it never to end. Hiatus done. China Miéville, one of the twenty-first century’s pre-eminent fantasy authors, is back.

With an arcane and secret history of late-twentieth-century Britain, told through two braided stories. The first 99 pages are all about a woman named Maur Towns; the second 1141 cut back and forth between Maur and Steven Allardyce, a soldier, in shortish chapters in different fonts on different-colored pages with different ways of presenting dialogue. (You might not always know quite when you are, but you always know exactly where you are.) It is painstakingly realistic yet haunted by presences somewhere between gods and mollusks. And it is delirium inducing. All I can do is give a flavor of its multitudes.

But how do you turn ekphrastic effusion into an actual sodding review? Text the author. Who responded with alarming alacrity, clarifying everything and solving nothing. So I present his answers as an interview, the second strand in a desperate pas de deux gambit to hit the deadline by imitating the novel’s double helix.

Mark Bould: We first spoke about what you called your “haunted house novel,” sometime after Iron Council (2004) and before Un Lun Dun (2007). You’d written maybe twenty to thirty thousand words, but it just didn’t happen at that point. How many of those words, how many of those original ideas, remain? How much changed? Why did it take so long?

China Miéville: They are there, in a sedimented layer somewhere. Overgrown but discernible, some of them; others possibly as a fossil trace. The book accreted: it didn’t get burnt to the ground and started again from a scorched zero; it kept building up in layers, was repeatedly winnowed but never stripped bare, so every layer contains those that went before it.

That’s to speak of the words. In terms of the “original idea,” the one-sentence elevator pitch is more or less unchanged. As time went on that kernel gathered about it more (and more)—and of course x wrapped in twenty years of matter is no longer the same x, even if you could strip it of those husks. At the same time, it is also sort of the same. Maybe that’s the dialectic of continuity and change. It remains exactly the book we spoke of, and utterly different.

It’s hard to express why it took so very, very long without slipping toward a kind of register I tend to avoid (something about the book’s own drives)—not out of scorn, but because it makes me feel uneasy for reasons I can’t parse. But here’s as close as I’m able to get: all books end up to varying extents evading—exceeding—the bounds you’ve conceived of for them. (If they didn’t, I suspect they’d be pretty lackluster.) For personal, political, cultural reasons I can reasonably infer but of which I don’t pretend to be wholly certain, this particular book did so more, and more dramatically, than any other book I’ve ever tried to write. It started to be “about” more than I originally intended it to be until, some years in, it reached the point when it was “about” everything. And I was thinking of it, obsessively and always. Of course you can’t write a book “about” everything, or I can’t. So I had to try to distill it down. Re-aggregate. Distill, repeat. Until, two decades on, for reasons beyond my conscious control, I, it, was, almost unbelievably to me, done.

Read the whole conversation on BR’s website.

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By Daniel Wortel-London

Reviewed:

Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century
Dwight Macdonald
Selected & introduced by John Summers, with a foreword by Andrew J. Bacevich
University of Chicago Press, 2026

We judge our enemies by their actions and our allies by their intentions. The moral lapses of our enemies: hypocrisies. The moral lapses of our allies: errors. Their compromises: stupid, probably evil. Our compromises: hard but necessary.

The temptation to evade self-scrutiny—to avoid thinking, I was wrong—seems to me universal. Still, it can be more or less reinforced by ideology and circumstance. An overtreated case is the Marxian left, which before World War II did not feel a pressing need to reconcile gaps between intentions and actions, partly due to the Hegelian assumption that history would take care of itself—that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers, helped along, perhaps, by a vanguard here and there. This conviction was destroyed by 1950: three decades of atrocities, committed as often for as against “progressive” causes, were now established facts, while capitalism seemed more entrenched than ever. Historical processes and good intentions, it seemed, weren’t sufficient for delivering desirable change: only voluntary actions could. And yet the possibilities for human action seemed more limited than ever by the rise of corporate leviathans in league with a centralized state, by the atomization of the public into a puerile mass, and by the near-complete neutering of political alternatives during the Cold War.

To navigate this benighted era, a generation of moralistes—Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, among others—desperately sought new political frameworks that might close the gap between intentions and actions. Disillusioned with both idealism and realpolitik, skeptical of state socialism but refusing the comforts of reaction, they were, to borrow Edmund Wilson’s borrowing of a phrase from Flaubert, “triple thinkers”: intellectuals willing to rethink prior convictions without defecting to the right, as was common enough in what was even then called a “postliberal” era.

Of this generation, nobody triple thought quite like Dwight Macdonald. Between 1940 and 1970, “flighty Dwighty,” as his one-time comrade James P. Cannon called him, adopted in turn the guise of a revolutionary Trotskyist, a pacifist anarchist, a fervent Cold Warrior, and a rambunctious supporter of the New Left. Such inconstancy, together with his ornery dismissal of mass culture and his inability to complete a book-length monograph—“You have nothing to say,” Gore Vidal once said to him, “only to add”—has threatened to reduce him to a mere curio of the postwar scene.

A new collection of his writing, Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century, should put that impression to bed. Selected by the historian John Summers, the twenty-five pieces assembled here, ranging from short letters to long-form essays, reveal Macdonald’s raw power as a journalist, moralist, and political analyst. Few other American writers have written as bracingly of the self-deluding barbarity that is American foreign policy. Few have been as clear-eyed about the greed and stupidity driving this barbarism. Whether writing about World War II or Vietnam, the Holocaust or the delusions of Zionism, mass culture or poverty, this goateed goy held the United States to account in a manner that still inspires.

And yet, in making the case for Macdonald’s significance—Summers titles his introduction “The Last of the Free Individuals”—this volume sometimes misjudges his relevance. For all their power, Macdonald’s insights into political responsibility under totalitarian conditions were largely extensions of the more general anarchist traditions that he preserved amid the state-idolatry of the postwar left and right—and which have continued to find expression in some of the most mobilizing social movements of the twenty-first-century American left, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. It is Macdonald’s method, more than any plank of his shifting political vision, that should command our attention now. In reading his essays, one encounters a mind dauntlessly searching for grounds for political hope while simultaneously holding that hope to the highest critical standards.

Read the whole essay by on BR’s website.

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By Lorna Finlayson

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—both inheritor and critic of the Frankfurt School, best known for his theories of discourse ethics, communicative action, and deliberative democracy—died in March at the age of ninety-six. One of his last public political acts, five weeks after the beginning of Israel’s war of annihilation against the people of Gaza following the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was to publish a statement, entitled “Principles of Solidarity,” with three colleagues at Normative Orders, a research network based at Goethe University in Frankfurt. The statement sought to identify “some principles that should not be disputed” amid the “cascade of moral and political statements and protests” following “Hamas’ extreme atrocity and Israel’s response to it.”

The solidarity in question, the authors made crystal clear, was not with the victims of what is now widely acknowledged to be a genocide but rather with “Israel and Jews in Germany.” Israel’s retaliation was “justified in principle,” they wrote—although it ought to be conducted in accordance with the “guiding principles” of “proportionality” and the “prevention of civilian casualties.” The authors did not hazard a judgment as to whether these conditions were being observed in Israel’s offensive, which at the time had already killed over eleven thousand people, but they did assert, without argument, that “the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.”

