December 19, 2024 Holiday Issue

Susan Tallman

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

Is Art History?

by Svetlana Alpers

Andrew O’Hagan

The Darkroom of Propaganda

“It now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”

Linda Greenhouse

Trump at the Supreme Court

“The amateurish nature of many of the first Trump administration’s encounters with the Supreme Court is highly likely to be replaced by a more disciplined and strategic approach.”

Ben Tarnoff

Antisystemic Times

“Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.”

Christine Henneberg

“I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians.”

Aryeh Neier

The Rise of Authoritarianism

The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats all over the world.

Wesley Lowery

The Task of the Journalist

“Our highest calling is not short-term persuasion or immediate influence but diligent documentation.”

Susan Neiman

Nemesis

“Will workers be served by a president who openly praises union-busters? Of course not, but Trump’s promise was to be their retribution, not to solve their problems.”

Michael Hofmann

Words Without Consequences

“How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner?”

Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

Jenny Uglow

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah

by Charles King

Regina Marler

The Cuttlefish’s Play

Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.

Playground

by Richard Powers

Joshua Hammer

Making Germany Hate Again

In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.

Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants

by Jacob Kushner

Carolina A. Miranda

Intimate Theatricality

Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

an exhibition at the Broad, Los Angeles, May 25–September 29, 2024; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025; Hayward Gallery, London, February 11–May 5, 2025; and Les Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse, June 13–November 9, 2025

Karen Solie

The Barrens

a poem

Charles Glass

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

Ange Mlinko

The Shoals of Prose

Recent books of prose by two of our best poets suggest the importance of criticism to the development of a poet’s work.

My Poetics

by Maureen N. McLane

Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry

by Terrance Hayes

Martha C. Nussbaum

Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

Fear Factories: Arguments About Innocent Creatures and Merciless People

by Matthew Scully

Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight

by Timothy Pachirat

Truth and Transparency: Undercover Investigations in the Twenty-First Century

by Alan K. Chen and Justin Marceau

Martin Filler

The Architect Who Unified America

H. H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.

Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University

by Jay Wickersham, Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo

Alexander Leggatt

You Only Live Twice

Shakespeare’s characters often navigate the dangerous possibility of a second chance.

Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud

by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips

Shakespeare in Bloomsbury

by Marjorie Garber

David Cole

Gender-Affirming Care & the Courts

The Supreme Court will rule this term on whether a Tennessee law denying minors treatment for gender dysphoria discriminates on the basis of sex.

Joanna Biggs

A Very Quiet Symphony

Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.

The Hearing Test

by Eliza Barry Callahan

Ishion Hutchinson

Snow Elegy

a poem

Rashid Khalidi,
Mark O’Connell

Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

The scholar of Palestinian history talks about what has and has not surprised him about the world‘s response to Israel‘s assault on Gaza.

Ian Tattersall

Look Who’s Talking

When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?

The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved

by Steven Mithen

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

Choose Love

a film written by Josann McGibbon and directed by Stuart McDonald

Her Story

a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow

Telling Lies

a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow and cowritten by Amelia Gray

Immortality

a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow and cowritten by Barry Gifford, Amelia Gray, and Allan Scott

John J. Lennon

Tangled Justice

A new book examines the complex relationship between forgiveness and justice through the story of Paula Cooper, who was sentenced to death at the age of sixteen.

Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy

by Alex Mar

Francesca Wade

‘Insouciant Pagan Journal’

The Little Review, the radical and short-lived magazine helmed by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, was a vanguard of modernism in American culture.

Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review

by Holly A. Baggett

Robert Kuttner

The Import of Exports

Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.

No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers

by Robert Lighthizer

Chaos Under Heaven: America, China, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century

by Josh Rogin

Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World

by Rana Foroohar

R.J.W. Evans

Centers on the Margins

The dark history of Buczacz, an ordinary town in western Ukraine, exemplifies the fate of Jews in the vast marginal territories of East-Central Europe.

Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past

by Omer Bartov

John Washington