Brian Bergstrom

Another way to put this is that all social movements are also intellectual movements: They both contribute to and rely on the ideological groundwater of society. Williams would have us believe that someone who smashes a storefront window in Minneapolis or pitches a tent in Morningside Heights is engaged in the opposite of thinking. But the panicking ruling class wasn’t just interested in flattening the encampments or quelling the looters; it wanted to crush the ideas that these things represented. This is what Baldwin was getting at when spoke of the “spiritual state” of America. “The political institutions of any nation,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time, “are always menaced and controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.” What he meant, I think, was that every time a person contests or defends a political situation, they are also contesting or defending the intellectual terms on which that contest is conducted. You cannot fight without fighting about how you fight. That is why Williams cares so desperately about what the summer of 2020 made us think, even if the protests manifestly failed to achieve their objective goals; it is also why liberal institutions were so eager to snatch up these ideas and exhaust their potential before tossing us back the husks. What Mamdani’s win suggests, however, is that they did not get them all.

This is actually a very beautiful essay on the meaning and means of political activism; the takedown of Williams is all the more devastating for being kind of a casually tossed-off sideline

That, says Williams, is what made the summer of 2020 so long and hot: The general amelioration of racism in America had left many Black people with a festering need to “revolt against something.” In his famous case for reparations, Coates argued that “no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.” But this much-touted wealth gap, Williams tells us, largely reflects the disparity between the richest Black people and the richest white people, with reassuringly narrow gaps among the lower classes. Williams relies here on the arguments of Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, a pair of grouchy class-first Marxists who have long made the case that social justice is, at best, a program for “redistributing skin colors” more evenly within the upper classes rather than an attempt to redistribute wealth. It should be pointed out here that, unlike Reed or Michaels, Williams is clearly against the redistribution of wealth. (He was horrified when activists stated that, in a just world, the Poetry Foundation would give away its $257 million endowment to “those whose labor amassed those funds.”) Instead, Williams is content to observe that skin colors are already well distributed among the poor and whatever inequalities remain are certainly not worth burning down a liquor store over.

Exquisite

Stick it straight in my veiiiiins

Gratuitous pit shot Tuesday

Wow this is disgusting, both conceptually but also just looking at it

August 2025 Reads for the Rest of Us The best feminist books written by women, Black, brown, AAPI, LGBTQ, Native, disabled, trans, nonbinary writers in August 2025.

Great to have Dilemmas featured in Ms. Magazine!

msmagazine.com/2025/08/01/b...

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25 Notable Books by Women in Translation for 2025 Explore 25 powerful books by women in translation for 2025. Add fresh international voices to your reading list.

An interesting list for #WIT month (and yes, it includes a nice notice for Dilemmas! My other pick from this list is Good and Evil and Other Stories, by Samanta Schweblin (Megan McDowell, trans.)

#womenintranslation #translation #translatedliterature #japaneseliterature

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Israel’s most famous novelist says his country is committing genocide. David Grossman, widely considered to be Israel’s most prominent novelist, has described his country’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide. Speaking to Italian daily La Repubblica, in an inte…

David Grossman: “But now I can’t help myself—not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there.”

Fig and rosemary

Blueberry

Strawberry cream cheese

Cherry

Lately I've been going galette-crazy 🤷

What a wonderful review 🥰 Thank you!

"It is, indeed, Yamamoto’s 'difficult' heroines and her ambiguous endings, and her interest in the emotional contours of women’s everyday lives, that is on full display in the collection and makes it a both powerful and delightful read."

The first sentence is ここのところ私は編みぐるみにはまっている。But the very next sentence is in the past (and the story is in the narrative past overall). Ahh, Japanese

For those of you interested in the ins and outs of translation, that "Lately" was one of the most revised word choices in the entire book (past-tense narration in Japanese can accommodate locutions implying the present tense, like "recently," "now," etc. in a way English has a hard time with)

I have indeed found this to be true

12 Must-Read Books of August 2025 - Chicago Review of Books Here are the 12 books you need to read this August.

Happy to find The Dilemmas of Working Women listed among 12 Must-Read Books of August chosen by the Chicago Review of Books!

"Funny, at times self-deprecating, and unafraid to lean into the darkness, Fumio Yamamoto’s masterpiece is sure to find resonance with readers today."

The Rent Is Too Damn High guy saying you're Right and You Should Say It

Click through for a very cool calendar of short stories!

A lot of Japanese places (izakaya, ramen, etc.) do.

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I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories Ghost Stories

Sorry, that seems to be a bad Bookshop link. Here's one that should work:

bookshop.org/p/books/i-wa...

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The spooky, gray-framed cover of the book I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories, the new volume of Calico collections of translated literature from The Center for the Art of Translation

It's a bit early to announce, but regardless: there's a new Calico volume coming out in March 2026, a collection of ghost stories from around the world, including my translation of a story by Tomoyuki Hoshino ("Jupiter"/木星)!

Also, look at this cover!

bookshop.org/.../i-was-al....

YouTube video by Jenny Fern's Library Recent Reads I'd Like to Own

Online reviews are driven by free digital ARCs sent by publishers or made available at places like NetGalley.

So there's something lovely about being featured in a video about books a reviewer liked so much she wants to buy them even after reading the free ARC 🥰

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu9p...

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Gratuitous pit shot Tuesday

Hugh Dancy's reading of the Kawakami's "I Won't Let You Go" is absolutely amazing, don't miss it