David

Lost between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, the 1990s has been set aside as a “holiday from history.” But we are past due for a serious reckoning with the meaning of the decade, as Nicole Hemmer argues in her bold new interpretation of American conservatism, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

Niki Hemmer is a research scholar at Columbia University and a frequent writer and commentator on politics. She contends that it was Ronald Reagan’s widely touted revolution that was the interlude. Though it continues to have a hold on how we understand conservative ideology today, the Reagan Revolution was not only unfinished, it was completely undone. Today’s Republican Party looks more like the isolationist and pessimistic Republican Party of the ‘30s and ‘40s than the big-tent Republican Party of the ‘80s.

Central to that shift in philosophy were players—from Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh—who began as Reagan staffers and acolytes. During the 1990s, however, they pulled away from a commitment to the conservative values Reagan had championed. Using a powerful and growing conservative media ecosystem to advance their cause, forces on the right replaced the popular politics of the Reagan era with a focus on base politics and a conservative opposition to the egalitarian ideals of democracy.

In Partisans, Hemmer makes a clear and compelling case that a new appreciation of the 1990s is both long overdue and a timely contribution toward understanding where American politics is today. In her sharp and lively telling, the 1990s are hardly a backwater. This is revelatory history, and will change the way we look at the present.

We might think that perfect harmony is the goal for healthy relationships—early ones between parents and children, and later in life between lovers, partners, friends, and siblings. But we all know that human interactions are messy, complicated, and confusing. According to psychologist Ed Tronick and pediatrician Claudia Gold, that is not only ok, it is crucial to our social and emotional development. In The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships Are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust, they show how working through complexity is the path to better relationships with the people we depend on and love. We might want to instantly smooth over the inevitable bumps, but the process of navigating around them builds resilience and hope.

Ed Tronick is the University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts (and, recently, the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the national organization Zero to Three). He is one of the first researchers to have shown that babies are profoundly affected by their parents’ emotional states and behavior. His renowned experiment, the “still face paradigm,” and the decades of research that followed its introduction, have led him to see how important messiness is to our well-being. That work has resulted in a fundamental shift in our understanding of human development.

Our highly evolved sense of self makes us separate, yet our survival depends on connection. And so we approximate, learning about one another iteratively, and gaining confidence in the process as we correct the mistakes and misunderstandings that inevitably arise. Drawing on careful observation of our earliest love relationships, The Power of Discord is a refreshing and original look at our ability to make meaning of our experiences. By showing how reparation is fundamental to our capacity to trust, Ed Tronick and Claudia Gold enable us to improve the many relationships in our lives.

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Robert Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler, political scientists at Johns Hopkins and Cornell, gathered with a group of colleagues, all of whom were looking for ways to explain the predicament facing democratic institutions in the US. They found themselves asking – and being asked—whether we were headed toward a profound crisis. Might history help us to understand where these threats had come from and how to respond to them?

As their book, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, makes clear, the looming crisis is not unprecedented. Indeed, we have endured similar ones before, starting in the early days of the republic and continuing to the present. Treating the current moment as unique distorts its meaning and misses the lessons that can be learned from the past.

Understanding which factors led to previous crisis moments offers some guidance about how we might weather the current disruption. And Lieberman and Mettler identify four distinct conditions that have produced democratic disruptions in the past and that also characterize the current political climate. None of them—political polarization, racial division, economic inequality, and executive aggrandizement—are new, but the fact that all of them are in play today is unprecedented, and alarming.

Four Threats is an urgent look at the complex interplay of these factors. By shining light on the durability of American democratic institutions, they also make clear that the challenge of defending and renewing our most essential institutions falls to all of us.

In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive charm and magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into a verdant Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches hang low over dismal swamps. Places like these–collectively known as swamplands or peatlands–often go unnoticed for their ecological splendor. They are as globally significant as rainforests, and function as critical carbon sinks for addressing our climate crisis. Yet, because of their reputation as wastelands, they are being systematically drained and degraded to make way for oil sands, mines, farms, and electricity.

In Swamplands, journalist Edward Struzik celebrates these wild places, venturing into windswept bogs in Kauai and the last remnants of an ancient peatland in the Mojave Desert. The secrets of the swamp aren’t for the faint of heart. Ed loses a shoe to an Arctic wolf and finds himself ankle-deep in water during a lightning storm. But, the rewards are sweeter for the struggle: an enchanting Calypso orchid; an elusive yellow moth thought to be extinct; ancient animals preserved in lifelike condition down to the fur.

Swamplands highlights the unappreciated struggle being waged to save peatlands by scientists, conservationists, and landowners around the world. An ode to peaty landscapes in all their offbeat glory, the book is also a demand for awareness of the myriad threats they face. It urges us to see the beauty and importance in these least likely of places­. Our planet’s survival might depend on it.