How do you write a life like that? It is presumed that artists make things while scientists discover them, the lives of the first leaving traces in what their minds produce, the second not so much, or, in the case of very technical and abstract inquiries, not at all. We tend to think that Philip Roth bears a different relationship to Portnoy’s Complaint than Albert Einstein does to E=mc
Hal Ebbott has raised an uncomfortable reality that our closest friends may not be the safest, and forces us to confront what we might have to do. Among Friends explores an old idea in male friendship. Volumes have been written about rich white men and the way they live. The topic in so many ways has been exhausted by the heavy, 20th-century novel Ebbott clearly aspires to write. But where Ebbott finds new ground is in attaching contemporary values to the examination, packaged in a way that recalls a different time and place, a different way of thinking, and in that dichotomy, has created something new and compelling for the present.
Death at the White Hart is, as such things go, a fairly traditional mystery. It isn’t particularly groundbreaking in terms of story or style. What it is, though, is genuinely compelling, an entertaining read full of interesting and three-dimensional characters that make the search through a village’s worth of red herrings and false leads more entertaining than it has any right to be.
I’d never known that Morrison had straddled the line between writer and editor. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t envisioned that someone could do both jobs at once, especially a writer of Morrison’s caliber. And I didn’t know then how many of the writers who surrounded her in the Norton volume—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Leon Forrest, Toni Cade Bambara—as well as figures beyond the anthology, such as Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton, had relied on Morrison to usher their books into the world. I certainly did not appreciate how dynamic—and complicated—both the art and the business of those collaborations had been for her.
Now readers can discover Morrison the bold and dogged editor, thanks to a deeply researched and illuminating new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams, a scholar of African American literature and the dean of Howard University Graduate School. Decades of path-clearing and advocacy had preceded the Norton anthology, and Morrison, as the first Black woman to hold a senior editor position at the prominent publishing house, had played a major part. In a 2022 interview, Gates remarked that Random House’s hiring of Morrison, at the height of the civil-rights movement, was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.”
The United States and China see eye to eye on very little these days, but there is one surprising point on which their top officials agree: the world is becoming multipolar. In one of his first interviews in office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the unipolar dominance the United States had enjoyed in recent decades was “an anomaly” and “a product of the end of the Cold War.” The United States, in his view, was no longer the unrivaled global hegemon but one of a handful of “great powers in different parts of the planet.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agrees. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Wang declared, “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality.”
To be sure, Beijing’s and Washington’s understandings of multipolarity are different.