June 8, 2023 issue

Trevor Jackson

The Price of Crypto

Despite its boosters’ frequent references to democracy and freedom, cryptocurrency reflects a radical marketization of politics in which major players can rewrite the rules as needed.

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

by Laura Shin

Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains

by Vitalik Buterin, edited by Nathan Schneider

Kevin Power

Ideal Detachments

Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.

Nothing Special

by Nicole Flattery

Howard W. French

The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule

by Max Siollun

Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation

by Fola Fagbule and Feyi Fawehinmi

Laura Kolbe

‘Autopsies of Many Kinds’

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s beautifully written book about cell biology grows hazy when it comes to who or what ought to set the priorities of biomedical research.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Nick Laird

Talking to the Sun in Washington Square

a poem

Vivian Gornick

Surviving by Accident

With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Marina Jarre makes us feel the hard, dull ache of the spiritual aloneness that countless lives endure, especially in the shadow of a dramatic world war.

Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Return to Latvia

by Marina Jarre, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Erin Maglaque

Unwanted Thoughts

Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory.

The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God

by Robin Vose

John Washington

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

Solito

by Javier Zamora

Joan Acocella

‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

by Jennifer Homans

David W. Blight

The Two Constitutions

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

by James Oakes

Erica McAlpine