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The Prophet Business

There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.

A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present

by Glenn Adamson


In Lieu of Love

Diana Athill chose a life of sexual and intellectual exploration. Could she get it all down on the page?

Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill, with an afterword by Lena Dunham


A Daring Departure

One hundred and fifty years after Impressionist paintings were first exhibited, it takes a certain effort to recover their original radicalism.

Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment

an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025

Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism

by Sebastian Smee


Rebooting the Pentagon

Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff


Curable or Not?

The late Swiss writer Markus Werner’s bleakly funny The Frog in the Throat, first published forty years ago, is a parallel portrait of father-and-son misanthropes and seems to speak directly to our moment.

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

a television series directed by Alex García López and Laura Mora


The Great Leap Backward

Lea Ypi’s memoir of her childhood in Communist Albania asks whether individual freedom is always elusive, even in liberal democracies.

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi


‘A Loving Caw from a Nameless Friend’

A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters reveals them to be a major literary achievement, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson

edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell


Waiting by the Phone

Have our intimate lives taken on the worst features of the free market?

The End of Love

by Tamara Tenenbaum, translated from the Spanish by Carolina Parodi

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

by Louise Perry

Rethinking Sex

by Christine Emba

Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

by Nona Willis Aronowitz


China’s Counter-Histories

In Sparks, Ian Johnson writes of Chinese people who risk their careers and even their lives to uncover suppressed truths about their country’s modern history.

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

by Ian Johnson


A Hero for Cro-MAGA Times

Charles Baxter’s new novel follows the moral travails of a rock-steady insurance salesman in a dystopian Ohio backwater.

Blood Test

by Charles Baxter


The Impressionist

Over more than fifty years of documentary filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman has made an art of withholding judgment and showing people figuring things out on their own.

Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution

a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, January 31–March 5, 2025

The Worlds of Wiseman

a retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, January 1–February 5, 2025

Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman, Revised and Expanded Edition

by Barry Keith Grant

Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros

a documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman


Brazil: The Threat from the Right

Former president Jair Bolsonaro and his allies have brought violence into Brazilian political discourse, with consequences that will endure.

Issue Details

Cover art
Friedemann Heckel: Man, 2020 (Galerie Thomas Fischer/Sweetwater, Berlin)
Series art
Laura Lannes: Notation, 2024

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