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Today in The New York Review of Books: Robert P. Baird visits Ross Douthat’s church; Bill McKibben breathes carbon dioxide; Andrew Katzenstein laughs with Maria Bamford; and, from the archives, James M. McPherson on John C. Calhoun.

Robert P. Baird
God of the Gaps

Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.

Bill McKibben
It’s a Gas

There have been five great mass extinctions on Earth: four have been the result of carbon dioxide flooding into the atmosphere and raising the temperature.

Andrew Katzenstein
Bamfordtown

Maria Bamford’s wild and constantly inventive stand-up style relies on her never flinching from the most difficult realities.

Free from the Archives

One hundred and ninety-three years ago today, with the nullification crisis coming to a head, Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned from Andrew Jackson’s administration.

In the Review’s January 19, 1989, issue, James M. McPherson wrote about Calhoun and the road to what McPherson called “The War of Southern Aggression.” Even though Calhoun died eleven years before the onset of the Civil War, he was, McPherson argued, one of the primary architects of the slave states’ relentless efforts to preserve human bondage and override the Constitution.

James M. McPherson
The War of Southern Aggression

“Calhoun led the Southern Rights wing of the Democratic party until he died in 1850. His theory of slavery as a “positive good” and his doctrine of state sovereignty as a buttress of slavery lived on as the rationale for secession. Consumed by ambition for the presidency, an office that for thirty years he sought in vain, Calhoun dedicated his career to constructing elaborate methods to sustain southern political power despite the region’s shrinking minority of the American population.”

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