January 18, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Ultra Hardcore

If Walter Isaacson’s new book inflates the scale of Elon Musk’s contributions to humanity, it also understates the amount of damage inflicted on actual humans along the way.

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Anahid Nersessian

Transmissions from Another World

The first collections of Annelyse Gelman and Elisa Gonzalez are haunted by grief and confront the question of whether lyric poetry still offers something no other medium can.

Vexations

by Annelyse Gelman

Grand Tour

by Elisa Gonzalez

Julian Bell

Bodies That Flow

A new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shows that conservatism has had no more articulate advocate than Peter Paul Rubens.

Rubens and Women

an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, September 27, 2023–January 28, 2024

Jack Underwood

Eldest Statesmen

As we enter an election year, can the Democrats prevent age from becoming a serious obstacle?

Anjum Hasan

Even as a Ghost

In their new novels, V. V. Ganeshananthan and Shehan Karunatilaka use the “distance of time” to dramatize large chunks, if not the whole, of Sri Lanka’s recent past.

Brotherless Night

by V.V. Ganeshananthan

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka

Matthew Desmond

Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic

Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?

The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure

by Scott Fulford

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

by Steven W. Thrasher

Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19

by Zachary Parolin

Francine Prose

Chile’s Count Dracula

Pablo Larraín’s film El Conde makes the bloodthirstiness of Pinochet’s regime literal.

El Conde

a film directed by Pablo Larraín

James Gleick

The Fate of Free Will

In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

by Kevin J. Mitchell

Frances Wilson

Across the Moominverse

Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature.

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words

by Boel Westin, translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella

Álvaro Enrigue

A new book investigates the lives of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century—a story central to the beginning of globalization.

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Katie Trumpener

A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance

Alexander Kluge’s account of the Allied air raid on his hometown in Germany, while suffering memory lapses of its own, examines the city’s amnesia as a defense against terror.

Air Raid

by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, with an afterword by W.G. Sebald

Jack Underwood