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For anyone made an involuntary homebody by the pandemic this year, the idea of foreign travel seems cruelly out of reach. But staying local doesn’t mean remaining provincial: Immanuel Kant never traveled more than 100 miles from his native Königsberg. In his review of Emily Thomas’s “The Meaning of Travel,” our critic Tunku Varadarajan surveys the many moral and intellectual benefits that philosophers have attributed to tourism. But the lesson most relevant to our current moment, Mr. Varadarajan suspects, comes from Flaubert: “You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Travel puts our lives in perspective and takes us out of ourselves. If the world is too much with us these days, perhaps it is because we are not out enough in the world. Read the review —C.C. |
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| George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images |
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Seeing Red: In many ways, Sen. Joseph McCarthy came late to the cause of anticommunism. Martin Dies’s House Committee on Un-American Activities had been at work since 1938, and the Smith Act, making it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, had been in effect since 1940. Eleven high-ranking members of the Communist Party USA were imprisoned in the fall of 1949, months before McCarthy told a Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, W.Va., that he had a list of 205 communists who were working in the State Department. What McCarthy wanted more than anything was a proper spy, ideally a Julius Rosenberg. But by the time he began his crusade, the Soviet spy networks, which had hitherto penetrated the Manhattan Project, the State Department, the Treasury and the Office of Strategic Services, had been all but wiped out. The number of active communists had also shrunk. CPUSA membership peaked at around 80,000 in 1944 but had fallen by more than half by 1950. Duncan White on “Demagogue” by Larry Tye. Read the review |
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| | | Clean By James Hamblin The definition of personal cleanliness has changed over the centuries, thanks to evolving social attitudes, advances in indoor plumbing and new insights into microbiology. A doctor who stopped showering a few years ago embraces the skin microbiome’s role as both a defender of human health and a cosmetic asset. Read the review |
| Smellosophy By A.S. Barwich What is a smell? Is it a substance, or a perception? With vision, the mix that results from different colors is predictable; with smell, combinations do not follow reliable principles. It was only in 1991 that the olfactory receptor genes were discovered, and with them an entirely new mode of sensation. Read the review |
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“Out of Time”: In David Klass’s top-notch thriller, a junior FBI man follows his hunches to help track down an eco-terrorist dubbed “Green Man.” Read the review |
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| | | The Sirens of Mars By Sarah Stewart Johnson Exobiologists, who search for life on other worlds, still haven’t found any on the solar system’s second-smallest planet. There are no little green ferns on Mars, let alone little green men. Millions of bacteria thrive in a pinch of Earth’s soil, but it appears as if not a single one inhabits Mars. Read the review |
| The Great Indoors By Emily Anthes Open-office designs, paradoxically, reduce face-to-face interactions, by 72% in one example. A study of six individuals locked together in a habitat for a year revealed that the subjects most desired privacy, a place where others wouldn’t be constantly intruding on them. Read the review |
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Remarkable Women: Biographical treatments of Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O’Connor and Sarah Bernhardt. Read the review |
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| | | Utopia Avenue By David Mitchell The eighth novel by David Mitchell, which follows a ragtag group of rock musicians who form a band in 1967, adds a dollop of the supernatural to an otherwise straightforward yarn. But it’s really about the thrill of making art at a time when all the rules are suddenly up for grabs. Read the review |
| The Shapeless Unease By Samantha Harvey The novelist Samantha Harvey’s memoir of sleeplessness employs a fiction writer's tricks. Some passages are written in a detached third-person voice, as if by a prim clinician, and hint that she might be histrionic: “Question these factors as sufficient triggers for insomnia?” Read the review |
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Hollywood Antics: Oddity abounds in “Memoirs and Misinformation,” Jim Carrey’s faux-autobiographical novel, co-written with Dana Vachon, and Charlie Kaufman’s “Antkind.” Read the review |
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| From Your Bookshelves . . . |
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Holmesian: We asked for your favorite volumes of letters. Michael Polelle replies: “A memorable collection of correspondence is the letters between Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Harold Laski, English economist and chairman of the British Labour Party. I nominate it because the letters show the depth and extent of Holmes’s intelligence. |
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“The letters range far beyond the law to political theory and philosophical speculation. Holmes lived until 93, but his mind remained young and supple. Though he took a dim view of socialism, as he did of most salvation doctrines, he had no problem discussing -isms with those who thought differently. “I think his embrace of free speech, irrespective of one’s deepest personal beliefs, is being lost in an America where business and the academic world, despite their differences, increasingly fall all over themselves trying to be politically correct for themselves and others.” |
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| Five Best: Harold Schechter |
Crimes Into Novels Into Movies |
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The author, most recently, of “Ripped From the Headlines! The Shocking True Stories Behind the Movies’ Most Memorable Crimes.” Read the article |
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An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser (1925) Double Indemnity By James M. Cain (1943) Looking for Mr. Goodbar By Judith Rossner (1975) The Night of the Hunter By Davis Grubb (1953) Psycho By Robert Bloch (1959) |
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