In this statement, as in so much writing about Israel’s aggressions, the world appears upside-down. It is simply not true, as the authors asserted, that Hamas’s attack was carried out “with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general.” Rather, the declared genocidal intentions belong to Israel’s political and military leaders, who were explicit from the beginning: among other examples, by calling for Gaza to be “erased from the face of the earth,” stating that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” welcoming disease epidemics that would “bring victory closer,” and advocating that a nuclear bomb be dropped on the twenty-five-mile-long strip of land.

But I am not concerned here to argue that Habermas and his coauthors were wrong. If you look at Israel’s destruction of Gaza and do not see it for what it is, no argument I could make is likely to change that. Nor is my intention to write Habermas’s obituary, to try to sum up his legacy or reduce it to a particular moment. My aim is different: to insist that this moment—one that many obituarists have been keen either to forget or else to cast as an unfortunate minor detail—matters. In particular, it matters why, and how, Habermas and others have been able to refuse, so totally and triumphantly, to see reality—and worse, attempt to paint those who did see it as purveyors of hate.

These questions are not only about Habermas; they would be less interesting and less important if they were. Rather, they reflect a tendency in the development and present state of critical theory—a tradition whose defining aspirations have been an orientation toward emancipation and solidarity with the oppressed, a self-reflective, historically sensitive attitude regarding the role of the theorist within configurations of power, and a special focus on self-inoculation and vigilance against the recurrence of authoritarianism and fascism, not only in politics but also in culture. How can it be that many who work in this tradition can be so blind when it comes to Israel—a country with leaders who intone against the “children of darkness,” and whose own children sing in social media videos of their country’s mission to “annihilate everyone” in Gaza? A country, in short, that embodies, with ever-decreasing subtlety, all the things critical theory professes to stand against?

Read the rest of the column by Lorna Finlayson on BR’s website.

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By Yarimar Bonilla

In San Juan, people are once again bathing with buckets. Water outages have reshaped daily life, forcing residents to improvise plans for once-basic tasks: finding public oases, filling water drums, hauling heavy containers up flights of stairs to flush toilets, or coordinating with relatives in neighboring towns to shower and do laundry. Restaurants have reduced their menus. Bars without working restrooms direct customers to portable toilets, and some businesses pay private companies thousands of dollars a week to refill their cisterns. Others simply hang signs on their doors: closed due to lack of water. Tourists post TikToks about the discomforts of vacationing in a city without running water, while emptied-out hotels mull temporary closures.

What began a year ago as a seemingly isolated set of infrastructural failures has metastasized into a prolonged crisis. Last July, a major pipeline connecting San Juan to the Carraízo reservoir ruptured, leaving much of the metropolitan area without water and prompting Governor Jenniffer González-Colón to declare a state of emergency. Though she initially blamed the damage on private contractors, the investigation she commissioned found failures within the state-run Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, including its inability to identify the underground pipeline’s location for contractors and wider deficiencies in infrastructure, management, and operations. The report called for extensive reforms: more money toward maintenance and system monitoring, the filling of critical technical vacancies, and stricter oversight of contractors and emergency repairs.

Evidently satisfied that the recommendations constituted sufficient progress, González-Colón quickly declared the crisis overcome. Meanwhile, the outages continued. This June, more than 112,000 customers across nine municipalities lost access to running water entirely. The Aqueduct and Sewer Authority had detected a drop in the volume of water reaching the distribution system, suggesting that water was being lost somewhere along the transmission line. But it was only after Bayamón’s concerned mayor deployed drones over the North Coast Superaqueduct, which supplies much of the metro area, that the culprit—a rupture in the massive, six-foot-wide pipe—was discovered. As crews began repairs, two more breaks were found, followed by another in a connected line, and then another. Although repairs to those pipes were completed in June, service has remained uneven. Outages and rationing are still ongoing, and a comprehensive evaluation of the system is expected to take at least six to nine months.

Many residents have responded with the practiced humor of a people forced time and again to find levity in the face of hardship. In one popular comedy sketch, characters representing the water and electric utilities compete over which agency generates the most outages, rate increases, and public frustration, with the water authority gloating that it has finally surpassed the long-reviled electric company. My aunt joked that driving an hour after work to shower and fill containers at her son’s house gives her a wonderful pretext to see her grandson. My mom told me the outages are a nice excuse to linger at the mall and treat herself to food court fare to avoid doing the dishes. But for other families, the costs of eating out, buying paper plates, hauling clothes to the laundromat, and being unable to flush toilets or clean their homes are hard to joke about.

González-Colón eventually activated the National Guard to aid with water distribution, but the burden of caring for constituents has fallen mostly to beleaguered municipalities. After the water authority failed to provide a restoration timetable or an adequate alternative-supply plan, San Juan’s mayor sued the agency to recover more than half a million dollars the city had spent distributing water itself. Mounting public outcry and the threat of more lawsuits prompted tense local Senate hearings on the authority’s failures, with community members gathered outside to protest the government’s handling of the crisis and lawmakers inside calling for the agency head’s resignation. Both groups seemed to be consoling themselves with the idea that the disaster could be traced to a single act of bureaucratic failure: one neglected repair, one unreplaced part, one official who failed to do their job. Yet Puerto Rico’s latest crisis is not merely one of shoddy infrastructural maintenance. It is borne of a governing model, reinforced by a decade of federally imposed fiscal oversight, that manages scarcity for residents while creating abundance for creditors, consultants, political loyalists, and investors. When public services are treated as liabilities to be reluctantly contained rather than obligations to be fulfilled, disaster becomes routine.

Read the whole essay on BR’s website.

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Yesterday the inventive, genre-bending writer John Crowley died. An acclaimed author of fantasy and science fiction and teacher of creative writing at Yale, Crowley published more than a dozen novels, several essay collections, and multiple film scripts—as well as more than twenty essays with Boston Review since his first, on Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo, in 2004.

Ursula K. Le Guin called Crowley’s 1981 novel Little, Big “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” Harold Bloom named it a “neglected masterpiece.” Thomas M. Disch wrote that it was “the best fantasy novel, ever. Period.” Yet critics often kept a strange distance from Crowley’s work. In an essay we published in 2000, fellow novelist James Hynes lamented the “the curious logic of our commercially driven literary culture,” wherein “the most mediocre graduate of an academic writing workshop automatically receives the official imprimatur of ‘literary writer’ along with his or her MFA, while John Crowley’s lushly written and vastly more intellectually satisfying books are shelved, if they are in print at all, with nth-generation cyberpunks, vampire novelists, and Tolkien wannabees.”

But Little, Big is an “Important American Novel,” Hynes insists, “that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.”

