Larb

A collection of essays on the topic of the law and legal affairs, selected in order to give readers samples of the ways in which the subject of law relates to the study of ourselves and our times. Those included in this publication are just a sample of the books reviewed over the last year and a half reviews that cover a variety of topics, some very current, some historical and some dealing with debates spanning centuries. A review of Judge Wilkinson's Cosmic Constitutional Theory surveys the leading theories of the Constitution and how to interpret it. Two equally brilliant and contrasting views on the meaning of our nation's founding document are provided through interviews with Justice Antonin Scalia and Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar. Between these three pieces, the reader will find a sharp debate as to whether a literal reading or a living interpretation of the document should govern our age. Also included is a thoughtful treatment of the macroeconomic disconnect between the numbers of new lawyers churned out by our educational system and the market for these new entrants. To see how far we've come since the first women sought admission to the bar, read a review of Jill Norgren's Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America's First Women Lawyers. The articles featured in this publication, by the breadth of the issues they survey, show rather that the law is a rich bed of moral inquiry, an all too true reflection of our times and ourselves.

More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, “Film and the Art of Adaptation, consider a range of contemporary films inspired by celebrated works of American literature, including Baz Luhrmann's spectacular take on The Great Gatsby and James Franco's faithful transposition of As I Lay Dying. Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James's orphaned children in “Updating What Maisie Knew, while Len Gutkin's sassy pan, “A Beatnik Animal House" shows how John Krokidas's adolescent romp Kill Your Darlings butchers the murder that launched the Beat movement. Lowry Pressly's discussion of Steve McQueen's humane and heartbreaking 12 Years A Slave defends McQueen from charges of sadism in his adaptation of Solomon Northup's little-read slave narrative. Rounding out the collection is Jerry Christensen's take down of historian Ben Urwand's controversial book The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler. From adaptation to collaboration, these six essays illuminate how writers, directors, and actors work together across yawning gaps in time and space to bring history and literature to the silver screen.

The reviews selected for this month's Digital Edition, "Foreign Lands, Invisible Cities," are a sampler of the places we readers of fiction visited this year. From the flood-prone hills of Haiti to the common courtyards of Queens, New York, fiction reminds us that everywhere we go we find humans who love and lust and scheme and hope. Some of the reviews mix personal history with criticism: Lisa Locascio describes her own fascination with Mormonism in terms of Ryan McIlvain's Elders, while Courtney Cook lets her love for Jane Gardam shine in her aptly-titled essay, "Go Read Jane Gardam." For a dash of digital-age, we include Susanna Luthi's sharp take on The Circle, Dave Eggers's dystopian novel that tackles big data collection, surveillance, and transparency. It isn't the stories alone that transport us: imagery and rhythm, form and tone all work together to take us elsewhere. This is evident in Edwidge Danticat's "Claire of the Sea Light," reviewed by Rita Williams. And discussed in both Nathan Deuel's review of Lucy Corin's "One Hundred and One Apocalypses" and Katie Ryder's essay on Renata Adler, whose 1976 "Speedboat" was republished this year by NYRoB. Some travel to see the great landmarks, others to meet and mingle with the natives. Michael LaPointe's gorgeous review of Javier Marias's "The Infatuations" takes us deep into the sorrows and desires of Marias's characters. And we round out the issue with Greg Cwik's "Donna Tartt's New Anti-Epic," a review of both the writer and her latest novel, The Goldfinch. No doubt we'll remember Tartt's warm and seedy characters long after the twists and turns of the plot are forgotten…and then, as with all dear and distant friends, consider visiting them again.

As any historian or casual observer of urban transformation might tell you, walls are not everlasting. The following collection examines different ways monuments and notions of monumentality in art and architecture exist in relation to this reality. From Esther Yi's chronicle of the uncertain fate of a section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery, to Michael Z. Wise's essay on the Casa Malaparte in Capri, the articles collected in this month's LARB Digital Edition examine the powerful sway of the monumental on our common sense. Also in this issue, Victoria Dailey covers land artist Michael Heizer's LACMA installation, Levitated Mass; Evan Selinger reviews Bianca Bosker's in-depth look at the phenomena of 'duplitecture, ' Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China; Victoria Bugge Oye reviews the first ever monograph on the acclaimed Postmodern architects Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro; and we look back on architect Joe Day's own monumental undertaking with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L. A.

