November 23, 2023 issue

Joshua Leifer

Inhumane Times

Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.

Raja Shehadeh

Causes for Despair

The human suffering that the people of Gaza have endured in the past three weeks is beyond comprehension.

Susan Tallman

Ed Ruscha Bigger than Actual Size

Sassy, reverent, diffident, disarming: an unprecedented survey of the artist’s career is an enticement into looking at the unremarkable.

Ed Ruscha: Now Then

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 10, 2023–January 13, 2024, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 7–October 6, 2024

Dan Chiasson

Louise Glück (1943–2023)

Benjamin Moser

The Cost of ‘Order and Progress’

The life of the explorer Cândido Rondon suggests that Brazil might have taken another path—one that avoided the devastation of its ecosystem and the decimation of its indigenous peoples.

Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist

by Larry Rohter

Vivian Gornick

Camus on Tour

Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World

by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom

Daniel Immerwahr

Zoning Out

A recent book contends that the global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian

Clair Wills

The Collector

For the characters in Jeremy Cooper’s novels, art—looking at it, talking about it, sending it in the form of postcards—is the currency of human relationships.

Brian

by Jeremy Cooper

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Key West

a poem

Johannes von Moltke

Embracing Anonymity

The critic and novelist Siegfried Kracauer returned repeatedly to anonymity as a theme in his work, and a new biography insists on his desire for anonymity in his life as well.

Ginster

by Siegfried Kracauer, translated from the German by Carl Skoggard, with an afterword by Johannes von Moltke

Kracauer: A Biography

by Jörg Später, translated from the German by Daniel Steuer

Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication

by Siegfried Kracauer, edited by Jaeho Kang, Graeme Gilloch, and John Abromeit

Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923–1966

edited by Wolfgang Schopf, translated from the German by Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler

Alice Gribbin

Rough Slabs of Jade

a poem

Namwali Serpell

Hit Me, Baby

A spate of fiction about young women besting their older, powerful male lovers aims to remix and take revenge on that stately master narrative we call The Novel.

Christopher de Bellaigue

A World Off the Hinges

While climate catastrophes have been beyond our control, human choice has often made the difference between social collapse and survival.

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

by Peter Frankopan

Geoff Mann

Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

Rich White Honky Blues

an album by Hank Williams Jr.

James Romm

Authoritarianism’s Emblem

From ancient Rome to Mussolini’s Fascists, the fasces—a bundle of rods surrounding an axe—have carried a wide range of meanings.

The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol

by T. Corey Brennan

Miranda Seymour

As Pluck Would Have It

Antonia Fraser’s new biography of the hectically adulterous Lady Caroline Lamb celebrates her as a woman who resisted convention.

Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit

by Antonia Fraser

Marina Warner

No Freedom to Move

The current politics of immigration have twisted human nature against itself, fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life.

The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World

by James Crawford

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

by Sally Hayden