In Parts True and Original

Review – The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani

Amid many recent books purporting to explain our present age’s apparent problems with the truth, Michiko Kakutani’s stands out.

It stands out because of its author’s reputation as a judicious writer; she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism. But more than that, it stands out because of the specificity of its central claim – which holds not, as other books have argued, that there is more falsehood in the world now than ever, or it is easier to be duplicitous, and on a grander scale, than at any time in recent history; but rather that the very idea of verity is under attack, and that it has been in retreat for some time.

Foreign Fighters: From Kurdistan to the Caliphate

Much is made of the foreign fighters who flock to join the ‘caliphate’ Islamic State (IS) claims to have established in Iraq and Syria.

Although many foreign fighters are from Middle Eastern and North African countries, the international focus is on those from prosperous Western nations. These people are many things: a clear and present threat to national security, something of a rebuke to the societies from which they came, and also an important puzzle.

Unmasking Elena Ferrante

I imagine you have heard of it already, billed as both a great piece of investigative journalism and a terrible crime against literature: the presumed unmasking of the hitherto unknown Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer of style whose essential feature, whose animating influence, had been anonymity. She could have been anyone. That was the thrill; that was a serious attraction.

Civil Strife in Spain and Ukraine

There is said to be something which binds together instances of conflict and strife throughout the human experience. Maybe it is the suffering such things cause, which is a pain all societies experience and which is never entirely distinct from previous iterations; perhaps it is the required impulses of savagery – temporary though they may be – which are necessary in war; possibly this includes the fact that war shapes and forges societies, even if it does not affect their borders, simply by the force of its trauma and the fact of its happening at all.