"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities."

For Summer 2026 Reading Recommendations, we asked members of the JHI community to suggest texts related to intellectual history, broadly conceived. Responses spanned ecology and animality, the material life of texts, Asian feminisms, and the concepts of work, excess, and accountability.

What We’re Reading: Summer 2026

By the JHI Community

web.sas.upenn.edu

"That things 'just go on like this' *is* the catastrophe." — Walter Benjamin www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Chicago air quality worst in the world as Canada wildfire smoke chokes skies; beaches closed, events canceled

Chicago air quality is now hazardous as Canadian wildfire smoke has settled in an acrid haze over the area Thursday morning.

cbsnews.com

‘The majority is no longer young. Older generations can and do outvote younger ones. Having elderly representatives no longer looks like a check on anything. It is more like another finger on an unbalanced scale.’ David Runciman on gerontocracy. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

David Runciman · The Cult of Longevity

We don’t have a politics of what works so much as a politics of what older citizens won’t notice. All human beings...

lrb.co.uk

Meghan O’Gieblyn: "An argument rarely comes to me fully formed." It "emerges through the writing itself, as I try to respond to some inchoate inner tension that’s caused, for example, by a challenging passage of philosophy, or an assumption...repeated, unthinkingly, in public discourse" (NYRB) /1

in rochester just to explore a bit with the family and took some time on my own to reflect on the life of one of the city’s most famous citizens, frederick douglass youtu.be/zTa_qiiZGiQ?...

The Fight Never Ends

YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie

youtu.be

Jackson.

Incisive reflection by Gary Wilder on the significance of the encampment movement: “The student movement disrupted the mechanism that impels us to accommodate to the webs of uncanny barbarism that encircle us.” @versobooks.bsky.social www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/t...

The University We Wish to See: Or, Learning from the Encampments

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances … forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator --Karl Marx  I We have now marked the...

versobooks.com

Germany's far-right AfD, endorsed by Elon Musk, is going after the Bauhaus school for "deracination... dislocation" and for "avoiding any sign of national rootedness."

NEWS: In a stunning upset, Mamdani-backed Darializa Avila Chevalier will defeat five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the NY-13 congressional primary. With victories by Lander, Valdez, and now Avila Chevalier, Mamdani went 3-for-3 with his endorsements in New York City's Democratic primaries.

Glad to share my review of Andreas Malm's provocative short book on Palestine and climate catastrophe, which explores connections between two seemingly unrelated "nakbas" (Arabic for catastrophe) on both historical-material and political-metaphorical levels. PDF below. @versobooks.bsky.social

"The Nazis who survived the war were all executed at Nuremberg" is Cold War-era historical revisionism that the US needs to tell itself, to avoid confronting how many high-ranking ex-Nazis were simply rehabilitated and allowed back into West German and US politics in the name of anti-Communism.

Joel S.@joelhs.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ben-Gvir is a monstrous war criminal who belongs in the Hague, but this is rank Holocaust revisionism designed to use anti-Zionism as an entree into questioning all of Jewish history.

‘If Marcel Duchamp rejected painting, it also rejected him: he was a poor painter, as the first gallery, dotted with splotchy landscapes and unlovely nudes in the manner of Monet and Degas, makes clear.’ Hal Foster on the Duchamp retrospective at MoMA. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Hal Foster · At MoMA: A Dose of Duchamp

In​ 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared...

lrb.co.uk

Props to CNN’s chyron writer:

Highly recommend the new exhibition at Spore Berlin on colonial exploitation, genocide, environmental degradation, and ongoing extraction in the former German colony in Namibia—a collab between Forensic Architecture and indigenous artists, scholars, and activists www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Got to see the brilliant @triofrancos.bsky.social present her book *Extraction* in Berlin for the launch of the German edition from @suhrkamp.de

The star of the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s exhibition on "Nature in German History": die Kartoffel / der Erdapfel

