Plus: A Price Tag on Life; Resisting the Nazis; Konstantin Vaginov; Sandra Day O'Connor
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Linda Greenhouse assesses Justice Anthony Kennedy’s legacy; Trevor Jackson asks why we let economists determine the value of life; Joshua Hammer commemorates acts of resistance against the Nazis; Sophie Pinkham celebrates the early Soviet writer Konstantin Vaginov; a poem by Chloe Wilson; and, from the archives, Linda Greenhouse on Sandra Day O’Connor. Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning. For half a century the US government has assigned a dollar value to human life. By denying that the EPA needs to mitigate carbon emissions, the Trump administration is driving that value down to zero. Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance? In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor. Free from the ArchivesIn our March 12 issue, Linda Greenhouse writes about Anthony Kennedy’s memoir and the end of a nearly fifty-year period in the Supreme Court’s history—from 1974 to 2020—when “a series of three justices, Lewis Powell, [Sandra Day] O’Connor, and Kennedy,…occupied the Court’s ideological center and, as [the law professor Richard M.] Re puts it, ‘held the key to major victories.’” In our November 7, 2019, issue, Greenhouse wrote about O’Connor’s legacy on the Court—where she was known for “her distinctive brand of center-right pragmatism”—and her place in history. The legal academy has tended to be dismissive of Sandra Day O’Connor, arguing that she had no overarching theory of constitutional interpretation. But the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver. New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems. Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free. You are receiving this message because you signed up
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