Volume 68, Number 11 (2021-07-01)

David Shulman

Cracks in the Israeli Consensus

The latest round of violence in Gaza has led to the reemergence of the Palestinian national movement—as well as more skepticism among Israelis about repeatedly making war on Hamas.

Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours

by Marta Werner

Mark Danner

‘Reality Rebellion’

By doubling down on Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Republicans are making their base angrier, more radical, and more likely to turn to violence.

David A. Bell

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

by James McAuley

Hari Kunzru

As American as Family Separation

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of a long American tradition of taking children from their parents.

Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

by Jacob Soboroff

Taking Children: A History of American Terror

by Laura Briggs

Robert Macfarlane

The Landscapes Inside Us

Our navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time.

Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World

by M.R. O’Connor

From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way

by Michael Bond

Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America

by Jon T. Coleman

Lindsey Hilsum

More Than Accomplices

How do we determine the agency of female participants in genocidal regimes, where male supremacy often goes hand in hand with ethnic chauvinism?

Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice

by Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko Darden

James Walton

Selfies from Hell

John Lanchester’s collection Reality and Other Stories aims to restore a sense of the uncanny to our digitally driven lives.

Reality and Other Stories

by John Lanchester

Joe Dunthorne

Medicine

a poem

Linda Greenhouse

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

What accounts for the paradox of religious ascendance over an ever more secular American society?

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

by Katherine Stewart

Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty?: The Unnecessary Conflict

by Andrew Koppelman

Ian Johnson

A Most Adaptable Party

The belief that history brought it to power is one of the few ideological constants in the Chinese Communist Party’s hundred-year saga.

From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party

by Tony Saich

The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century

by Bruce J. Dickson

The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives

edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van der Ven

How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–45

by Gao Hua, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian

Maya Abu al-Hayyat,
Fady Joudah

I Burn Time

a poem

Catherine Nicholson

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

by Hazel Wilkinson

Spenserian Moments

by Gordon Teskey

Sean Wilentz

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

by Van Gosse

Gary Saul Morson

Dostoevsky and His Demons

Three biographers take different approaches to the great writer’s life, which often resembled his most fantastic tales.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 1: In the Beginning, 1821–1845

by Thomas Gaiton Marullo

Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 2: The Gathering Storm, 1846–1847

by Thomas Gaiton Marullo

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

by Alex Christofi

Lectures on Dostoevsky

by Joseph Frank, edited by Marina Brodskaya and Marguerite Frank

Karan Mahajan

India’s Streaming Auteurs

Realistic depictions of religion, sexuality, and politics have been off-limits in Bollywood for decades, but in recent years directors were able to bypass censorship by moving to the small screen.

Caitlin Zaloom

The Broken Promise of Retirement

If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022.

Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back

by Nathan Bomey

Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans

by Teresa Ghilarducci and Tony James, with a foreword by Timothy Geithner

American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation

by Sarah L. Quinn

Downhill from Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality

by Katherine S. Newman

Christopher R. Browning

Blue Bloods and Brownshirts

The relationship between German nobles and the Nazis was a misalliance in which attraction prevailed over repulsion.

Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance

by Stephan Malinowski, translated from the German by Jon Andrews

Imani Perry

In Her Own Voice

To be a Black artist has always required one to fight as well as create.

Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry

edited by Mollie Godfrey

Priyamvada Natarajan

All Things Great and Small

The origins and fates of atoms and galaxies are closely intertwined.

Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos

by Katia Moskvitch

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

by Katie Mack

Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

by Frank Wilczek

Fara Dabhoiwala

Imperial Delusions

From the late eighteenth century onward, the British justified their empire with a continually updated ideology of moral purpose and historical necessity.

Time’s Monster: How History Makes History

by Priya Satia

Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

by Adom Getachew