Excellent event in Berlin tonight launching the conference volume “Hijacking Memory,” ft. Emily Dische-Becker, Susan Neiman, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, & Gilbert Achcar, who all condemned the abuse of Holocaust memory for authoritarian ends from Germany, to the U.S., to Israel

‘They are disturbing the dead’: reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century – my latest @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

‘They are disturbing the dead’: reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century

At least 3,000 Herero and Nama people died in a German concentration camp at Shark Island, Namibia. A new forensic exhibition in Berlin is using digital technology to unearth how colonisers scarred a ...

theguardian.com

"German Arrogance": State fails to secure a rotating seat on the UN Security Council, marking "a foreign policy catastrophe." Among the reasons: "Merz repeatedly managed to weaken Germany's commitment to international law in order to justify military interventions..." www.zeit.de/politik/ausl...

UN-Sicherheitsrat: Deutsche Arroganz

Deutschland verfehlt den Sitz im Sicherheitsrat. Eine Niederlage, die nicht nur an einer späten Kandidatur lag. Politische Positionen und Selbstverständnis stimmen nicht.

zeit.de

Today @ktbberlin.bsky.social: "Crisis and Transformation" ft. Dipesh Chakrabarty et al. Rahel Jaeggi: “We are no longer in an age of crisis but an age of catastrophe.” The aim is to convert (1st order) catastrophes into (2nd order) crises amenable to collective problem-solving & learning processes.

The Columbia University settlement with the Trump administration included a $21 million fund for compensating Jewish faculty and staff for an allegedly hostile work environment. Now Jewish faculty who claim they were harassed for being pro-Palestine are applying. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

‘We were attacked as bad Jews’: Columbia faculty who supported Gaza protests file claims with Trump’s antisemitism fund

Faculty who support Palestinian rights are applying for compensation, claiming they faced harassment as Jews for their positions

theguardian.com

“My Jewishness demands that I honor my ancestors and the only way I know to do that is to oppose war, violence and injustice and fight for ‘never again for anyone’,” Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of antisemitism and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, wrote” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

‘We were attacked as bad Jews’: Columbia faculty who supported Gaza protests file claims with Trump’s antisemitism fund

Faculty who support Palestinian rights are applying for compensation, claiming they faced harassment as Jews for their positions

theguardian.com

Breaking News: The House voted to end the war in Iran, as four Republicans sided with Democrats in a striking rebuke to President Trump. nyti.ms/4ucxdsY

BREAKING: The House just passed a war powers resolution to rein in Trump’s ability to wage war on Iran. After numerous attempts, the legislation passed for the first time, with four Republicans joining every Democrat in support.

The American mind cannot comprehend

Great to catch Johannes von Moltke speak in Berlin today on America’s rightward drift, including the 1619 vs 1776 Projects; anti-intellectual campaigns against universities; and the online propaganda outlet PragerU as a right-wing populist alternative to the overpriced university

Smart interview with Vivek Chibber criticizing "inevitablist" theories of capitalist breakdown, including the latest version of this argument centered on "catastrophist" accounts of climate change that he finds paralyzing rather than mobilizing. jacobin.com/2026/05/capi...

Capitalism Won’t Collapse on Its Own

Capitalism’s recurring crises have long fueled predictions of its inevitable demise. Vivek Chibber explains why breakdown isn’t guaranteed — and why political agency, not historical laws, will determi...

jacobin.com

At UChicago, human rights are now a “political statement” uhighmidway.com/32453/showca...

To preserve neutrality, university says pride flag can’t be flown - U-High Midway

A tradition of raising a pride flag on the flagpole in Blaine Courtyard for Pride Month in June will not continue this year, as University of Chicago administrators determined that the flag qualifies ...

uhighmidway.com

Berlin till June 11 🥨 Sag Hallöschen! June 4-5 Critical Theory in Berlin conference “Crisis and Trnasformation”; June 8 Hijacking Memory launch at Roter Salon; June 9-10 conference “Assessing the State of Holocaust Studies”; and stay tuned for a smaller event in the works on German Holocaust memory