What we've been up to

From the new issue: It feels like a bizarre and distinctly 1970s story: Patty Hearst, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped in 1974 by the radical leftist Symbionese Liberation Army and subsequently brainwashed (or so she later claimed) into robbing banks and making bombs. But as writer Ed Simon shows in "American Captivity," the story of Hearst has resonances that go back centuries in the American imagination—to colonial and frontier stories of violence, forced conversions, and innocence lost. Such captivity narratives mark a deep strain in our political mythologies.

"The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American…Traces of the form can be seen in the true-crime memoirs of someone like Hearst, but the trope is even more intrinsic to American self-understanding. Our literature brims with archetypal accounts of characters descending into the dark core of barbarism and emerging with a primal knowledge that transforms them into new persons."

Also from the new issue: It's hard to know how to talk about sex. Among other things, it's a topic of discussion that ends up veering quickly into questions of identity, culture, and power. Sex is, after all, an extremely private act with sometimes quite public consequences. It is shaped by intimate desires that are also formed by broader cultural and political conditions. As writer and critic Lily Meyer considers in her review of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, a more just and free society might be achieved at least in part by decoupling sex from power—and not reducing the former to the latter. But that's something feminist thinkers have been writing about for quite some time.

"Srinivasan seeks ambivalence as well as egalitarianism—or, rather, she seeks them in tandem. Her simultaneous possession of and discomfort with power pushes her toward a more complicated, less confident, and less comfortable vision of feminism than is presently dominant. It also pushes her toward inclusivity. In the essays collected here, Srinivasan takes up a feminist dream traceable directly to Simone de Beauvoir: a world in which, no matter who you are or who you desire, sex is free."

Want to read more from the new issue?

"A Tale of Two Stories: Meditations on the American Dream" by Angel Adams Parham.

Wilfred M. McClay on mystery.

"The First Authoritarian: Popper's Plato" by Tae-Yeoun Keum.

Ronald W. Dworkin writes about the medical humanities and the specialist.

"The Once and Vital Center" by Antón Barba-Kay.

Ian Marcus Corbin reviews After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman.

Witold Rybczynski on Frederick Law Olmsted: "The Man Who Built Forward Better."

Jackson Arn reviews David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

"The Return of the King: The Enchantments of a Rising Illiberalism" by Philip S. Gorski.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Niceness was never considered a virtue—or at least it never achieved the prestige of the cardinal virtues like justice or courage. Perhaps that's because ancient philosophers recognized that a commitment to niceness might, in some cases, hamper acts of justice or courage. As Matt Dinan, associate professor of philosophy at St. Thomas University, considers in "Be Nice" for the Fall 2018 Issue, new doubts have been raised in recent years about whether niceness and its close counterpart, civility, tend to marginalize those who would dare to speak up against injustice. But as Dinan argues, with a little help from Aristotle, niceness isn't always about cynically smoothing over differences.

"When it comes to virtue, it's difficult to find a better guide than Aristotle. While there is no description of the virtue of civility or niceness in his most famous account of the good life, the Nicomachean Ethics, he does present an array of seemingly minor virtues pertaining to common life that cover similar ground. Ranging from gentleness and honesty to wit or tact, the social virtues seem like a decided step down after the memorable peak of his discussion of moral virtue in greatness of soul. But it is precisely in contrast to greatness of soul that the social virtues emerge as so important."

From further afield:

At The New Atlantis, James Mumford writes about how dogmatically nonjudgmental psychotherapy is failing patients who need to hear hard truths.

For n+1, Will Tavlin tells the story of why Hollywood killed celluloid and how it explains what's going wrong with the movie industry.

In the pages of Christianity Today, Louis Markos reviews a new book on C.S. Lewis's medieval mind.