Volume 67, Number 1 (2020-01-16)

Fintan O’Toole

The Designated Mourner

Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.

Clair Wills

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

To Calais, in Ordinary Time

by James Meek

The Corner That Held Them

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Noah Feldman

Is Trump Above the Law?

If the Senate does not remove Trump, what will that mean for his presidency, and for impeachment itself?

Natalie Shapero

Weekend

a poem

David Salle

The Great Amalgamator

Rachel Harrison’s starting point is a feeling of disconnectedness, estrangement, and simmering revolt fed by a finely cultivated disgust.

Rachel Harrison Life Hack

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020

Cathleen Schine

It Had to Be Her

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both.

Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler

by Cate Haste

Robyn Creswell

Lebanon’s Infernal Circle

Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

De Niro's Game

by Rawi Hage

Bill McKibben

My Land, Your Land

Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West

by John Taliaferro

Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America's Public Lands

by John Clayton

William Logan

Moon, January

a poem

Amy Knight

The Secret Files of the Soviet Union

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity

by Vladimir Bukovsky, translated from the Russian by Alyona Kojevnikov

David W. Blight

‘A Doubtful Freedom’

Andrew Delbanco’s ‘The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War’

The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

by Andrew Delbanco

Merve Emre

The Imperfect Telescope

The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Jed Perl

Made in Mexico

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury

an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 6, 2019–January 12, 2020

Josephine Quinn

Mothers and Emperors

Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

by Guy de la Bédoyère

Jonathan Stevenson

ISIS After Baghdadi

Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad

by Daniel Byman

Targeting Top Terrorists: Understanding Leadership Removal in Counterterrorism Strategy

by Bryan C. Price

The London Bombings

by Marc Sageman

Freeman Dyson

The Power of Morphological Thinking

Zwicky: The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe

by John Johnson Jr.

Mark Mazower

The Man Who Was France

“Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.”

De Gaulle

by Julian Jackson

Peter Brooks