Sponsored by the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Munk School

Miri Rubin
Christian Hair

The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.

Howard W. French
Toffler in China

The work of the eclectic American futurist exerted a profound and unanticipated influence on China’s digital transformation since the 1980s.

Dan Rockmore
The Quantum Chaos of Literature

Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.

Combustion

a poem by
Witold Wirpsza,
translated from the Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes

The comparison between man and candle
Has been suggested then as now:
A flame is ignited
And in the end self-annihilates.

This is libel. I am warning you.
I object.

I am neither wax nor paraffin…

Nabil Salih
The New Baghdad

The Iraqi capital is witnessing an inequitable construction boom, as the elite launder oil money and the state reconfigures sites of dissent.

Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, and 15 other scholars
A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia

The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing First Amendment–protected speech.

Free from the Archives

Akira Kurosawa was born 115 years ago today. In the Review’s April 24, 1986, issue, the Polish critic Jan Kott wrote about Ran, Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear set in  Japan’s era of warring states: “Kurosawa’s greatness lies in his capacity to reveal historical similarity and variance.”

Jan Kott, translated by Lillian Vallee
The Edo Lear

“The selection of landscape in Lear is, perhaps more than in any other play, simultaneously a selection of costume and historical time. In King Lear the question where is also the question when.”

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