April 10, 2025 Issue

Howard W. French

Toffler in China

The work of the eclectic American futurist exerted a profound and unanticipated influence on China’s digital transformation since the 1980s.

Witold Wirpsza,
Ann Frenkel,
Gwido Zlatkes

Lost in the Landscape

The Met’s Caspar David Friedrich exhibition offers an introduction to an artist whose work—luminous, disturbing, serene—reveals an all-encompassing physical realm.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 8–May 11, 2025

Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age

an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, December 15, 2023–April 1, 2024

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time

by Florian Illies, translated from the German by Tony Crawford

Cathleen Schine

Ungovernable, Capricious Life

In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.

Shattered

by Hanif Kureishi

Wendy Doniger

The Rise and Fall of Warhorses

You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when.

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

by David Chaffetz

Adam Thirlwell

Rotten in Denmark

Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.

The Kingdom

a television series directed by Lars von Trier

Laura Kolbe

How Germany Remade Itself

A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume.

After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany

by Michael H. Kater

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022

by Frank Trentmann

Natasha Wimmer

Rigorous Innocence

A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.

A Question of Belonging

by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, with an introduction by Mariana Enríquez

Miri Rubin

Christian Hair

The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.

Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism

by Magda Teter

Jonathan Mingle

Planet Ooze

We cannot grow the crops that feed eight billion people and counting without phosphorus. At the rate we waste this precious element, how long will supplies last?

The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance

by Dan Egan

Dan Rockmore

The Quantum Chaos of Literature

Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.

The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

Brenda Wineapple

In her history of American social movements, Linda Gordon argues that they are vital and transformative partnerships that, by challenging the status quo, are indispensable to the health of the nation.

Seven Social Movements That Changed America

by Linda Gordon

Geoffrey O’Brien

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television

by Foster Hirsch

Christopher R. Browning

Trump, Antisemitism & Academia

If the Trump administration were truly concerned about antisemitism, it would start in its own house.

Issue Details

Cover art
Scott Csoke: Antique Portrait of a Gay Horse (Head), 2021 (Private Collection/Courtesy of Paige Money)
Series art
Fernanda Amis: Bajo el Alma, 2025