The Independent Scholar

The Independent Scholar - April 29, 2026


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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.

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    The Independent ScholarBy Julia Murphy