news archive
January 2026
Posted 01.21.26: “Drawing on a wealth of archival material, biographer Polito reframes Bob Dylan's ‘second thirty years' as a period of unprecedented creativity and growth . . . Intimate details and astute critiques coalesce into a rich portrait of an artist ceaselessly remaking himself. Dylan devotees couldn't ask for a more thorough consideration of an under-studied part of his oeuvre.”—Publishers Weekly; “A ramble through the latter-day work of the ever-estimable Bob Dylan.... An insightful look at Dylan's lesser-known works, in all their multitudes.”—Kirkus Reviews on Robert Polito's forthcoming After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace
Posted 01.19.26: "Amar, a Yale constitutional scholar with wide-ranging interests and expertise, isn't interested in the standard telling. That much was clear from The Words That Made Us, the first installment in the trilogy in which Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920 sits in the middle position. His project is more ambitious and considerably more unsettling. He wants readers not merely to revisit these four-score tumultuous years, following the first 80 of independence and national identity, but to reconsider how constitutions change, who participates in that change, and how the 20th century inherited an order profoundly different from what the Constitution's Framers crafted. Amar's history isn't about what law students generally study, which is courts unspooling legal doctrine from text or common law. It's a story of popular mobilization, political struggle, and the cumulative redefinition of basic constitutional commitments. The Constitution that emerged by 1920—textually, structurally, in lived practice—had become something genuinely new.... Textual amendment is only part of the story. Amar emphasizes what he calls the nation's 'constitutional conversation,' the extended political and social processes that give amendments meaning over time.... Amar is an exceptional stylist. He delights in patterns of parallelism, in unexpected symmetries between eras, in the serendipity of historical coincidence. He has a gift for recovering the personalities that animated the period—from recognized giants like Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Stanton to lesser-known figures whose activism shaped constitutional meaning from the grassroots. His prose makes these characters vivid, reminding us that constitutional change has always been driven by people with complicated motives, remarkable courage, and sometimes surprising blind spots....Amar's narrative is rich—almost decadent—with intricately drawn episodes, political context, and biographical color."—Tal Fortgang, The Washington Free Beacon, on Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920.