A good novel must be note-perfect to succeed, but a great one can sprawl—must sprawl—if it is to encompass all the unseemly and unrestrained passion of its own ambition. The craftsmanlike novel is read the way an onion is peeled, one layer at a time, until you have nothing left; but with a John Crowley novel—well, the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Granted, half a million words on hippies and alchemists probably seems pretty big to begin with, but where Crowley’s work does show its genre roots—what he does share with the best of modern fantasists and fabulists (Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, John Cowper Powys), apart from sheer determination in the face of critical and sometimes commercial neglect, simply to persevere—is a sense of spaciousness, of depth, of the boundlessness of his imagination. What he also shares with these writers is the ability to give the reader the feeling that at any point in these novels you could make a sharp left turn from the narrative and just keep going—there’s that much world and story and mystery out there that he’s simply not bothering to show you.

Read Hynes’s whole essay, “Genre Trouble,” here, and browse Crowley’s work for BR here.

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The following Editors’ Note introduces our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe by Monday to get it straight from the printer, and use code SUMMER2026 for 20% off. Check out the full table of contents here and below.

Funding cut, grants frozen, graduate admissions stalled, scientists leaving the country: as Zeynep Pamuk writes in this issue, the United States is witnessing “the greatest attack on scientific research since the end of World War II.” But the catastrophe has been gathering force for decades, propelled by arguments that public funding for research is hard to justify at best, inefficient and wasteful at worst.

Fiercely defending science as a public good, Pamuk excavates the debates that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950. She shows how the era’s flawed justification for state funding made our model vulnerable to attack. While it appealed to the common good, it assumed the best way to achieve public benefit was to give scientists a high degree of autonomy in deciding what to fund. Moreover, since the 1980s, many new technologies built off of basic research have been patented by private companies, only to be sold back to the public whose funding made them possible. In this context, she notes, “it is hardly surprising that taxpayers failed to see the benefits of the research they were supporting.”

Where do we go from here? As Pamuk sees it, restoring the old model is a dead end. When we can begin to rebuild science, we will need a different approach: one that recognizes the special good that science serves in modern democratic societies, grasps its essentially political character, and makes funding decisions more accountable to the public. Taking inspiration from a largely forgotten alternative vision for the NSF, Pamuk calls for stronger congressional oversight, public ownership of patents, and citizens’ assemblies to advise on research agendas. Not everyone will agree with her proposals; a range of scientists and scholars debate them in a forum on our website.

The natural and health sciences aren’t the only areas in trouble. Michael Harris describes an equally grave threat to his own field: AI’s incursion into mathematics. Among the drafters of the Leiden Declaration—a statement signed by many of the world’s leading mathematicians—Harris condemns the use of math for “warfare, oppression, mass surveillance, or the undermining of democracy.” But beyond that, growing reliance on black-box corporate tools is destroying the heart of mathematical culture: the effort to understand. Understanding is an essential human need, and the “gift economy” it relies on can’t be privatized.

That theme—the human importance of the effort to understand—runs through much of this issue. Our new columnist, Lorna Finlayson, examines why some leading practitioners of critical theory, with its defining commitment to solidarity with the oppressed, have failed to “see reality” in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Elsewhere, Olúfémi O. Táíwò and Omer Bartov confront uncomfortable truths about our understandings—and uses—of the past. Getting it right is important, Bartov says, because his students “have a right to hope.” Of course, journalism itself, especially in the face of eroding freedoms, is essentially a pursuit of understanding. Paul Hockenos offers a deeply reported story from Russian-occupied Ukraine, documenting the intrusion of violence into one family’s life and the choices of a sixteen-year-old faced with a brutal new reality.

In our Books and Ideas section, Daniel Wortel-London reviews a new collection of essays by Dwight Macdonald, the postwar journalist perhaps best known for his 1945 essay “The Responsibility of Peoples.” In fact, Wortel-London argues, Macdonald should be best remembered for his lifelong habit of fearlessly puncturing delusions: the left’s, the right’s, the foreign policy establishment’s—and his own. “Our freedom to be generously self-critical, after all, remains one of the few freedoms still left to us today,” Wortel-London writes. “And if we fail to use this gift, there is no one else responsible but ourselves.”

—The Editors

Contents

Columns

Truth Without Reconciliation
Lessons from Brazil.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Normativity from the Standpoint of Its Victims
Critical theory after Habermas.
Lorna Finlayson

Dispatches

In the Lobby of Hope and Change
The Obama Center casts a long shadow.

Carrying Water
Puerto Rico’s compounding crises.
Yarimar Bonilla

Science Under Fire

How to Save Science
After the end of the “endless frontier.”
Zeynep Pamuk

Knowledge Collapse
AI companies come for mathematics.

Features

Things Fall Apart
A family’s unraveling in occupied Ukraine.
Paul Hockenos

The Stranglehold of Memory
Israel’s moral abyss.
Omer Bartov interviewed by Arnon Grunberg

Why Climate Politics Can’t Wait
The case against “climate hushing.”

Object Lessons
Realignment in the Persian Gulf.
Aslı Ü. Bâli

Books and Ideas

Think Again
Dwight Macdonald’s gift of self-critique.

• Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century
  by Dwight Macdonald, selected and introduced by John Summers. Chicago, 2026.

Junk Analysis
A report jeopardizes scholarly self-governance.
Richard Moran

• “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” chaired by Paul Boghossian. 2026.

Revenance Event
China Miéville returns to fiction.
Mark Bould

• The Rouse
  by China Miéville. Del Ray, 2026.

We Don’t Live in a Gerontocracy
Samuel Moyn’s generational warfare.
James G. Chappel

• Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It
  by Samuel Moyn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026.

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Executive editor Matt Lord introduces a new special feature with contributions from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Avery Dame-Griff, Joanna Walsh, Chad Wellmon, and :

For as long as it’s been around, we haven’t been sure how to feel about it. The utopians had their favored metaphors: cyberspace; a global village; the electronic frontier, digital commons, or new public sphere. If American literature, as Emerson said, is “in the optative mood,” the same has been true—maybe truer—of so much thinking about the internet.

But it didn’t take long for disillusionment to set in. A few years after British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, critics began to sound the alarm on the “Californian Ideology”: the insidious creep of corporate greed in the guise of bohemianism. Since then, the story of the web’s decline has paralleled that of Silicon Valley and the “new economy” of neoliberal globalization it stood for. Social media, once a vehicle of “participatory culture” and “networked protest,” has been enshittified. Big Tech has gone red (in the GOP, not communist, sense). Attention merchants lock us into doomscrolling while platform capitalism, the backbone of today’s national security state, extracts, surveils, and kills. Despite valiant efforts by activists and reformers, it’s been the dystopians’ world—or at least the realists’—for some time now: an age of techno-feudalism, digital colonialism, the new Jim Code.

With the rise of AI, however, some new mood seems discernible, at least around the edges: the elegiac. A lot of the web is being swept away. In May, Google overhauled its iconic search box for the first time since 2001, signaling its all-in on the “intelligence age.” As chatbots hallucinate and hide their sources, search results become harder to browse, and digital life becomes ever more atomized, online access to information looks more imperiled than ever. Wikipedia has managed to survive—a miraculous exception that proves the rule—but it’s staring down new threats. Boston Review has been online since 1995, but our search engine traffic is falling, like everyone else’s. If work is published on the net and no one can navigate to it, does it leave a trace?

In other words, is this the end of the web itself? And if so, is some kind of eulogy in order?

