In a series of penetrating conversations, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting-edge thinkers—including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, Elaine Scarry, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—to explore the role of violence in politics, culture, the media, public speech, and against the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence in this world."

First published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, these lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence—in all strata of society—has become a defining feature of our times.