Parks: It seems to me you’re still avoiding my main question. If I am the world I experience, what is this sense I have of being a subject separate from the world? How can I be both subject and object?

Manzotti: What you call a subject is nothing but a particular combination of objects that are relative to another object, your body. Being a subject means no more than being experience, i.e. a collection of objects, relative to your body. You ask how, if this is the case, the feeling of “subjectivity” can arise. My answer is: thanks to two misconceptions.

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On May 9, in a twist that would have seemed far-fetched even on House of Cards, President Trump fired James Comey as director of the FBI on the recommendation of Jeff Sessions, his attorney general. The notion that Trump and Sessions took action against Comey because of his unfairness to Clinton may be the most brazen effort at “fake news” or “alternative facts” yet from a president who has shown no reluctance to lie, even and especially when the truth is plain for everyone to see.

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The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward, originated in her search for community and consolation after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

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Even if you think yourself a reluctant shopper, consider all of the resources used to create our material world: the steel to build our homes, the natural gas to fire our furnaces, the aluminum in our smartphones and tablets. In the world’s richest countries, consumption has ballooned by over a third in the past few decades to the point that in 2010, each person in the thirty-four richest nations consumed over 220 pounds of stuff every day. How did we come to be such voracious, irrepressible consumers? And how has all of this consuming changed the world? Those are the questions at the heart of Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things, each of its nearly seven hundred pages of text jam-packed with telling facts and counterintuitive provocations.

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James Gray’s film The Lost City of Z is distinguished by three things—a kind of ethnographer’s fascination with the behavior of men in groups; beautiful photography of the forest lushness of the Amazon basin, roughly two-thirds the size of the United States; and the driving force it gives to Percy H. Fawcett’s determination to do something that would dazzle the world.

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Although advances in science and technology are often portrayed as the work of solitary men—for example, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein—science has always been a collective enterprise, dependent on many individuals who work behind the scenes. This has become increasingly true as more scientists work on large research projects funded by governments and staffed by hundreds of technicians. Yet despite the collaborative nature of science, for too much of its history the work of women and scientists of color was exploited, deemed rudimentary, and unacknowledged.

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The fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Qin and Han Dynasty artifacts presents objects that lay buried in tombs for many centuries. Having been beautifully preserved underground for thousands of years, these objects delight us still. It is easy to forget that the past remains another country. But perhaps it isn’t a complete illusion.

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It comes as a surprise to a British reader to find World War I routinely referred to, by Americans, as America’s “forgotten war.” The British would never use such a term. It is true that certain significant aspects of the war have faded from the collective memory. Every one of us can remember why World War II was fought (“Hitler had to be stopped”), but few can do the same for World War I. Yes, the archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, but who the archduke was, and why his assassination led to general war, and why the war was or wasn’t worth fighting—that takes a rarer expertise to answer.

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The new Hulu TV series The Handmaid’s Tale has been enthusiastically acclaimed as a feminist classic. Fortunately for the show’s producers, if not for the rest of us, this scenario seems uncannily timely, given how many recent events suggest that, if men like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have their way, we might end up living in a dystopia of our own. But gradually it occurred to me that I was watching an orgy of violence against women—promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment.

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Since the first days of the Trump administration, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has been conducting what it calls targeted enforcement operations around the country. About 680 people were picked up during five days in February in coordinated actions in five cities. In March ICE announced at least 729 arrests in operations ranging from Virginia and Delaware to Oklahoma, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest. Local news reports of smaller actions appear daily. The agency said that those detained included many immigrants convicted of serious crimes, such as aggravated assault, spousal battery, and sex offenses with minors. ICE does not publish the names, citing privacy restrictions, so its claims about criminal histories cannot be easily verified. However, many of the people who have been rounded up do not appear to fit into the categories of malicious lawbreakers described by Trump and his homeland security secretary.

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