“Just as I’d hoped, [the web] has enabled a flourishing of human creativity and self-expression,” Berners-Lee writes in his recent memoir, This Is for Everyone. But “to ensure the web agents serve people—not corporate profits, not governments, not themselves, but people—it’s critical that we develop systems today that put the human first.” We asked five humans who’ve been paying attention what to make of this moment. Read on for their reflections: about how the web used to work and what it used to feel like, the strange and sorry thing it’s become, and the good that’s worth remembering when so much of what we love is dying, or already long gone.

Read the whole feature on BR’s website.

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This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy.

An anecdote at the end of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) neatly condenses the felt contradictions of Barack Obama’s legacy. In early 2016, as Black Lives Matter was growing rapidly, Ayọ Tometi, one of the movement’s founders, relayed the group’s decision to refuse a meeting with Obama. Without the “space to have a real heart-to-heart,” she said, a meeting would be “a disservice to the movement.” Obama responded by scolding BLM’s leaders, insisting the goal of activism is “to get you at the table” and “prepare an agenda that is achievable.” In an interview with Coates, he expressed a more personal frustration: “You feel like saying to these folks, ‘Don’t you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants?’”

The tension between a presidency bound simultaneously by the half-imposed, half-embraced strictures of neoliberalism—an “achievable” agenda, given the limits of office—and the mantle of representation not only of the left, but specifically a Black left, is one that I carried with me as I visited the Barack Obama Presidential Center a week before its official opening in June. By now the photographs have made the rounds: an imposing obelisk, windowless, washed stone gray, eight stories and nearly 250 feet tall, towers over Hyde Park and Woodlawn in Chicago’s South Side. It’s not all that different from what many feel about Obama himself: gravity defying, singular, seemingly impossible, yet also a real, apparently indomitable force in American liberalism. The building reflects both power and isolation, anchoring the historically underdeveloped and redlined neighborhoods it looms over while clearly standing apart from them. One can see it as a testament to “defying history,” as Coates puts it, in all the ambivalence of that phrase.

The building’s architects explained the obelisk was meant to represent “cupped hands,” while an architecture critic notes the blunt tower of stone epitomizes University of Chicago brutalism. As I approached the Center with advance tickets a friend received by virtue of being in Obama’s graduating class at Occidental, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had been walking by the construction site for years as a resident of Chicago’s Hyde Park; it didn’t seem possible that I could stroll over and just walk inside. Tometi’s remark about proximity to power suddenly seemed a portentous warning.

Read the whole essay by on BR’s website.

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This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy.

On January 5, 2025, then president Joe Biden addressed reporters and reaffirmed his commitment to a peaceful transfer of power amid the wait for election results, nearly four years to the day after the infamous attempted coup of January 6. “I think what [Trump] did was a genuine threat to democracy,” Biden said, “and I’m hopeful that we’re beyond it.” We were not. Days later, in his inaugural address, Trump made false claims of election fraud, just as he had done in 2020.

The United States is several years into a disastrous surge in right-wing authoritarianism. Just days ago, ICE murdered a father in front of his three-year-old daughter in Maine and left his posthumously handcuffed body in the street for five hours. The latest mass deportation surge only adds another layer to the structural reality of constant, unaccountable police violence: according to Campaign Zero, there were only six calendar days in the entirety of 2025 in which law enforcement did not kill someone.

One looks abroad with equal parts curiosity and envy at other countries that have managed to fend off their own right-wing insurgencies, including South Korea, where the former president narrowly escaped a death sentence for his role in instigating an attempted coup thwarted only by a brave mass protest, and Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s recent electoral defeat cemented a setback for the international right-wing coalition that had rallied to his defense. These are worth learning from for a host of reasons, perhaps chief among which is that a network of actors are working in concert across these different national boundaries to support right-wing governments by fomenting xenophobic panic and violence. But among the examples from abroad that thinkers here should pay attention to, one stands out in particular: Brazil.

There are plenty of parallels between our situation and that of our neighbors to the south. Former President Jair Bolsonaro’s antipathy toward communists, open effort to amass personal wealth, and tendency to flaunt norms of “political correctness” in public speech helped earn him a description as “the Trump of the tropics.” More jarringly, the January 8, 2023, riots that stormed Brazil’s Supreme Court and Congress in a failed attempt to incite a military coup took place almost exactly two years after the January 6 attempt to prevent the transition of power in the White House. But what ought to inspire attention to the Brazilian case are not the similarities to events here but the differences. Most centrally, Bolsonaro has begun a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for his role in January 8, while the instigator of January 6 sits in the Oval Office.

Why did Brazil’s democratic institutions hold firm while those in the United States so quickly wilted? One explanation hinges on particular institutional actors. Perhaps Merrick Garland, the former U.S. attorney general, singularly altered the course of history by slow-walking the prosecution against Trump and other conspirators. Another takes a wider angle, alleging that President Biden and the wider Democratic Party’s reluctance to go on offense against the Republicans opened the door for Trump’s later return. On this view, the public memory of January 6 ought to have served not merely as proof of the antidemocratic aims of the right but as a point of orientation for both a legal and a propaganda battle around the legitimacy of the Republican Party and its standard-bearers. What must change, then, is not the discrete decisions of this or that institutional actor but the entire orientation of a political party from “folders” to “fighters.”

In a new book, Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil, political scientists Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako test out this view in the Brazilian context. Bolsonaro’s conviction, they argue, owes much to the decades-long contest over how—or whether—to remember Brazil’s violent military dictatorship. As the authors point out, public memory not only bolstered the country’s “long return to democracy”; it also powered Bolsonaro’s attempt to halt it. In the United States, too, fights over narratives of the past—the right way, for example, to remember slavery and the genocide of indigenous people—have been waged by both the left and right. Should we in the United States try a Brazilian strategy?

→ Read the whole essay by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on BR’s website.

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This Bastille Day, we’re revisiting a review essay by Edwin Frank from our Summer 1995 issue—on ways of writing about revolution, what Simon Schama got wrong in his bicentennial bestseller Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), and why “the recent book that best captures the character and import of the Revolution for our time is instead a novel, plain and simple: Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety”:

After twenty years in which revolution has been dismissed as the enthusiasm of under-stimulated professors, over-excitable students, and the odd follower of Bob Avakian, the Republicans have succeeded in making it popular again.

The extraordinary coincidence in 1989 of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the 200th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille seemed to provide irrefutable symbolic evidence that the age of revolution was, at last, over. Radical revolutions had come to nothing, and even the reformist project of social democracy, which had presented itself as the constructive alternative to revolutionary destruction, suddenly appeared historically irrelevant.

At the time, such political reflections found support in scholarly debate on the French Revolution. A new generation of historians—most prominently François Furet—undercut the claim to universality that was the basis for the mythic appeal not only of the French Revolution but of revolution itself. Their work exposed the fundamentally local character of the Revolution’s animosities and did not mince words about its atrocities. The Revolution was not, as Marxist historians had claimed, the transformation of the feudal state by a newly ascendant bourgeoisie, but a bloody distortion of modernizing and liberalizing tendencies that were already at work in the ancien regime forces that, failing the Revolution, might very well have run their course far more effectively. The only world-historical significance the Revolution retained was to anticipate the later barbarisms committed in its name. Otherwise, it was just another detail in the “register of crimes, follies and misfortunes” that Gibbon famously declared history to be. In short, a mistake.

