FIELD NOTES BREAKTHROUGH BOOKS
INSIDE PUBLISHING
A Secret History of the Sexual Revolution The Shock of the Old
The Passion of Roberto Unger
My First Intellectual CLASSIFIED CONFERENCES HYPOTHESES
BOOKSHELF
School for pundits/Animal autobiography/Medieval gender wars, and more
Nuclear Weapons
Loony Marxists/Bathing beauties/Soviet shopping
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox ideas–about character armor, fascism, and the importance of the orgasm–inspired American writers from Saul Bellow to William Burroughs and gave unbridled eroticism its most fervent defense. Reich believed he had unlocked the mysteries of the universe. But today his name is all but forgotten. A reexamination of the life and legacy of a self-declared prophet.
BY HAL COHEN
In 1993 a handful of disgruntled scholars founded the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics to reclaim the study of literature from political correctness and poststructuralism. Is the ALSC a book club for genteel amateurs or a cabal of rabid reactionaries? Or does it represent a long overdue effort to inject the pleasures of reading into academic criticism?
BY CALEB CRAIN
For decades, Harvard law professor Roberto Unger burned the midnight oil, composing dense volumes of political theory. Now, he has abandoned the classroom to take his vision of social transformation–a fusion of Christian romanticism, Max Weber, and the Marquis de Sade–to the slums of his native Brazil. Can Unger’s idiosyncratic ideas save the country from neoliberal orthodoxy–and economic collapse?
BY EYAL PRESS
At seventeen, Mark Edmundson was a bored football player looking forward to a life in the military or on the local assembly line. Then an eccentric, idealistic young Harvard grad came to teach philosophy at Medford High School, and everything changed.
BY MARK EDMUNDSON
Jim Holt listens to the voices in your head.
