Book Reviews

Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is assuredly one of the best books on Adorno and Critical Theory to have been written in the last decades. The book is comprehensive but detailed, focused but expansive. It is about Adorno’s concept of happiness and the flouring life, but it is also…

In The Atlantic Realists, Matthew Specter sets out to historicize a tradition of international thought—realism—whose defining feature may be its claim to exist outside history. The book “conducts a genealogy of the realist paradigm in North Atlantic international thought” (2), asking “how [realist] intellectuals… [came] to believe that specific theories offered a privileged glimpse of…

Film scholars have in general spent surprisingly little time historicizing, theorizing, and analyzing the technological processes by which films actually get made. Even within studies of avant-garde and experimental cinema, which by necessity center individual filmmakers and their specific artisanal practices, emphasis is usually placed far more on formal analysis – itself leaning heavily on…

Long before I ever read the Communist Manifesto, “the Soul of Man Under Socialism,” or A Peoples History of the United States, Mad magazine helped make me a radical. Although Mad had no positive political program to offer, it served as a useful inoculation. Mad encouraged me, as it did for many readers, to see…

Maintaining that our democracy needs religion seems an idea ill-fitted to our times. In the West at least, religion is not faring well. Western Europe is arguably a post-religious society, with many churches and cathedrals converted to museums or concert halls. In the last several decades, the United States seems to be following Europe in…

Sarah Wynn Williams was a diplomat in New Zealand and an international lawyer. Inspired by what she saw as Facebook’s formidable potential, she lobbied the platform for months, before being hired and ultimately rose to Director of Global Public Policy at the platform. Promoted it seems because her idealism was a completely new approach. It was to be a harrowing…

Introduction In the preface of his most recent book, On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and  Conflicts, Benjamin Heim Shepard (2025) states a powerfully obvious fact about the times we are living in: “With pandemics ebbing and tyrannies rising, we all need friends” (p. xiii). At a time when social movements are more…

Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm radiates intelligence and insight. In addition to being thoughtfully written, meticulously researched, and exceptionally compelling, Matheus Romanetto’s new book is a meaningful contribution to Fromm scholarship. One of its defining features is its depth and breadth: the book covers, in some detail, a wide range of themes, from questions of…

A year after his death in a Siberian prison, the New York Times reports, “Even in Death, Navalny Is Seen by the Kremlin as an Enduring Threat …Russian authorities have zealously prosecuted people with links to Aleksei A. Navalny’s organization inside Russia in the year since he died.” On the 12th day of the second…