The book that most successfully caught the spirit of that moment in the late eighties, when revolutionary aspiration had come to seem a distraction from the business of everyday life, was Simon Schama’s Citizens. Published to take advantage of the anniversary, Schama’s book was not an original piece of historical research, but a grand and engaging synthesis of revisionist scholarship, distinguished by what can only be called aesthetic distaste before the whole phenomenon of revolution. For Schama, the French Revolution was worse than wrongheaded; it was de trop: its Rousseauian sentimentality and paranoia, the self-consciously histrionic history-making of its major and minor actors, and its rhetorical—leave aside real—overkill made it too deplorably melodramatic for words.

And yet, only six years later, we have a revolution breaking out in the unlikely cause of freeing us from the tyranny of welfare queens. Grotesque as it undoubtedly is, this reactionary appropriation of revolutionary rhetoric helps to reopen the question of the historical significance of revolution. Superficially, it bears out Schama’s sense of the perversity, illiberalism, and vulgarity of the revolutionary spirit. But the bad faith of the Republicans should not disguise either the rootedness of the resentments they have exploited or the failure of the liberal state, so painfully apparent under the avowedly reformist Clinton administration, to establish itself as anything more than an apologist for high finance. And in this light, Schama’s inquest on the French Revolution looks like an exercise in wishful thinking: far from taking the measure of revolutionary reasons and passions, he could be said to have simply averted his face from them. Is there a way to reconceive the history of revolution that will neither exempt it from its failures nor reduce it to them, but will do justice to the power it continues to exercise over our political and moral understandings? The question has come to seem urgent again.

The French Revolution—any revolution—is not just a sum of events, but an event in the imagination. One of the appealing things about Citizens was that Schama saw as much—as he remarked, “It is not in the least fortuitous that the creation of the modern political world coincided precisely with the birth of the modern novel”—and so tried to bring a novelistic breadth of conception and intensity of focus to his treatment of the Revolution. Schama’s commendable ambition on this score was compromised, however, by his even greater determination to prove that the Revolution was nothing more than an outbreak of mass hysteria.

The recent book that best captures the character and import of the Revolution for our time is instead a novel, plain and simple. Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety appeared in 1992 to high acclaim in the author’s native Great Britain, where she is recognized as one of the best younger novelists at work today. In America, however, the book has been unduly neglected. Mantel’s huge, vividly intelligent book is, as she says in her introduction she hoped it would be, “a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can live and think inside.” In it, far more than in Schama’s history, the French Revolution and its claims on our attention and expectation come back to life, as real and unresolved and critical as ever.

→ Read the whole essay by Edwin Frank on BR’s website.

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Climate politics are in a very weird place right now.

On the one hand, current events would seem to be fertile ground—perhaps more fertile than ever—for generating popular support for climate action. Renewables are now the most competitive form of electricity generation, meaning a climate agenda can have relatively short-term material benefits for voters. The Iran war has demonstrated the inherent superiority of clean energy over fossil fuels—sunlight does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and nobody ever went to war over wind. The harmful effects of climate change are also becoming noticeable for millions of Americans who are regularly experiencing summer-ruining heat waves, record-breaking droughts, historically destructive storms, and dystopian wildfires, to say nothing of the financial impacts of this extreme weather, from skyrocketing insurance rates to collapsing property values. And the current administration, which is staffed top-to-bottom with climate deniers and oil and gas executives, is making the corruption and clownishness of the United States’s fossil fuel addiction explicit for all to see. How else to describe “Coalie,” the anthropomorphized mascot of Trump’s “American Energy Dominance Agenda”?

On the other hand, we are seeing a massive deprioritization of climate across multiple sectors. Businesses have been ditching their previously professed climate pledges and going silent on the issue. Bill Gates has started arguing that “climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries,” amplifying a false dichotomy between efforts to decarbonize the economy and efforts to improve human welfare. Politico recently announced it is folding E&E News, its standalone climate and energy outlet; NPR just shut down its climate desk, and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post laid off its climate team earlier this year. Meanwhile, a host of think tanks and pundits—mostly corporatist outfits like WelcomePAC, the Searchlight Institute, and the Breakthrough Institute—have been aggressively arguing that Democrats should stop talking about climate change and abandon climate action as a policy priority. And many prominent Democrats are doing just that. New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s successful push to water down her state’s signature climate law has gotten the most attention, but similar efforts have been pursued by California’s Gavin Newsom, Rhode Island’s Dan McKee, and other politicians at both the state and federal levels.

This “climate hushing,” as it has been derisively but accurately labeled, deserves serious examination. Three main arguments have been made.

First, corporate-aligned think tanks—joined by some voices on the socialist left, like Matt Huber—argue that climate is an electoral anchor that hurts Democrats’ chances of regaining Congress and the White House, variously claiming that climate policy is not popular enough, or that it’s popular but not deeply felt enough, or that it’s simply too polarizing to benefit Democrats at the ballot box. As Huber recently wrote in the New York Times, “The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular. The way out is to stop elevating a litany of single-issue policies that appeal to the already converted. When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”

Second, and closely related, it has been argued that Democratic advocacy on climate has pushed working people away from the party and that rebuilding a working-class base requires essentially dropping or deprioritizing the fight for climate action.

Third, in a quite different vein, some climate advocates themselves have argued that at a time of authoritarian takeover, we need to prioritize fighting fascism over a focus on climate. This is not so much an argument for “hushing” as a brief for reorienting the climate movement. As the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, Aru Shiney-Ajay, wrote in March, the organization “is pivoting to end authoritarianism and win a democracy capable of addressing the climate crisis. We’re still a climate movement, but this moment requires the acknowledgment that climate action is impossible under authoritarianism.”

None of these cases for hushing or pivoting away from climate action really holds up.

Read the whole essay by on BR’s website.

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What to the world is this Fourth of July?

Don’t miss our recent roundtable on America at 250 with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, David Waldstreicher, and Nikhil Pal Singh—plus these readings from Martha Nussbaum on patriotism, Robin D. G. Kelley on “the most controversial film ever made in the United States,” and more:

Forum: Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

Martha C. Nussbaum, with responses from Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, Immanuel Wallerstein, and more

Our primary allegiance should be to the community of human beings across the entire world.

The Changing Same of U.S. History

David Waldstreicher

Saying that good history has to reveal change or progress in the nation is just as risky as saying the past has no relation to the present.

The People and the Patriots

Alfred F. Young

The Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance. But defiance of whom, by whom, and to what end?

Births of a Nation

Robin D. G. Kelley

What “the most controversial film ever made in the United States”—D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—reveals about the arc of U.S. history and the rise of Trump.

What White Supremacists Know

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The origin of the United States in settler colonialism matters to the pursuit of justice.

