December 8, 2022 issue

Audrey Wollen

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

The Water Statues

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

I Am the Brother of XX

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

Peter Canby

The Death Squad Dossier

Decades after Guatemala’s long civil war, a chronicle of government kidnapping and disappearance is bringing former officials to trial. Will there be justice for the victims?

Fara Dabhoiwala

Becoming Amartya Sen

In his memoir Home in the World the pathbreaking economist and moral philosopher looks back on his much-traveled, multicultural childhood, education, and early academic career.

Home in the World

by Amartya Sen

Dan Chiasson

Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

by Bob Dylan

Martha C. Nussbaum

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

Rae Armantrout

Blend

a poem

David Salle

Who Am I? What Am I?

Charles Ray’s ambitious, technologically sophisticated sculptures allow viewers to enjoy figurative realism without the taint of kitsch.

Charles Ray: Figure Ground

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, January 31–June 5, 2022

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

by Olivier Zunz

Edward Mendelson

Life, Death, This Moment of June

Mrs. Dalloway has the world-defining ambition and scope of every great epic, from Dante’s Commedia to Goethe’s Faust.

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne E. Fernald

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf, edited and with an introduction and notes by Merve Emre

Ada Wordsworth

Ukrainian Lessons at the Train Station

A diverse community of volunteers has gathered on the Polish border to assist Ukrainian refugees, but the outlook for Ukrainian refugees already in Europe is often bleak.

Mike Jay

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.

Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide

edited by Joanna Ebenstein

Regina Marler

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

Natural History

by Andrea Barrett

Corey Robin

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy

by Samuel Fleischacker

Issue Details

Cover art
Henni Alftan: Tiptoeing (part 1 of 2), 2019
(Henni Alftan/Karma, New York/Sprüth Magers,
Berlin, London, and Los Angeles)

Series art
Agnes Barley: Untitled, 2022