Liu Xia

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• George Andreou, currently vice president and senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, has been named Director of Harvard University Press.
• Robert Thorson, author of The Boatman and Walden’s Shore, joined American Scientist for a roundtable discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s important but largely overlooked work as a naturalist.
• Susanna L. Blumenthal, author of Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture, wrote at the Washington Post of the long-standing need for the U.S. justice system to clarify what it means to be competent to be executed.
• Timothy Morton, author of Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought was profiled by the Guardian as “the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene.”

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July 13: Liu Xiaobo and the Responsibility of Being Alive

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Demo…