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The Waste Land

Two crucial and interconnected resources—human feces and arable soil—face crises of mismanagement.

The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health

by Lina Zeldovich

A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet

by Jo Handelsman


A Kinetic Endlessness

Nicolas Poussin explored insistently the transitions from three dimensions to two, and a delight of a new exhibition of his work is the thoroughness of his curiosity.

Poussin and the Dance

an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, October 9, 2021–January 2, 2022; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, February 15–May 8, 2022


‘Invitations to Dig Deeper’

At a time when pleasure was considered suspect by politically engaged socialists, Orwell wrote about roses.

Orwell’s Roses

by Rebecca Solnit


Trump’s Unbridled Pardons

Trump demonstrated that the ability to grant pardons, one of the few areas of executive authority where a US president’s power is nearly absolute, is too often a miserly remedy for systemic injustice.

Riffraff

Billy Wilder’s evolution from interwar stylist to hard-bitten realist.

Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna

edited by Noah Isenberg and translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge

by Joseph McBride


Playing Fast and Loose

In Second Place, Rachel Cusk uses a new tone, exploring a less disciplined persona.

Second Place

by Rachel Cusk


In the Shadow of Slavery

Merging memoir, travelogue, and history, Clint Smith evokes the horrors of slavery.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith


Thinking Without Banisters

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on judgment, thinking, moral action, and political courage show that she was not a system builder and was not interested in offering axioms by which to rearrange the world. Yet in following her train of thought, we experience the illuminating force of her insights.

Hannah Arendt

by Samantha Rose Hill

Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin/The Life of a Jewish Woman [Complete Works, Critical Edition, Volume 2]

by Hannah Arendt, edited by Barbara Hahn, with the support of Johanna Egger and Friederike Wein

Arendt

by Dana Villa

An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities

by D.N. Rodowick


Scenes of the Crime

In his new novels, John Banville is writing the kind of history that is the novelist’s proper concern—the history of a trauma that’s fully contained within the character he has invented.

Snow

by John Banville

April in Spain

by John Banville


Europe’s Great Emporium

Sixteenth-century Antwerp was alive with entrepreneurial merchants, rapacious moneylenders, whispering spies, and heretical ideas.

Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age

by Michael Pye


A Language of Geometric Forms

Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s art, like her life, was a bringing together of equals.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction

an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, March 19–June 20, 2021; Tate Modern, London, July 13–October 17, 2021; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, November 21, 2021–March 22, 2022


Strangers in a Strange Land

Two recent books investigate the canny mastery of housing politics that has allowed the Hasidic Satmar sect to build thriving, isolated communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg

by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper

American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York

by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers


Soldiers of Solidarity

Giles Tremlett tells the story of the foreigners who joined the first line of defense against fascism in Europe.

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War

by Giles Tremlett


Liberation Psychology

How Frantz Fanon came to view violence as therapy.

The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon, translated from the French by Richard Philcox, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a foreword by Homi K. Bhabha, and an introduction by Cornel West

Issue Details

On the cover: Tucker Nichols, Untitled (BR1420), 2014 (Gallery 16, San Francisco).

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