May 23, 2024 Issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Whistleblower We Deserve

The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.

An Enemy of the People

a play by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, March 18–June 23, 2024

Walt Hunter

‘A Long-Tongue Saga’

Over the course of more than a thousand pages, Leon Forrest’s novel Divine Days, reissued after three decades, elicits from the reader every emotion from awe to exasperation.

Divine Days

by Leon Forrest, with a foreword by Kenneth W. Warren and a preface by Zachary Price

Ansel Elkins

Self-Portrait of the US as Conjoined Twins

a poem

Martin Filler

New supertall skyscrapers planned for Manhattan will reduce the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the scale of souvenir tchotchkes. With the current glut of unoccupied office space, they may be the last of their kind.

Supertall: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives

by Stefan Al

Sky-High: A Critique of NYC’s Supertall Towers from Top to Bottom

by Eric P. Nash and Bruce Katz

Billionaires’ Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World’s Most Exclusive Skyscrapers

by Katherine Clarke

Supertall | Megatall: How High Can We Go?

by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture

Joanna Biggs

‘Give Me Joy’

Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology.

Madonna: A Rebel Life

by Mary Gabriel

Timothy Garton Ash

Big Germany, What Now?

The post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans, is asking which way Germany—the most powerful country in the European Union—will go.

Germany, A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000

by Helmut Walser Smith

Discussing Pax Germanica: The Rise and Limits of German Hegemony in European Integration

edited by Emmanuel Comte and Fernando Guirao

Wie Wir Wurden, Was Wir Sind: Eine Kurze Geschichte der Deutschen [How We Became What We Are: A Short History of the Germans]

by Heinrich August Winkler

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500–2000

by David Blackbourn

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022

by Frank Trentmann

Ange Mlinko

Transatlantic Flights

The collected poems of Denise Levertov and Anne Stevenson suggest what a poet can gain by expatriation, in both directions between England and the United States.

Collected Poems

by Denise Levertov, edited and annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, with an introduction by Eavan Boland

Collected Poems

by Anne Stevenson

Pamela Druckerman

Dr. B

Jill Biden is a barrier-breaking national figure. What are we to make of the wholesome, at times bland story she tells about herself?

American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden

by Katie Rogers

Jill: A Biography of the First Lady

by Julie Pace and Darlene Superville, with Evelyn M. Duffy

Matthew Aucoin

Perpetual Expectation

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.

L’Amour de loin

an opera with music by Kaija Saariaho and a libretto by Amin Maalouf; directed by Peter Sellars at the Finnish National Opera, Helsinki

Innocence

an opera with music by Kaija Saariaho and a Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen, with multilingual contributions by Aleksi Barrière; directed by Simon Stone at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam

Catherine Lacey

The Woman in the Well

In Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a dissatisfied Italian everywoman starts keeping a diary, and eventually her own thoughts become too much to bear.

Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Tiya Miles

How Bondage Built the Church

Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance.

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

by Rachel L. Swarns

Clair Wills

Triumphs of Skepticism

Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

Mike Jay

Ecstasy’s Odyssey

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to “a low-calorie martini.”

I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World

by Rachel Nuwer

The History of MDMA

by Torsten Passie in collaboration with Udo Benzenhöfer, translated from the German by Andrew Dennis

Quinn Slobodian

Safe Havens

The UK’s “second empire” of tax-free jurisdictions around the world persists despite the overwhelming evidence that it enables corruption, drains public budgets, and exacerbates inequality.

Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything

by Oliver Bullough

Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire

by Kojo Koram

Stephen Breyer

Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism

A method of judicial interpretation that looks only to the original meaning of legal texts risks producing a Constitution and laws that no one would want.