This month's Digital Edition serves up eight irresistible courses from LARB's Food and Drink section. Including a taste of the dizzying heights of gourmandise in John McIntyre's essay 'Finer Dining Through Chemistry, ' and samples of extreme foodie-ism in Douglas Bauer's review of Anything that Moves by Dana Goodyear; with John T. Scott's review of American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit as an aperitif, and a bonus interview with Leslie Stephens, author of Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother's Recipe Box, for dessert. Two reviews by Steven Shapin pique our appetites with the Enlightenment debate over the palate, as well as an intellectual history of cannibalism. And Amy Finnerty's take on Jenny Rosenstrach's Dinner: A Love Story rounds out this wholesome spread of food writing. Enjoy!

Does an academic boycott of Israel advance, or damage, the cause for peace in the Middle East? We brought together eight leading scholars to debate the question in an unprecedented forum, "Academic Activism: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Ethics of Boycott." Collectively, their essays - equal parts incisive, provocative, and passionate - deliver a multifaceted lens through which to view the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement, and the ongoing search for a path towards peace.

As National Poetry Month was just last April, it's only fitting that we celebrate poetry this July. The poets in this collection represent the depth and breadth of contemporary American poetry: its independence, its drive to find new ways of making meaning, and its commitment to innovative ways of interrogating what we might consider foundational texts. In this new poetry ePub, we present two poets writing about Emily Dickinson, Stephen Burt's groundbreaking essay on trans-poetry, Joshua Edwards's elegy to poetically seeing the landscapes around us, and original poetry by Douglas Kearney, Maurice Manning, and Lauren K Alleyne.

We're all prone to excess, even in discussions of excess, observes biologist and science writer Marlene Zuk. This year has been marked by another rainfall of books about humans destroying the environment in which they evolved, a few about the a priori Darwinian mismatch between humans and their so-called "natural" environments, and a great many more about the even greater mismatch between humans and their constructed environments. This month's Digital Edition gathers some of the best essays and reviews from LARB's Science Section that deal with aspects of the mismatch, and how scientific discoveries and agendas are changing how we think about them. Several also deal with issues of legibility - how science goes about making legible human experience, not to mention environmental impacts. From the exploding fields of neuroscience and genetics to reading the movement of glaciers, this month's selection of articles is the perfect match for readers in search of a legible science.

It's fall. Throughout the country, students are heading into classrooms where they will read and discuss books. There are ongoing questions about what use this reading will be to them. Indeed, will it be any use at all? The essays in this month's Digital Edition are purposefully quite wide-ranging in their subjects and tone. Books, they show, are different things for English professors, for economists, for artists; they help us grieve, and they help us grow. The essays here share a sense that books quite often solve problems very different from the ones they explicitly address. So rather than using books to simplify and reduce a complex world, as the criticism 'book learning' might imply, these essays, together, advocate for a non-instrumental mode of reading. Read widely, they say, for a range of pleasures; read to enjoy the world, not to treat it as a problem to be solved.

Comedians really want to make us cry. The best reaction they can hope to elicit is tears - laughter, sure, but it's the tears they're after. Like almost every other human emotion, there is an emoji depicting this phenomenon online: a round yellow face with an absurdly broad, open smile, eyebrows furrowed and eyes pressed closed, a pendulous teardrop dangling from each corner. It's the face comedians want to see most, along with 'Spit-take Emoji' and 'Peeing-my-pants-laughing Emoji. ' Comedians are after our bodily fluids. But why? The essays in this month's Digital Edition are unanimously concerned with the proximity of comedy to our graver emotions. Whether demonstrating the ameliorative quality of humor in dealing with our innermost fears, grappling with loneliness, growing up without a father, or processing grief, these examples of humor writing and criticism attend to, rather than shying away from, our common discomfort. Lightness and play are, in fact, qualities that allow us to shrug off our heaviest burdens. The lightness of comedy is very much the subject of these essays- except, of course, when it comes to jokes, which they take very seriously. Please be advised: these essays are heavy on jokes.

The LARB Digital Edition Memoir epub is a selection of feature articles from the Los Angeles Review of Books's memoir and creative nonfiction section, personally curated by Creative Nonfiction editor Dinah Lenney.

The LARB Digital Edition epub is a selection of feature articles from the Los Angeles Review of Books's History section, personally curated by history editor Robert Zaretsky.

The Digital Edition LARB Quarterly Journal epub is a selection of feature articles, poetry and shorts from the Los Angeles Review of Books's Quarterly Journal, curated by Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz.