"The Heartbreak Is What Lingers Longest"

"The title comes from Albert Camus. Men learned in Spain, the French novelist wrote sadly, that 'one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.'"

Bob Drogin in the Los Angeles Times reviews Adam Hochschild's Spain Is in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

"The Ingredients of a Philosophical Schism"

"Sartre and Camus’s love-hate relationship was played out and reflected in their on-off romance with America. As Camus put it, 'It is necessary to fall in love … if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.' Above all the two thinkers emphasize that America is always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of a philosophical dialectic."

Andy Martin in The New York Times contrasts the experiences of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York.

"The Most Eloquent Manifesto in the History of the American Left"

"But by invoking the spirit of John Dewey, Albert Camus, C. Wright Mills, Michael Harrington and Pope John XXIII, by at once championing and chiding organized labor as a victim of its own success (the S.D.S. began as the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy), by elevating the university to the apex of activism and by validating liberalism and the two-party system, Tom Hayden and his colleagues forged a manifesto that still reverberates."

Sam Roberts in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement.

"No Rapport to Literature"

"During his campaign in 2006, Sarkozy notoriously dismissed the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette, arguing that civil service entrance exams should not include questions about such painfully irrelevant subjects. A great crowd of unsuspected Madame de La Fayette fans arose, holding marathon public readings of La Princesse de Clèves and following the satiric 'Sarkothon' campaign of the writer Jacques Drillon, who, mocking both the current government and TV charity telethons, wrote that since poor Nicholas has never read anything, French citizens should immediately mail him books."

Benjamin Ivry in New Statesman depicts the French debate over reburying Albert Camus in the Panthéon.