February 22, 2024 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Case for Disqualification

The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.

Emily Raboteau

A New Environmental Canon

New books by Camille Dungy and Elizabeth Rush argue that the ethics of care we often associate with maternity is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis.

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

by Camille T. Dungy

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Rush

Larry Wolff

Rebel Without a Cause

The Met’s new production of Carmen strips away most of the opera’s Spanish flavor, transferring it to an American world of popcorn and cotton candy.

Carmen

an opera by Georges Bizet, directed by Carrie Cracknell, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, December 31, 2023–May 25, 2024

Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris

by Jacek Blaszkiewicz

Andrew O’Hagan

The Talented Mr. Santos

A man in perpetual flight from reality, George Santos invents stories about himself with no regard for believability.

The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos

by Mark Chiusano

Jenny Uglow

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World

by Ulinka Rublack

Natasha Wimmer

Scrupulous Extravagance

The Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier depicted revolution’s promise as well as its folly.

Explosion in a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with a foreword by Alejandro Zambra

The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with an introduction by Leonardo Padura

David A. Bell

An Unlikely Life

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a biopic that manages to omit or distort most of the central elements of Napoleon’s life and career.

Napoleon

a film directed by Ridley Scott

Ange Mlinko

The Rain Trees

a poem

Rachel Nolan

The Forest Eaters

In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.

Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World

by Eliane Brum, translated from the Portuguese by Diane Whitty

David S. Reynolds

‘A Fiendish Fascination’

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

by David Anthony

Natalie de Souza

The Dark Tangle of Alzheimer’s

Recent breakthroughs in dementia treatments have been hailed as successes, but after decades of disappointing research it is difficult to be optimistic.

How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s

by Karl Herrup

Jim Moore

After Michael Longley, After Amergin Glúingel

a poem

Robyn Creswell

Reimagining al-Andalus

To modern Arab thinkers, the Andalusian experiment has represented everything from the perils of factionalism to the benefits of cultural openness to the pain of exile.

On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus

by Eric Calderwood

Ava Kofman

Open Secrets

Kerry Howley’s self-defined “nonfiction thriller” about Reality Winner, the most recent millennial charged under the Espionage Act, is less about breaking news than about making dismal facts felt again.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

by Kerry Howley

Gary Saul Morson

Russian Exceptionalism

After the fall of the USSR, liberalism, considered foreign, was overwhelmed by various types of nationalism, one of which, Eurasianism, seems to have achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology.

Foundations of Eurasianism

translated from the Russian and edited by Jafe Arnold and John Stachelski

The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

by Mark Bassin

Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii [Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia]

by Aleksandr Dugin

Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism

by Aleksandr Dugin

The Fourth Political Theory

by Aleksandr Dugin

Black Wind, White Snow: Russia’s New Nationalism

by Charles Clover

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Letters

Pierre Sauvage

Camus in Wartime

Issue Details

Cover art
Corydon Cowansage: Drops (Green, Turquoise, Peach), 2023 (Corydon Cowansage/kaufmann repetto, Milan and New York)
Series art
Paul Davis: Mad Molecules, 2023