October 3, 2024 Issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

The Nation of Plants

by Stefano Mancuso, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti

Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence

by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence

John Koethe

Dynamism & Discipline

The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair.

Forrest Gander

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries

edited by Sarah Gristwood

Wallace Shawn

The End of a Village

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

Alice Kaplan

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4

by Michel Leiris, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth

Susana Plotts-Pineda

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy

by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Daphne Merkin

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich/I Am Me

an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, June 6–September 9, 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025

E. Tammy Kim

Duterte’s Cruel Tricks

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing is both a reporter’s notebook and a contemporary political history of the Philippines.

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

by Patricia Evangelista

Ian Johnson

China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo

by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi

Linda Greenhouse

Are Sheriffs Above the Law?

County sheriffs are useful to the right. They appear regularly as talking heads on conservative media, especially on the subject of immigration. Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

by Jessica Pishko

Christopher de Bellaigue