Founding Fathers, Founding Villains

Can we successfully argue our politics only from impeccable readings of constitutional and founding history?

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please subscribe to the magazine or make a tax-deductible donation.

On Monday, Boston Review and Dissent convened a panel of three distinguished scholars of history and politics—Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher—to discuss their recent essays occasioned by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

• Adom Getachew, “New Declarations” in Dissent

• Aziz Rana, “The American Revolution in Global Retreat” in Dissent

• David Waldstreicher, “The Spirit of ’76” in Boston Review

The conversation was moderated by historian Nikhil Pal Singh, who published a related essay in The Guardian.

Listen to the conversation on YouTube or via The BR Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The transcript below has not been fully edited and may contain errors.

About the Panelists

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Interim Chair of Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and a contributing editor at Boston Review.

Aziz Rana is Professor of Law and Government at Boston College and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is author of The Two Faces of American Freedom and The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.

David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification and, most recently, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. He is author of Race and America’s Long War and Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.

Nikhil Pal Singh: Thank you to Boston Review and Dissent for organizing this amazing panel of scholars. It’s great to see all of you colleagues and friends, and I’m looking forward to our conversation.

When we talk about the American Revolution, we’re often being confronted with this question of, what kind of inheritance is it? And I think these moments always ask us to think about its relationship to the present. Just to give you an idea of what I have in mind, when Obama was elected in 2008, he spoke of the dream of our founders being alive in our time. Obama was very good at sort of knitting together these kinds of emancipatory milestones in American history, whether it was the New Deal, or women’s suffrage, or the civil rights victories of the 1960s, up to and including, say, marriage equality—which, although Obama was ambivalent about at first, passed during his first term. If we think of these all as moments in the expansion of democratic possibility in the United States, up to and including his own election, it’s not that long ago that this sort of redemptive story held.

But after more than a decade in which a figure like Donald Trump has dominated American politics, I’m wondering whether any of you would really want to defend that kind of progressive emancipatory story in the current moment. I think that’s an open question for us today. Certainly there’s been influential scholarship, a lot of public-facing discussion in recent years, including something like, say, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which has been inclined to read contemporary injustice and inequality in light of the deep American past. So rather than the idea that the founding is some kind of affirmative, usable past that we can hold on to, it is something that enchains us and continuously drags us backward.

Sitting here on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, reflecting on what we might think of as the disappointments or unfulfilled promises of the Obama presidency, the fallout of something like the 1619 Project, and then the rise now of the bombastic pro-American Trumpian defenses of 1776 and the great American State Fair—including, of course, attacks that are happening now on unpatriotic U.S. history taught in our universities—can you all take a minute to situate your own approach to the American founding, the revolutionary narrative, and how you situate that approach in relationship to these alternative currents, emphasizing the disavowal of that inheritance or the affirmation of that inheritance? Of course, I know you all fall in sort of a nuanced place in between those poles, but I’d like to get you to start by reflecting on that. Aziz, why don’t you start us off?

Aziz Rana: Sure. So first, thanks so much to all the organizers of this event at both Boston Review and Dissent, and thank you so much, Nikhil, for moderating and those really challenging and helpful reflections to begin.

My own view about the revolutionary heritage is that the best way to think about that moment in the late eighteenth century is as a particular settler revolt, and a revolt both against the English crown, but also, really importantly, against the kinds of threats posed by various other communities on the North American landmass, in particular Native peoples, French Canadians, and enslaved persons. And this means that the revolution is best understood as really having elements that are worthy of profound disavowal, but also worthy of affirmation. I’d argue that the colonists had a really rich internal account of republican freedom that emphasized political participation and economic independence, but that required conquest, land expropriation, and it also required workers to engage in coerced forms of labor that were inconsistent with internal ideas of free labor and independence. That mix wasn’t something that was an uneasy compromise, but was pretty profoundly ideologically linked, and that, in a way, meant that the long story of the American project isn’t about fulfilling inherent liberal values or traditions, but about whether or not it’s possible for later generations, including those that benefited precisely from this project of settlement and conquest, to actually extricate their values of emancipation from precisely the structural conditions that gave them life: expansion and enslavement. That’s an ongoing and continuous struggle that has marked the American experience and that is grounded in persistent structural features that have never quite had a proper accounting.

I should also say that there’s a second element of my work that focuses on the Constitution. I have, let’s say, a less equivocal relationship with the constitutional tradition than with the revolutionary one. I’d say that the Constitution in the twentieth century is oftentimes combined with the Revolution, when these really should be understood as different historical events. In a profound sense, the establishment of the Constitution and what the institutions of governance have meant over time is really a constraint on what would be an effective way of organizing a multiracial democracy in the twentieth century, and one of the real problems of Founders worship isn’t really even about 1776, it’s about investing the institutions of governance that we see today with a kind of mythos and presentation that it’s near ideal or perfect, in a way that makes it very difficult in the present to both appreciate the extent to which the achievements of American democracy are the product primarily of the twentieth century, and of, let’s say, the Civil War and Reconstruction. To the extent that folks continue to be invested in a story of Founders worship around the text of the Constitution, it’s very difficult right now to appreciate the extent to which it’s precisely those institutional arrangements that have facilitated the rise of an incredibly aggressive form of right-wing authoritarianism.

Adom Getachew: I can follow Aziz. I’ve learned a lot from all of your work, and I’m very happy to be on this panel. I also want to thank Boston Review and Dissent for organizing this and encourage everyone watching to subscribe to the magazines, read them, they’re excellent places where ideas are debated.

I think I would just say, a lot of my work has focused, of course, on anticolonial thinkers from Africa, from the Caribbean, who looked to that revolutionary tradition and saw the kind of inspiration that Aziz describes. And we’ll talk more about this, but I think what I find very compelling about folks like Eric Williams and their approach to the United States and the American experiment in self-government is that it does two things. One, it provincializes the United States. Whereas the story about America internally is one of exceptionalism, they saw it as the first case of a postcolonial experiment in self-government. That’s what they thought could be useful and instructive for their own purposes. It was one of many different cases, rather than a singular or exceptional instance. So that’s one.

The second thing I think that’s part of the narrative, Nikhil, that you laid out would be something like, there’s the pure perfect ideals, and then there’s sometimes these practices that are not in accord with those ideals. That’s this narrative, and then somehow this is a self-correcting project and process. That’s Obama’s vision of the United States. But I think what you see in the cases of Third World actors who look to the United States is: one, they think the ideals themselves have to be transformed and radicalized, expanded. So that something like self-rule includes a really robust sense of economic self-government in addition to political self-government; the ideals themselves are being reinvented and transformed, expanded, radicalized. And the second is that the discrepancy between ideals and practices, say, between emancipatory ideals and imperial practices. . . . being habituated to that gap generates regressive possibilities. It actually corrodes and undermines the ideals over time. So you can’t simply disaggregate them as if they’re on different sides, and over time living with that gap leads to the erosion and corrosion of the ideals themselves. Part of why the ideals themselves have to be reinvented is that they never remained untouched by imperial practices. Figures of the Black freedom struggle in the United States are exemplary of this kind of critique, and a model for this process of reinvention, and I think Third World actors and statesmen also had this vision that at the international level: the ideals needed to be reinvented.

