In this week's issue:

• France's most storied independent bookshop chain — 16 stores, 140 years old, 500 employees — in court-supervised reorganization and betting its survival on used books
• Justin Garson's new history of how NIMH psychiatrists used LSD and amphetamines to induce schizophrenia in human subjects, and what it did to American psychiatry
• Deborah Lutz's first full Emily Brontë biography in over twenty years, drawing on previously inaccessible manuscripts to present a very different Brontë than the legend
• A GWU Illiberalism Studies Program essay tracing how a little-known Argentine writer became the dominant intellectual of the transnational Spanish-speaking radical right

Here we go.

Top Stories

• First full Emily Brontë biography in over twenty years draws on previously inaccessible manuscripts. Deborah Lutz's This Dark Night (Bloomsbury) is reviewed in The Guardian by Samantha Ellis, who finds it presents Brontë as a practical, grounded woman writing between domestic tasks — a sustained counterargument to the myth of the deranged visionary.
• 728-page biography of Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist who ran for New York mayor, finally published 55 years after his death. Amy Newman's Barnett Newman: Here (Princeton University Press) is newly featured in The Art Newspaper; among the recoveries is Newman's 1933 mayoral campaign run on a platform titled "Need for Political Action by Men of Culture."
• Tyler Austin Harper's Atlantic essay on the Mellon Foundation's pivot to social-justice grantmaking is back in active circulation. Harper appeared on The Dispatch podcast on April 29; the essay's core data point — Mellon disbursed $542M in 2024 versus the NEH's $78M — continues to anchor the debate, which has drawn a Jesse Helms comparison from Wesleyan president Michael Roth and a public reply from Harper.
• The Marginalian revisits Iris Murdoch's concept of "unselfing" from The Sovereignty of Good. The April 28 essay traces Murdoch's argument that encounters with beauty — in nature and art — pull the self away from egocentric preoccupation, a process Murdoch calls one of the most reliable moral mechanisms available to ordinary people.
• @KumaloProf argues on X that the book review essay is a mechanism of intellectual accountability and a form of resistance to AI-accelerated reading. The thread frames slow, methodic reviewing as not merely a scholarly practice but a structural defense of the kind of deep textual engagement that rapid AI-assisted consumption displaces.
• Lea Ypi on overcoming capitalism without repeating the errors of totalitarianism — an interview in Philosophie Magazine. The LSE political theorist and author of Free lays out how socialist ideals of liberty and justice can be pursued while taking seriously the historical record of what happens when they are pursued badly.
• A new GWU Illiberalism Studies Program essay traces Agustín Laje's evolution from fringe figure to dominant intellectual of the Spanish-speaking transnational radical right. The longform piece by Ezequiel Saferstein treats Laje as an object of serious political-intellectual history, mapping the networks and publishing infrastructure that made him a major ideological force across Latin America and Spain.
• AUB Press releases a new critical reading of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry in its Sheikh Zayed Series. The study treats Darwish's work as an evolving, interconnected corpus rather than a set of discrete collections — a methodological reframe with implications for how his full oeuvre is taught and interpreted.

Gibert, France's Oldest Independent Bookshop Chain, Files for Court-Supervised Reorganization

Financière Palidis, the legal owner of the groupe Gibert — known commercially as Gibert Joseph and Gibert Jeune — filed for redressement judiciaire (court-supervised reorganization) on Monday, April 27. The Tribunal de commerce de Paris validated the filing on Tuesday, April 28, opening a six-month observation period during which the company will operate under court supervision while it develops a restructuring plan. The chain, founded in 1886 and headquartered in Paris's Latin Quarter, reunified its two historic brands in 2017 and today runs 16 stores across 12 French cities, including five in Paris, with 500 employees.

The numbers tell the story: 2025 revenue was €86 million, of which used books accounted for 35% (approximately €30 million). Management has cited what it calls a "scissors effect": fixed costs — particularly rent and energy — have risen sharply while the new-book market has contracted and margin compression has tightened further. The chain's response is to bet its recovery on the second-hand trade, with a plan to double used-book revenue to €60 million by 2029, effectively reorienting the business model around the segment that has held up. Employee representative Sophie Rachet expressed concern for the chain's 500 workers, whose situation will depend on the shape of any reorganization plan submitted during the observation period.

