Michael Walzer, political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., recently announced he would be retiring from his post as co-editor of Dissent. After 50 years with the quarterly (roughly 20 of them as co-editor), Walzer is stepping down to concentrate on other projects (including writing a book, editing two more volumes of The Jewish Political Tradition, and lecturing at Yale). “I just can’t keep up anymore,” he told The New Republic.

In Dissent’s spring issue Michael Kazin, Martha C. Nussbaum, Brian Morton, and Avishai Margalit offered reflections on Walzer’s tenure. For Kazin, Walzer is a “supremely rational man,” for Nussbaum, he is “The Mensch.” Walzer himself provided the last word: “At seventy-eight, I still want to be an intellectual, and I still want to write for Dissent.”

While Walzer’s intellectual…

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Jessica Burstein is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She specializes in modern British and American literature and culture.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

I look at e-mail and the Guardian online, since it has a better sense of proportion than American papers. Then I look at The New York Times. I have a friend in New York who reads everything and sends me articles that I need, even before I know I need them.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

I receive The London Review of Books in the mail, as well as online; ditto for The New York Review of Books. I read The New Yorker online—my Internet-less mother requires the hard-copy version, so I have my minions get that to her. That’s the magazine I grew up with, and as much as the cartoon …

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In May 1942, in the wake of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gordon K. Hirabayashi had no doubt that the United States government was acting unconstitutionally in imposing curfews, loyalty oaths, and mass removal and internment on Japanese-Americans living along the West Coast.

So Hirabayashi, then a University of Washington student, defied two orders—one imposing curfews, another requiring anyone officials deemed a possible enemy to fill out a “loyalty questionnaire.” For that he was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned.

He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1943, it ruled against him. In 1987, via a rarely used legal doctrine, the high court overturned his conviction.

Hirabayashi’s stance made him a household name in Japanese-American circles, and among civil-rights advocates, more generally. As a result, his struggle and case have been analyzed every which way…

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Ezekiel J. Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (Random House).

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

The New York Times. In print. I’m boring.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile/tablet?

I get The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the New Republic, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Businessweek. I think that might be it. I read these in print—I’m old-fashioned.

Q: What are the best articles and books you’ve read recently?

One book I read that I really like is Jerusalem: The Biography, by Montefiore. I’m also in the midst of a book that’s coming…

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Academics were among the winners of Pulitzer Prizes in History, Letters, and Music announced this afternoon.

In History, Fredrik Logevall won for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), cited as “a balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road to full-blown war.” Logevall is a professor of international studies and of history at Cornell University, where he also directs the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

In Fiction, Adam Johnson, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, was lauded for his “exquisitely crafted” novel The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) set in totalitarian North Korea.

The Pulitzer in Poetry went to Sharon Olds for Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf), a collection of “unflinching poems” on the…

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Adam Grant is a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Viking). He is a former advertising director, Junior Olympic springboard diver, and professional magician.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

Without fail, when I wake up, I immediately gravitate to the most mesmerizing, so-enthralling-that-I-can’t-put-it-down genre of our era: e-mail. Luckily, on most mornings, my inbox is sprinkled with at least a few e-mails that open the door to exciting stories. Sometimes it’s a gripping New York Times story; in other cases, it’s an article about a mind-boggling new finding from psychology.

Q: What are the best articles and books you’ve read recently?

I loved Barry Schwartz’s call in The Atlantic for a council of psychological advisers to the…

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A generous new writers’ award has made its debut. Today, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University announced the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes, a global award for writers endowed by a gift from the late novelist Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell. Windham, who died in 2010, left his papers to the Beinecke.

Nine writers, ages 33 to 87, none of whom knew they were nominated, won $150,000 prizes for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The only condition? Participate in a multi-day literary festival at Yale in September where the awards will be given.

Academics among the winners were:

Adina Hoffman, who has taught at Wesleyan, Middlebury, and New York Universities, and been a fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Her books include My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the…

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Marianne Boruch

Claremont Graduate University has announced that Marianne Boruch has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013. The prize, $100,000, is given annually to a mid-career poet and is one of the largest monetary awards for poetry in the United States. Boruch, who teaches at Purdue University and Warren Wilson College, won for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press).

In addition, the poet Heidy Steidlmayer will receive $10,000 as winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her collection Fowling Piece (Tri-Quarterly).

Visit CGU for additional information and a list of finalists for both awards.

Literary anthologizing is always a fraught undertaking. No two editors will find the same set of works worthy, and every anthology will—if publishers are half-smart—have plenty of potential readers, many of whom will cavil about particular selections and omissions.

In the poetry world, that proved much the case in late 2011 when The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry appeared. Rita Dove, a former US Poet Laureate and the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, edited it, and took enormous flak for her judgment.

In a new edition of Postmodern American Poetry, due out in March from W.W. Norton, editor Paul Hoover is on safer ground if only because devotees of experimental poetry comprise a small subset of all poets and poetry readers, and because even large numbers of the devoted will surely find much of what Hoover has selected baffling.

Much postmodern…

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Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton University Press) took the highest honor, the R.R. Hawkins Award, at the PROSE awards handed out yesterday at the annual conference of the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division.

Among other winners, a second Princeton book, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, won for excellence in the social sciences.

The University of California Press won for excellence in the physical sciences and mathematics with its Atlas of Yellowstone, by W. Andrew Marcus, James E. Meacham, Ann W. Rodman, and Alethea Y. Steingisser.

Harvard University Press won for excellence in the biological and life sciences with…

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