David Waldstreicher: I’d echo everyone’s thanks, and I also want to point out how wonderfully Nikhil’s essay in The Guardian takes up some of these themes, including the centrality of expansion, as well as emancipation, and the interrelatedness of those factors in how the revolutionary tradition has played out and been usable but also insufficient in various ways.

Nikhil asked us to describe our approaches to the revolutionary narrative and how we situate it in relation to current disavowals and affirmations, and the way he asked the question made me realize, as a historian who focuses on the revolution and the post-revolutionary era and political culture, how much I’ve experienced the recent waves of unthinking avowal and critical disavowal as just more extreme versions of what’s always been there cyclically and always at the same time since 1776.

I’d especially point out how contentless the contemporary Trumpian version of the embrace of the flag and of 1776 is. It’s all spectacle, no references to anything actual about the past. You don’t even get the capital F founders, and that post-Bicentennial of the Constitution upraising of the founders as wise men that was so much a part of what Aziz describes as that worship of the Constitution. That was not always there, and it took a century to construct, as Aziz describes in his book. Obama quite deliberately, as a law professor, was reaching for the center when he said Founders. It’s really interesting to me that he emphasized the Founders and how much that was a reach across the aisle to emphasize the Founders and their vision, as opposed to the ordinary people that made the Revolution happen in the streets. There’s no mention of the Committees of Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, any number of things you could do to emphasize just how active and participatory the Revolution was.

On the other hand, in the 1619 Project, you get a different version of revolutionary consensus that presumes that because the revolution didn’t abolish slavery, that there was no debate, there was no conflict, there was no ambivalence, there was no course change that led to the future conflicts that actually did lead to the Civil War and ended slavery. It’s not so much that some of the founders were antislavery as it is a mirror image that is useful to construct the current politics around an idea that has a past—that rather than having to get back to it or embrace it, we have to realize how much we have to reject it or how continuous it is, how powerful the continuity is that we have to reject.

So where I come out on these things tends to emphasize the modernity of late eighteenth-century politics, the aspects that are both inspiring and disturbing in it. From the very beginning, what the Revolution was about, what it meant, was fought over and domesticated, and many aspects silenced and forgotten, but also continually conflictual. It’s not a matter of whether it was always hypocrisy or it was always pristine. People back then were both saying it was pristine, and that various aspects were hypocritical. I think it’s more constructive to think in terms of cyclical waves of domestication and repoliticization of the revolutionary legacy that are useful and that are pushed from various ends of the political spectrum with different emphases that may be domestic, maybe international, maybe local, maybe more or less nationalistic, maybe more or less economic, more or less about individual rights, about any number of things that are not just plausibly connected to the American Revolution, but which people then said the Revolution was about, and people continue to say that.

Especially given how much more mythic and distant we get from the actual history, I find myself wanting to emphasize just how much the kind of politics we see around the Revolution in the twentieth century is maybe not as much of a departure from the earlier history as we think, and that that actually maybe makes the Revolution more useful. Counterintuitively—it seems like a very early American historian point to make—but counterintuitively, I actually think it makes the more distant past more useful in the present.

Read the rest of the transcript of the event on BR’s website.

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In early April, a committee of ten professors submitted a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” to the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, who commissioned it last fall. In the words of its authors, the report was “prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble.”

Of course, there are many kinds of trouble facing the humanities. The committee purports to examine, in particular, “the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.” Its principal conclusion is that there are

grounds for concern, not just in individual disciplines, but systematically. . . . the problems concern the quality of the scholarship and the norms and standards governing its production—norms that often serve to suppress scholarship that challenges a rigidly enforced orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues, and which substitute moral and political standards for properly academic standards in the evaluation of scholarship.

Further, the report offers advice to administrators who may share these concerns about how to take action, recommending that “an indispensable first step will be an intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view.” This guarded prescription receives much less emphasis, however, than the claim that some departments and programs are “at risk” of “forfeiting their claims to deference,” the basic principle of academic life that the faculty and departments—not administrators or governing boards—evaluate the work and make decisions about hiring and promotion in their fields.

These are serious charges with foreseeably serious consequences, so it is not surprising that the report has elicited a spate of commentary. Some have contested the committee’s rejection of “relativism,” which the report alleges is responsible for the degradation of scholarly norms. Others have contested the report’s general description of the state of the humanities. Mostly lost in the discussion, however, have been questionable features of the process by which the report was prepared, the framing it uses to address administrators, and the kind of diagnosis that it offers of the state of scholarship. I will focus on these three aspects here. In my view the process was flawed in many ways, restricted to like-minded insiders; the issues are framed by categories from the culture wars that have no place in serious analysis; and the diagnoses in terms of “relativism” and the politicization of the humanities miss their mark.

First, a preliminary remark. No one could seriously deny the existence of fraudulent or shoddy work in the humanities, just as no one could seriously deny the existence of junk science or the existence of academic work that is simply pointless or trivial. This is the world we live in—the same world in which brilliant work is also produced—and none of the following criticisms depend on denying any of this.

Read the whole essay by Richard Moran on BR’s website.

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Has any single book drawn more Americans leftward over the last half century than A People’s History of the United States? Howard Zinn was not the first to write about Bartolomé de las Casas, the Flour Riot of 1837, the Teller Amendment, or MKULTRA, but no historian before him had been so audacious as to compile these and other subjects into a sweeping page-turner on national rapacity and popular resistance.

Conservatives are still saying that what A People’s History did to this country will take decades to remediate. The federal government has set itself to the task, and one imagines that in the drafty shell of Linda McMahon’s Department of Education, amid the fire sales of office furniture and summary sackings, a Two Minutes Hate is observed each morning before a massive projection of Zinn’s twinkly visage.

As if to rebuke the “America250” festivities this July, a new biography by Dave Zirin reveals the true character of our Emmanuel Goldstein. The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, published by Dutton in August, is in the first place a reminder of how much Zinn accomplished as a participant in history and not just a chronicler of it. Among other things, he built ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; dropped napalm on France during the war, which prompted his turn to pacifism; organized sit-ins with his young, gifted, and Black female students at Spelman College (among them Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman); served as a key advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; helped recover American POWs from North Vietnam; became a minor pop culture phenomenon thanks to Good Will Hunting; and held the attention of young people through his last years—last days, even—as one of his generation’s most outspoken opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He died in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven.

Zinn has a bulldog in Zirin, the longtime sports editor of The Nation. They became close in the last years of Zinn’s life, when the elder Z encouraged the younger to write a book that ended up being called A People’s History of Sports in the United States. Some of Zinn’s last public appearances before his death in 2009 were onstage with Zirin. So The People’s Historian is a personal book—“biased,” certainly, as Zinn’s opponents like to say—but it’s a reminder for Americans in the twenty-first century what moral and intellectual courage looked like in the twentieth.

I called Zirin last week to discuss the book. The day we spoke, Zirin had just arrived back home by train after covering the Knicks’ remarkable comeback victory in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. “I haven’t slept,” he said, but he had plenty of energy to discuss his old friend. This transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

—

Andrew Holter: Let me ask you first about your own relationship with Zinn. How old were you when you first encountered A People’s History, and what impression did it make on you?

