Volume 68, Number 2 (2021-02-11)

Mark Danner

‘Be Ready to Fight’

Trumpism is driven by cruelty and domination even as its rhetoric claims grievance and victimization. The attack on the Capitol showed that Donald Trump’s army of millions will not just melt away when he leaves office.

Simon Callow

A Taste for the Difficult

In his performing, his critical writing, and his conversation, the prodigious Charles Rosen was driven by ceaseless curiosity and the urge to share his knowledge.

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations About Art and Performance

by Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson, translated from the French by Catherine Zerner, with a foreword by Israel Rosenfield

Elizabeth Kolbert

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth

by Frank A. von Hippel

The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age

by François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, translated from the French by Janice Egan and Michael Egan

Martin Filler

Life in a Glass House

What went wrong between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dr. Edith Farnsworth over the six years they worked to create the Farnsworth house?

Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece

by Alex Beam

Edith Farnsworth’s Country House

an exhibition at the Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, July 1, 2020–November 14, 2021

Shennette Garrett-Scott

What Price Wholeness?

A detailed new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much, exactly, does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century

by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

Evan Kindley

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

The Poet’s Mistake

by Erica McAlpine

Perry Link

Seeing the CCP Clearly

For Chinese dissidents, the end of Washington’s deference to Beijing has been a long time coming.

Daphne Merkin

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

by Maggie Doherty

Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World

by Gillian Gill

The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London

by D.J. Taylor

Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars

by Francesca Wade

Leo Rubinfien

‘My Eyes Are Infamously Greedy’

Japan’s energetic culture of the photobook, from 1912 to today.

The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990

by Manfred Heiting and Ryuichi Kaneko, with essays by Duncan Forbes, Satomi Fujimura, and others

Chizu (Map)

by Kikuji Kawada

by Issei Suda

Karasu (Ravens)

by Masahisa Fukase

Utatane (Daydream)

by Rinko Kawauchi

Halo

by Rinko Kawauchi

Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water

by Asako Narahashi

Kuroyami (Black Darkness)

by Sakiko Nomura

The Restoration Will

by Mayumi Suzuki

Zaido

by Yukari Chikura

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Joyce Carol Oates

Chronicle of a Death Ignored

Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close is as much a study of corrosive institutional patriarchy as it is an investigation into an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

by Becky Cooper

Aaron Matz

Inheriting Hunger

Émile Zola’s monumental twenty-novel cycle encompasses nearly every sphere of French society, but returns repeatedly to people with a bottomless compulsion to dominate others.

His Excellency Eugène Rougon

by Émile Zola, translated from the French and with an introduction and notes by Brian Nelson

The Sin of Abbé Mouret

by Émile Zola, translated from the French and with an introduction and notes by Valerie Minogue

Nana

by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Helen Constantine, with an introduction and notes by Brian Nelson

Alex Dimitrov

Rain

a poem

Alexandra D. Lahav

Medicine Is Made for Men

In medical research, drug regulation, and product design, the male body is too often considered as the default—which can have dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez

Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation

by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Ruth Franklin