What we've been up to

Web Features: Every injury of war is horrific, each in its own physical or psychological way. But traumatic injuries to the face, the kind that cause debilitating disfigurement and elicit social ostracism, are perhaps the most dreadful—and especially so in the long years before modern reconstructive surgery. In "Saving Face," her review of Lindsey Fitzharris's The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Men the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, Leann Davis Alspaugh, managing editor of THR, considers the life and work of surgeon Harold Gillies who was a pioneer in the field of plastic surgery. His skill at reconstructing the damaged faces of veterans required special insight into what makes us human.

"The face we present to the world—young or old, male or female, clean or dingy, whole or damaged—is the primary signifier we possess. To the stranger, it is our entire identity; to friends and loved ones, it is what makes us precious, distinctive, and, well, more than just a face. Unlike many other surgical procedures, the work of facial reconstruction requires a distinctively artful and humanistic form of care, because the surgeon is seeking nothing less than to restore the outward and visible expression of the inner character of a human being. What Gillies and his colleagues had to do was consider their patients' shattered faces at length and in depth to discern a roadmap to recovery—a task not for the faint of heart."

Read more from the Summer issue:

Christopher Sanford reviews The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham.

"Politics, Anyone?" by Charles Blattberg.

Paul Nedelisky reviews Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm.

Jay Tolson interviews Historian and Tocqueville Biographer Olivier Zunz.

Paul Franz reviews Not Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss.

"On Patrimony" by Brian Patrick Eha.

Ryan Kemp reviews The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith.

"Less" by Philip M. Weinstein.

B.D. McClay on whataboutism.

"Pastlessness" by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.

Carl Elliott considers the conundrum of ethics and sensitivity trainings.

"The Tragedy of the American Political Tradition" by Nick Burns.

Jay Tolson reviews The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization by Harold James.

"The Evangelical Question in the History of American Religion" by Kirsten Sanders.

John Owen writes about the temptation to make a culture war out of the Ukraine war.

"Vladimir and Volodymyr: A Pivotal Moment in History" by Martha Bayles.

Philip S. Gorski reviews a new biography of sociologist Robert Bellah.

"A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation" by Johann N. Neem.

Eric B. Schnurer writes about the crisis of governance in an increasingly virtual and massively distributed world.

"Nietzsche's Quarrel with History" by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Kyle Edward Williams introduces "The Use and Abuse of History."

From the archives: Once a stage of life toward which we might aspire, adulthood has come to be seen by many as neither inevitable nor necessarily desirable. What happens to a culture when people don't want to grow up? In his essay for the spring 2009 issue, "Wither Adulthood?" Institute founder and executive director James Davison Hunter argues that our loss of confidence in what it means to be a successful adult is due, in part, to the "deinstitutionalization" of cultural rites and values that used to make adulthood meaningful.

"For the better part of the twentieth century, people had a pretty good idea of what it meant to be an adult and saw this as something worth pursuing. Steady employment, marriage, and home ownership were some of the outward markings of adulthood; responsibility, commitment, loyalty, and hard work were the inward virtues that made these possible. It was not something one fell into but something that one aspired to. Not to mature into adulthood in these ways was a matter of some shame. This is far more dubious today…. Adulthood is a destination one cannot quite locate, the passage to which is no longer clear."

From further afield:

For his newsletter, L.M. Sacasas considers the history what we are talking about when we talk about the "problem of attention."

At Commonweal, Phil Christman asks, "What, exactly, is David Bentley Hart's deal?"

For the Washington Examiner, Dominic Green writes about the tangled story of Queen Elizabeth II and the Sex Pistols.