In The Guardian, Moira Donegan covers last night’s presidential debate: “Trump failed to convincingly land attacks on Harris, and instead he spent much of the night arguing on the turf that his opponent chose for him. There was no bait she offered him that he didn’t take.”
Tonight at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, Charlotte Shane will discuss her new book, An Honest Woman, with Lydia Kiesling.
For Curbed, Christopher Bonanos visits Robert Caro as his most famous book, The Power Broker, turns fifty next week and the New York Historical Society hosts an exhibition celebrating the milestone. Since 1975, Caro has been laboring over his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson and is still at work on the last volume. Bonanos writes about how Caro recently took a trip to the White House so he could sit in a certain room, getting a feel for where LBJ made crucial decisions about Vietnam. Caro explains, “I went up and sat in the family dining room while the guy they gave me, the chief usher or something in the White House, was sitting out in the hall, and he thinks I’m nuts. But you know something? It’s right next door to the master bedroom and the two girls’ bedrooms, Lynda Bird and Luci. You can hear the people out on Lafayette Avenue. So when they were eating dinner or they were sleeping, they were hearing, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’”
In The Baffler, Sarah Jaffe talks about her new book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, with Hannah Proctor, author of the recent book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. Jaffe tells Proctor, “We can’t solve grief. We’re going to have to do it. But there are so many horrific ways to die that we can stop, that we can change.”
The Nation has published Wendy Brown’s introduction to a new edition of Marx’s Capital, which will be published next week.