Books and Literature
She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.
In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness. His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being […]
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‘Spare,’ by Prince Harry: Book Review
Mired in a “red mist” of grief and anger, the prince self-medicates at first with candy and then, as the hated tabloids report with varying degrees of accuracy, alcohol, weed, cocaine, mushrooms and ayahuasca. (More mildly he tries magnesium supplements, and I’m not sure anyone needs to know that this loosened his bowels at a […]
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11 Takeaways From Prince Harry’s Memoir, ‘Spare’
Harry describes suffering anxiety and panic attacks Fear of public speaking morphed into a fear of crowds, and then full-blown anxiety attacks on the cusp of his 30th birthday. In the book, Harry sees the afflictions as a form of PTSD, attributing them to both his military service and the death of his mother. When […]
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Prince Harry and the Value of Silence
During the early stages of my father’s Alzheimer’s, when he still had lucid moments, I apologized to him for writing an autobiography many years earlier in which I flung open the gates of our troubled family life. He was already talking less at that point, but his eyes told me he understood. I thought of […]
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Book Review: ‘Lady Justice,’ by Dahlia Lithwick
LADY JUSTICE: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America, by Dahlia Lithwick In 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that women had no constitutional right to practice law. Indeed, as Dahlia Lithwick notes in this stirring book, a justice explained that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female […]
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Review: Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir
If Kushner can recall a professor or a book that influenced him while in Cambridge, he doesn’t say. Instead, he recalls doing his first real estate deals while there. He moved to New York, and bought and ruined a great newspaper (The New York Observer) by dumbing it down and feting his friends in its […]
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Trump Asked Aide Why His Generals Couldn’t Be Like Hitler’s, Book Says
WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president. “Why can’t you be like the German […]
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Why the Penguin Random House Merger Is Also About Amazon
Amazon isn’t on trial in a big books lawsuit. But its power is. The U.S. government is suing to stop the book publisher Penguin Random House from buying a competitor, Simon & Schuster. The government says that the merger, which will shrink the number of large American publishers of mass-market books from five to four, […]
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The Role of Art in a Time of War
KYIV, Ukraine — You do not have to go far outside of Kyiv to see how the massacre of civilians and the trampling of culture still come one after the other. In Borodianka, a nucleus of Russian atrocities about 45 minutes north of here — the drive is slower now that the bridges have been […]
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