A carefully crafted f@&% you: An interview with Judith Butler, the gender-theorist-turned-philosopher-of-nonviolence, on the choices that make people expendable, and the role grief can play in setting a new course. No jacket required: A review of The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Michael F Suarez SJ and Henry Woudhuysen; The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future by Robert Darnton; Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books by Margaret Willes; and The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree. The way things are and how they might be: An interview with Tony Judt. A manifesto for a new politics As a culmination of his political thinking, Tony Judt, paralysed by motor neurone disease, makes an impassioned plea for a new arrangement of society. A review of The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson. On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him — how could this have happened? Richard Hayman traces the changing significance of the Green Man, a term coined in the 1930s for a medieval image of a face sprouting foliage, the meaning of which has transformed itself across the centuries. Born to Blush: Dacher Keltner reveals why embarrassment is good for all of us. Elif Batuman on dangerous friends in literature. More and more and more and more and more and more and more on The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman (and more at Bookforum). Fast Changes: An interview with David Paterson from a month ago shows how quickly politics can shift.
