Negro
Is It OK for White Music Critics to Like Violent Rap?
“It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air … Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.” — James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 1951 READ MORE >>
Efficacy and Democracy
Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republic’s most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of PowerBy Robert A. Caro (Knopf, 712 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>
Return of the Republicans
(Join John B. Judis and Richard Just at 1 p.m. on January 20 for a livestream discussion about the Republicans' return.) READ MORE >>
Confederacy of Dunces
WASHINGTON--The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or longstanding myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart. READ MORE >>
The Road to Mastery
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong By Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 475 pp., $30) Duke Ellington’s America By Harvey G. Cohen (University of Chicago Press, 688 pp., $40) Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original By Robin D.G. Kelley (Free Press, 588 pp., $30) READ MORE >>
Triumph of the Gypsies
Alone Together
The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity By Eric L. Goldstein (Princeton University Press, 307 pp., $29.95) Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America By Eric J. Sundquist (Harvard University Press, 662 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>
True Crime: A Different Way of Thinking about Homicide
The murder of large numbers of innocent people in a very short time span has become an infuriating and regular feature of contemporary life. Recently, such murders have been carried out by radical Islamists in Israel, Iraq, England, and Egypt. Last month we marked the tenth anniversary of the massacres at Srebenica, and just over a year ago, the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide. READ MORE >>
Out of Africa
Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge By Jerry Gershenhorn (University of Nevada Press, 338 pp., $65) READ MORE >>
A Paler Shade of White
Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past by David R. Roediger (University of California Press, 323 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>
