Catherine Nichols at Aeon:
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
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When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored. A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola’s brain was already producing hormones that had kick-started puberty. Lola had also been struggling emotionally. “She would have panic attacks every day at school,” says Elise, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and asked that her surname and Lola’s real name be omitted.
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Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition. He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe, the US and 
This also explains [Martin Luther] King’s fierce opposition to riots, even when he understood the rage behind them. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he said in 1967. But he immediately added that riots were “socially destructive and self-defeating.” As historian David Garrow documents, King believed that violence collapsed the moral clarity the [civil rights] movement depended on, allowing repression to masquerade as order. Riots were strategic failures. They destroyed the information the movement was trying to convey and pushed society back toward the bad equilibrium.
The collected poems displays the evolution of Heaney’s poetic impulses. The apprentice work from the 1960s is already accomplished, if less clarified in its thought and more given over to the tug of spontaneous music. Influences are, inevitably, worn on the sleeve, as in the 
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Last fall, George Saunders was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In the speech introducing him, alongside a glowing rundown of his literary résumé — author of 13 books, a past National Book Award finalist — he was called “the ultimate teacher of kindness and of craft.” Pretty good, right? Well, mostly.
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