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Tareq Baconi
Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

Fintan O’Toole
Trump’s Old News

The debate showed that the former president faces a new danger: not that his lies are outlandish but that they are getting stale.

Ian Johnson
China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

Daphne Merkin
The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

from Mojave Ghost

a poem by
Forrest Gander

Now there are creases that curve
from the flanges of my nose
to the scissure of my lips.
And a deep cleft, like something
left by a hatchet,
above the bridge of my nose…

Dunya Mikhail
Betraying Iraqi Girls

If Iraq legalizes child marriage, it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression.

Free from the Archives

One hundred and one years ago today, after months of terrorism—lynchings, beatings, kidnappings, threats, and property damage—by the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan against Blacks, Jews, and socialists in the state, Governor Jack Walton declared martial law. In a proclamation, he argued that the Klan’s activities constituted “a state of insurrection and rebellion” and mobilized the National Guard. Anyone found to be supporting or abetting the KKK, Walton wrote, “shall now be deemed to be enemies of the sovereign state of Oklahoma and shall be dealt with by the military forces of the state.” He was impeached two months later by a state house majority composed, by one historian’s reckoning, of mostly Klan members.

In the Review’s December 7, 2017, issue, Adam Hochschild wrote about the KKK of the 1920s, a second act for the organization—which reached its all-time peak membership in 1924—when it attempted, in some corners, to appear like a more legitimate political force, while in Texas and Oklahoma it continued its reign of terror.

Adam Hochschild
Ku Klux Klambakes

“The first and third incarnations of the Klan—the cross-burning lynch mobs and the vigilantes who beat up and murdered civil rights workers in the 1960s—seem beyond the pale of today’s politics, at least for the moment. But the second Klan, the Klan of the 1920s, less violent but far more widespread, is a different story, and one that offers some chilling comparisons to the present day. It embodied the same racism at its core but served it up beneath a deceptively benign façade, in all-American patriotic colors.”

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