Dave Zirin: I was eighteen, basically a teenage knucklehead, and I had no interest in the history that I was being taught in school. My sister gave me a book called The Twentieth Century: A People’s History—the truncated version of the book. That was really smart of her, because in my knuckleheadedness I really didn’t care about the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. You could have told me about 1870 and I would have thought you were talking about 1270—it meant nothing to me. The only history I was interested in was the history of my grandparents. I would sit down with my grandpa, who was born in 1906, and hear stories from him about the twenties, thirties, forties, and that was my love of history.

The Twentieth Century felt like revealed knowledge. I would read five or six pages and have to put the book down and walk around the room, because there were implications with every page. And reading this and taking it in, I thought, well, there might be an obligation for me not only to spread the word but to do something about the world in which I live. Which at eighteen was a scary prospect.

Read the whole interview on BR’s website.

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please subscribe to the magazine or make a tax-deductible donation.

Reviewed:
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century by Dagmar Herzog. Princeton University Press, 2024

The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality by Joel Michael Reynolds. University of Minnesota Press, 2022

The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability, edited by Liz Bowen, Joel Michael Reynolds, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Erik Parens. Oxford University Press, 2025

At the Nuremberg Medical Trials, Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, testified about his involvement in what he referred to as “the Leipzig case.” The parents of a child born with several disabilities wanted to have it killed. Since the director of their local hospital had rebuffed them, they had petitioned the Führer’s chancellery directly. As it happened, the Führer wanted a solution to the so-called euthanasia question, and so Brandt was directed to review the case and make it an exemplar. He found, as he put it, no reason to let the child live.

The child, eventually identified as a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar, became the first known victim of the T4 program, which killed nearly 300,000 disabled people between 1939 and 1945. While public protests led to an official suspension of the program in 1941, T4 continued its practices unofficially, the “wild” phase of its “euthanasia” lasting until the end of the war. Even in the postwar years, there was a “crushing breadth of popular support for the perpetrators, and ongoing shaming of the victims and their families,” writes historian Dagmar Herzog in The Question of Unworthy Life. Beyond Brandt, who was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and executed in 1948, very few physicians were held accountable, while people with disabilities kept being marginalized, confined to underfunded and short-staffed institutions. Not infrequently, ex-Nazi employees were “hired back as nurses and wardens.” Disabled people “were not viewed by their fellow citizens as fully human,” writes Herzog, “and their lives, bodies, and souls were not treated as of equal value.”

Much about the medical murders was known from the beginning; more was uncovered after the end of the war. Yet the revelations about the T4 program failed to banish one of its core assumptions: that some disabilities inherently make life not worth living. Is it an overstatement to say that echoes of that sentiment persist today? I don’t think so. One doesn’t need to look too closely to see traces of T4 in tech’s transhumanist ambitions to overcome human frailty and bodily vulnerability once and for all.

Take Nucleus Genomics. Financed in part by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the company—which ran a major ad campaign last year using taglines like “IQ is 50% genetic”—offers screening of up to twenty IVF embryos with the promise of evading undesirable “genetic conditions and traits,” among them somatic disorders like Huntington’s, caused by single-gene mutations, as well as much more loosely defined conditions like ADHD, insomnia, alcoholism, and anxiety. The pitch is that prospective parents can have their “best baby,” which in turn presupposes that such a thing exists.

This new eugenics is depressingly similar to its antecedents in its rejection of the body, and the granularity of embodied life, in favor of a narrow, singular vision of the life of the mind. Intelligence, narrowly defined, reigns supreme; bodily variation, like a clunky bit of code, is a problem in need of debugging. Unlike its forebears, though, the new order appears willing to let some of the would-be outcasts into the club—so long as they prove useful. Certain forms of neurodiversity have even been embraced, recast not as hindrances but superpowers, the mark of the mythical “10x” engineer who churns out work an order of magnitude more productively than “normal” workers. For tech moguls like Elon Musk and Alex Karp of Palantir, a hint of autism is perfectly acceptable, even desirable, if it strengthens the bottom line. According to Karp, only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers and the neurodivergent. Within the vastly diverse minority of disabled people, it has long been possible to discern the subgroup of the “able-disabled,” the people who gain some degree of social acceptance by living up to productivity norms and demonstrating their economic utility, often at a high human cost.

According to this familiar logic, the disabled remainder might well be better off dead. In Jojo Moyes’s bestselling novel Me Before You (2012), a rich, highly privileged quadriplegic man insists that he is nevertheless deprived of everything that makes life good, including the possibility of working, and must therefore kill himself. He does, and the story frames this as a happy ending. In 2021, Canada enacted laws that made nonterminal disabilities a sufficient, legitimate reason for physician-assisted suicide. And in one of the baldest statements of the cost-benefit approach, President Trump, after a meeting with disability advocates during his first term, allegedly said that, with the expenses involved, “those kinds of people”—referring to disabled people who required strict care and frequent hospital trips—“should just die.”

Haven’t we made some progress, though? I’ve been hearing language like Trump’s less often since I became a tenured professor, or for that matter since I got married and became a father. It seems I’m no longer being challenged, however implicitly, to prove that my life is worth living. Perhaps I’m passing as one of the able-disabled. Perhaps I’m now spending more time in the company of people who have lived long enough to think twice about what sort of experiences might really make you wish you were dead. And perhaps, following decades of activism, there has been a cultural shift in what “disability” signifies. From the 1960s onwards, American activists drew inspiration from and aligned with the civil rights movement to position disability as a minority identity. In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, the “social model” explained the marginalization of disabled people as a form of political and economic oppression driven by industrial capitalism and the privileging of interchangeable workers’ bodies. In both cases, disability was reconfigured from an individual medical problem to a phenomenon with social, cultural, and historical aspects: as a binary category of exclusion imposed on the range of natural human variation. The year I was born, 1981, happened to be the United Nations’ International Year of Disabled Persons. In the decades since, anti-discrimination laws have been implemented across the world.

It can be hard to reconcile this cheerful story of social progress with the sudden, baleful resurgence of eugenic ideology. But eugenics arose, in part, as a progressive project aimed at bettering the human condition, and even modern, progressive disability policies have partly been motivated by the idea that disability can somehow be “solved.” Some forms of the social model took the position that once political and economic oppression were eliminated, full equality would be achieved; the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities similarly advances the goal of “full and equal participation.” Like any grand ideal, these bear an equally grand potential for disappointment. All utopias, Fredric Jameson once observed, are defined by what they exclude, and disability’s utopian scenarios are no exception: they leave no room for the people who cannot live up to a particular standard, whether defined by productivity norms or some more humane understanding of lives well lived. The persistence of this gap in our thinking suggests there are still fundamental philosophical questions to be answered about how we view such people. Why we can only conceive of certain lives as problems to be remedied? Why, in short, does disability remain synonymous with deficit?

Read the whole essay on BR’s website.

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please subscribe to the magazine or make a tax-deductible donation.