Jennifer Szalai

I wrote about something that's contested nowadays: empathy.

WaPo's Ron Charles, in his Book Club newsletter, on Meta's repeated questions about his plans to review Sarah Wynn-Williams's "Careless People": "In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me."

In the basement of LAX:

Recent book that’s worth reading: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Sometimes a bare recitation of the facts yields a devastating parenthetical: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/u...

An insightful essay. A few years ago I wrote about the literature of shame, including questions about shamelessness, salutary kinds of shame and what shaming can (and cannot) be for: www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/b...

And one more thing: It’s good to see a Hungarian who isn’t Orbán make international news.

I said this when Krasznahorkai won a National Book Award for translation several years ago, and I’ll say it again: This can only encourage Americans to learn how to pronounce the “sz“ sound, and I am here for it!

László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel! Here’s an essay I wrote about him in 2012: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

I was struck by that line too. I reviewed Walter’s book “How Civil Wars Start” when it was published way back in 2022. her analysis was incisive; I was hoping it wouldn’t be prescient: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/b...

Philippe Sands‘s excellent new book traces the links between the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and an old Nazi named Walter Rauff — two men who embraced the deployment of state power to torture and murder human beings.

I highly recommend Philippe Sands’s absorbing new book about Pinochet, a Nazi hiding out in Patagonia, and impunity: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/b...

Took a break from writing about political memoirs to review a big new biography of Bruce Lee [gift link] www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/b...

“But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.” — Nicole Hemmer www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...