Volume 68, Number 6 (2021-04-08)

The great-grandson of a president and the grandson of another, Henry Adams struggled to break free of a personal history intimately tied to that of the country.

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

by David S. Brown

Choire Sicha

I, Phone

In Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a portrait of a person made ill by the Internet.

Fake Accounts

by Lauren Oyler

Sue Halpern

Weaponizing the Web

Nicole Perlroth’s investigation into the shadowy world of cyberweaponry predicts an unsettling future for global security.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Mark O’Connell

Old Midlands Giants

The comedian Stewart Lee’s documentary King Rocker is about a musician who seems impossible to mythologize.

King Rocker

a documentary film directed by Michael Cumming and written by Stewart Lee

Joshua Hammer

A Ghost in the War Machine

Alexander Wolff’s turbulent family history centers on his grandfather, who fled the Nazis, and his father, who fought for them.

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

by Alexander Wolff

Sanford Schwartz

Young and in Love

Salman Toor’s absorbing show at the Whitney depicts the pleasures, tensions, and small moments of gay life.

Salman Toor: How Will I Know

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 13, 2020–April 4, 2021

Cathleen Schine

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

Antiquities

by Cynthia Ozick

James Oakes

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for African slaves increased.

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

by John Harris

Kamran Javadizadeh

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman was central to American poetry’s personal turn, yet his Dream Songs made the racialization of that turn—and the whiteness of the lyric tradition—explicit.

The Selected Letters of John Berryman

edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, with a foreword by Martha B. Mayou

Diane Johnson

We’ll Always Have Paris

What is it about France that has long captured the American heart?

The Seine: The River That Made Paris

by Elaine Sciolino

Steven Simon

Turning Away from the Middle East

The Biden administration will seek to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, but its main focus will be on domestic affairs and relations with China.

Francine Prose

Living with Saint Death

Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history; the bodies are never buried very deep.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Sandra Lim

Pastoral

a poem

Adam Kirsch

The Symbolic Animal

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 3: Phenomenology of Cognition

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

James Walton

Infinite Quarantine

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is both topical and autobiographical, two unexpected qualities for a novel about a wicked magician-scientist exiling the protagonist to an enchanted world.

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke

Ursula Lindsey