Book review by Isabel Hull @ London Review of Books, for April 2018 print issue (free online), of The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro , 608 pp, September 2017. Lede:

By Michele Cottle @ TheAtlantic.com, April 24

As the culture war between gay rights and religious liberty rages, conservatives are livid that the president renominated Chai Feldblum at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has decided against recusing himself from the investigation into President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, but will consider stepping back from specific questions tied to the probe, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I wonder if this is actually auspicious for the investigation. For all his faults, Sessions seems less inclined to toady to Trump these days. Assuming he doesn't interfere with the investigation, Trump would have to remove both Sessions and Rosenstein (and Francisco?) to find someone who would close the Cohen case.

I won’t try to paraphrase this Lithub excellent essay by Rebecca  Solnit.

This is just one example in the well-wriiten look at how things have changed on the empathy train:

...PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?”

By Ian Bremmer @ CBSNews.com, April 23. (In his new book, "Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism," Eurasia Group president and CBS News senior global affairs contributor Bremmer writes about the growing nationalism around the world and support for anti-establishment politicians.)

While I don't agree with everything Poli-Sci Prof. Bremmer says in this op-ed, I find this part of his essay a good big picture to keep in mind:

By Ashley Southall @ NYTimes.com, April 20

In East New York, Brooklyn, a police observation tower still hovers over the intersection where a 16-year-old boy was gunned down on his way home from playing basketball last November.