October 17, 2024 Issue

Jessica T. Mathews

The Race That Can’t Be Won

A new nuclear arms race is beginning. It will be far more dangerous than the last one.

Christopher Tayler

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

Frances Leviston

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

by Jeremy Eichler

Gary Younge

Scapegoating the Immigrant

In the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots this summer, the British government has refused to confront the root cause of the violence and cracked down on immigration instead.

Beatrice Radden Keefe

Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Thirteen hundred years ago, the monks on the German lake island of Reichenau tended a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. An exhibit celebrating the anniversary chronicles the monastery’s history and art.

World Heritage of the Middle Ages: 1,300 Years of the Monastic Island of Reichenau

an exhibition at the Baden-Württemberg State Archaeological Museum, Konstanz, Germany, April 20–October 20, 2024

Aryeh Neier

Torture in Israel’s Prisons

Recent reports on the conditions in Israeli detention facilities describe them as sites of systematic abuse.

Carolina A. Miranda

Mythic Chaps

Two recent exhibitions in Denver reveal how many legends and surprising realities coexist in the idea of the American cowboy.

Cowboy

an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, September 29, 2023–February 18, 2024, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, September 28, 2024–March 23, 2025

The American West in Art: Selections from the Denver Art Museum

edited by Thomas Brent Smith and Jennifer R. Henneman

Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture

by Ivan McClellan

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

edited by Nicholas Seager and J.A. Downie

Samuel Earle

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them

by G. Elliott Morris

Anahid Nersessian

Speaking the Unspeakable

The Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah asks what it would mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide.

[...]

by Fady Joudah

Colin Thubron

The Artificiality of Nations

Two recent books advance compassionate cases against the cruelty of closed borders.

The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging

by Lauren Markham

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works

by Helen Czerski

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

by Susan Casey

Linda Colley

A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

Despite the absence of a single codified document, there is a long tradition of writing about the United Kingdom’s constitutional history.

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom

edited by Peter Cane and H. Kumarasingham

Julius Taranto

The Father-Daughter Dance

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is fundamentally a social novel, revolving around debates that occupy the public sphere: gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill.

The Hypocrite

by Jo Hamya

Caleb Crain