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Today in The New York Review of Books: Linda Greenhouse assesses Justice Anthony Kennedy’s legacy; Trevor Jackson asks why we let economists determine the value of life; Joshua Hammer commemorates acts of resistance against the Nazis; Sophie Pinkham celebrates the early Soviet writer Konstantin Vaginov; a poem by Chloe Wilson; and, from the archives, Linda Greenhouse on Sandra Day O’Connor.

Linda Greenhouse
As Kennedy Went

Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning.

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Trevor Jackson
The Men Who Sold the World

For half a century the US government has assigned a dollar value to human life. By denying that the EPA needs to mitigate carbon emissions, the Trump administration is driving that value down to zero.

Joshua Hammer
Paths of Resistance

Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance?

Sophie Pinkham
The Poet’s Double

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor.

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Jason Statham Asks Nothing of Me

poem by
Chloe Wilson

And for this I’m grateful. The scene:
I’m in my convalescent’s nest—a corner of the sofa.
Floral pajamas, oily roots. The pain refers
into my shoulders, as they foretold. A flash
of the anesthetist: This will feel cold. Your face

will prickle. A male voice: She’s out. Let’s do this.
Now, in the weeks between
visits to the theater, I want nothing
to do with human drama. Spare me the pathos,
the redemption arc. What do I want? That’s easy…

Free from the Archives

In our March 12 issue, Linda Greenhouse writes about Anthony Kennedy’s memoir and the end of a nearly fifty-year period in the Supreme Court’s history—from 1974 to 2020—when “a series of three justices, Lewis Powell, [Sandra Day] O’Connor, and Kennedy,…occupied the Court’s ideological center and, as [the law professor Richard M.] Re puts it, ‘held the key to major victories.’”

In our November 7, 2019, issue, Greenhouse wrote about O’Connor’s legacy on the Court—where she was known for “her distinctive brand of center-right pragmatism”—and her place in history.

Linda Greenhouse
The First and Last of Her Kind

The legal academy has tended to be dismissive of Sandra Day O’Connor, arguing that she had no overarching theory of constitutional interpretation. But the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

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