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The Review

Understand the big ideas and provocative arguments shaping the academy. Delivered on Mondays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

May 22, 2023
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From: Len Gutkin

Subject: The Review: Our most-read stories this year so far

I’m on vacation, so I’ve outsourced the newsletter this week to my colleagues, whom I’ve asked for summer reading recommendations. And scroll down to catch up on some of the most popular Review stories this year so far. I’ll be back next week.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, newsletter editor: My favorite genre is translated literature that takes place in one room or neighborhood, and Trick by Domenico Starnone nails it. A grandfather goes back to the home where he raised his children to take care of his four-year-old grandson for a few days. It’s a story about jealousy and the fear of aging.

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I’m on vacation, so I’ve outsourced the newsletter this week to my colleagues, whom I’ve asked for summer reading recommendations. And scroll down to catch up on some of the most popular Review stories this year so far. I’ll be back next week.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, newsletter editor: My favorite genre is translated literature that takes place in one room or neighborhood, and Trick by Domenico Starnone nails it. A grandfather goes back to the home where he raised his children to take care of his four-year-old grandson for a few days. It’s a story about jealousy and the fear of aging.

Emma Pettit, senior reporter: I just finished David Grann’s new nonfiction book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, and boy it sure is a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. Every time you think, “Oh my god, things can’t possibly get worse for these guys,” there’s another scurvy outbreak, then a huge storm, then lots of people drown, and then that all happens like five more times. But Grann’s writing is extremely cinematic and also funny enough to get you through the human horror of it all.

Ronald Barba, senior editor: I’m reading Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture from Caleb Smith, which digs into the genealogy of distraction. It presents an insightful argument that the current ethos around discipline and self-improvement is less a defining trait of this century than a revival of sorts.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows, staff reporter: Just finished Drunk by Edward Slingerland, which makes the case that the consumption of alcohol was foundational to the development of civilizations — and encourages readers to let loose, in moderation.

David Jesse, senior reporter: I’ve been spending a lot of time at baseball fields as my sons play ball this spring. I just finished Ryan McGee’s Welcome to the Circus of Baseball, an inside look at minor league baseball in the 1990s. Very funny and a perfect ballpark or beach or campground read.

David Wescott, senior editor: I’m thoroughly enjoying The Word of the Speechless, a collection of short stories by the Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro. The early stories — written in the 1950s — are dark, sinister, gripping, and never without a sense of humor.

Claudia Trapp, human resources: I am three-quarters of the way through Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. How do you communicate numbers so folks actually understand?

Stephanie Lee, senior reporter: I tore through Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True, now a Pulitzer Prize winner, in what felt like hours. In lyrical prose and unsparing detail, Hsu — a staff writer for The New Yorker and a Bard College professor — recounts his time as a lonely Taiwanese American student at the University of Califonia at Berkeley, trying to make meaning out of mixtapes and zines; a transformative friendship; and a loss that upends everything. It’s a coming-of-age story that’s both heartbreaking and very funny.

Readers’ Favorites From the Review

Catch up on our most-read essays this year.

Mary Gaitskill, “The Trials of the Young”
Owen Kichizo Terry, “I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.”
Deborah Chasman, “My #MeToo Moment”
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, “Yes, DEI Can Erode Academic Freedom”
Alicia Andrzejewski, “The Sad Humiliations of Academic Ghosting.”
Gayle Greene, “The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning Outcomes’”
Joshua Doležal, “Younger Faculty Are Leaning Out”
Elise Archias and Blake Stimson, “The Labor of Teaching and Administrative Hysteria”
Evan Mandery, “Where Rich Students Are Told: ‘You Deserve This’”
Jeff Denning et al., “The Grade Inflation Conversation We’re Not Having”

The Latest

  • Balloon figure of a professional man holding a balloon brief case
    The Review | Opinion

    Against Higher Ed’s Happy Talk

    By Joshua Doležal May 16, 2023
    We need realism, not bombast and bromides.
  • Illustration showing a women wearing eyeglasses that reflext an African-American man and an Asian-American woman in the same gray colors.
    The Review | Essay

    The False Promise of Colorblind Admissions

    By Richard Thompson Ford May 16, 2023
    You can’t stop racial discrimination without considering race.
  • State legislatures are increasingly hostile to colleges.
    The Review | Opinion

    Statehouses, Not Student Activists, Are the Real Threat to Free Speech

    By Eduardo Peñalver May 17, 2023
    Fixating on drama at Stanford Law leads us astray.

Recommended

  • “A crowd instinct, he explained, is the pull that individuals feel to abandon themselves and blend in with the mass, while the personality instinct is the pull that individuals feel when it comes to retaining a notion of self.” In The Nation, Farah Abdessamad writes about Elias Canetti.
  • “The culture-maddened far right believes that Americans will lose their native birthright forever unless drastic protective measures are intensified. Meanwhile, the left-liberal side has never shown a more arrogant pride in its own good intentions and its demonstrated capacity to silence those who disagree.” In The New Statesman, David Bromwich on the return of Trump.
  • “The specter of a truly anti-liberal order on either the left or the right makes us fearful, for good reason. Even if we dispute the picture of man and reason that lies at the heart of the liberal order, and even as we can recognize the ways that liberalism undermines itself, we shudder at the proposed alternatives.” In The Hedgehog Review, Jennifer A. Frey writes about liberalism and anti-liberalism by way of Émile Perreau-Saussine’s biography of Alasdair McIntyre.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin

Len Gutkin
Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review and the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present (Virginia). Follow him at @GutkinLen.
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