This story belongs to a different crisis than the editorial capture controversies (Bolloré/Grasset) that have dominated French publishing discourse in recent months. Where that story is about who controls the content of books, the Gibert filing is about the structural economics of independent bookselling — the squeeze between commercial landlords, energy markets, and a declining market for new books at compressed margins. Gibert's cultural weight is hard to overstate: as The Times has put it, the Latin Quarter stores are something close to a "cathedral" of French literary life, a city institution that has supplied generations of students and scholars. Whether the used-book pivot is a genuine survival strategy or a slower form of decline will become clearer over the six-month observation period.

Sources: France 24 / AFP, April 27 · France Info, April 28 · The Times

Upcoming Events

• PEN America World Voices Festival 2026. April 29–May 2, New York City; 140 writers from 40+ countries, with both free and ticketed events across venues.
• Brown University Cogut Institute: Workshop on the Moral and Political Significance of Art. May 2, 2026; collaborative public workshop at Brown's Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
• Byron Writers Festival 2026. August 14–16, Byron Bay, Australia; 30th anniversary edition with Trent Dalton among the first names announced for the lineup.
• Auckland Writers Festival 2026. May 12–17, Auckland, New Zealand; ticketed sessions across multiple venues.
• Deborah Lutz on Wuthering Heights — WBUR CitySpace. June 16, 2026, Boston; in-person event with the author of the new Emily Brontë biography.

The Madness Pill: How NIMH Researchers Used Psychedelics to Chase the Dopamine Hypothesis

Justin Garson's new book The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia (St. Martin's Press, April 28, 2026) traces the rise and fall of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia through a largely forgotten chapter in the history of American psychiatry. Garson — a philosopher whose previous book Madness: A Philosophical Exploration was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 — focuses on NIMH-funded researchers who, from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, administered LSD, STP, and high-dose amphetamines to both animal and human subjects in an attempt to model schizophrenia experimentally. Among the central figures are Burton Angrist, a Bellevue psychiatrist, and Solomon Snyder, a Johns Hopkins professor who would later become one of the most decorated neuroscientists of his generation.

The book's argument, as reviewed by Christopher Lane (Professor Emeritus of Medical Humanities at Northwestern University) in his Psychology Today "Side Effects" blog, is that this experimental program was decisive in shaping the dopamine hypothesis — the theory, dominant for decades, that schizophrenia results from excess dopaminergic activity. The research strategy was straightforward and, in retrospect, troubling: if psychedelics and stimulants could induce psychosis, then the neurochemical pathways they acted on might explain schizophrenia itself. The hypothesis generated a generation of antipsychotic drug development but also, Lane's review suggests, a kind of pharmacological tunnel vision that may have foreclosed other explanatory frameworks.

Lane's review, titled "The Drugs Meant to Induce Madness," emphasizes the book's contribution to the history and philosophy of psychiatry — a field increasingly asking how specific theoretical commitments became institutionally entrenched. The timing is notable: the book appears amid a broader cultural reassessment of both psychedelics (now the subject of serious therapeutic research) and the limits of the dopamine hypothesis (which has faced sustained empirical challenge since the 1990s). Garson's contribution is to historicize how that hypothesis got built in the first place, and at what human cost.

Sources: Christopher Lane, Psychology Today, April 28, 2026

Odds and Ends

• Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling reviewed in The Daily Northwestern. The student paper calls it meticulously researched narrative nonfiction that masterfully unravels a web of lies — which is either a genuine scoop of critical judgment or the best argument for reading student newspapers.
• Conservative Catholic intellectuals have been conspicuously quiet about Trump's attacks on Pope Leo XIV, New Lines Magazine reports. The piece maps who has spoken out and who has stayed silent, with no clear explanation yet for the pattern.
• Quebec indie bookstore La Liberté faces boycott calls for hosting an Éric Duhaime book launch — Le Devoir. The bookstore is defending the decision as a matter of editorial independence, which makes it a near-perfect case study in the difference between a bookshop's role as platform and its role as endorser.
• Douglas Stuart's John of John called his finest novel to date by the Boston Globe. Set in the Hebrides in 1996–97, it follows a 22-year-old returning from art college to a Calvinist island community — which, if you've read Shuggie Bain, will tell you roughly what kind of homecoming to expect.

That's the Issue

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