May 29, 2025 Issue

Rachel Nolan

‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’

What caused Venezuela’s collapse, and who is responsible? A recent memoir tells the story as so many families have lived it.

Motherland: The Disintegration of a Family in a Collapsed Venezuela

by Paula Ramón, with translations by Julia Sanches and Jennifer Shyue

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

by William Neuman

Christopher R. Browning

Surely Not?

If the US president were a Manchurian candidate, are there things he would hesitate to do?

Nina Siegal

The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.

The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945

by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel

Hari Kunzru

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker

Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness

by Stewart Home

Alice Kaplan

Zionism Without Zion

Rachel Cockerell’s family saga shows that in the search for a Jewish homeland, Palestine was only one possible location.

Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

by Rachel Cockerell

Fintan O’Toole

Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

Jane Yeh

Self-Portrait as Psychology

a poem

Anna Della Subin

‘Her Own Cuneiform’

The poet Dunya Mikhail is preoccupied with Iraq’s urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past.

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay

by Dunya Mikhail

Sue Halpern

For the Love of Money

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s damning memoir of working at Facebook exposes the predatory cupidity of the company’s executives.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Chris Ware

Pure Thought on Paper

Olivier Schrauwen’s graphic novel Sunday is, like Ulysses, an attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over a single day. It is also, like Ulysses, a masterpiece.

Sunday

by Olivier Schrauwen

Linda Greenhouse

How Brown Came North and Failed

The effort to desegregate Detroit’s public schools required not just the courts but a social movement that could speak effectively about the barriers that Black people faced before it could begin to seek redress.

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

by Michelle Adams

Boris Dralyuk

The Dybbuk

a poem

Christopher de Bellaigue

Iran: A Grand Bargain?

The conditions necessary to negotiate a new nuclear deal and revive commercial ties between Iran and the US are in sight.

Joseph Horowitz

Grand Opera’s Tribulations

This season’s production of Aida at the Met sheds light on issues facing both the company and the genre of grand opera itself.

Aida

an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Michael Mayer, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, December 31, 2024–May 9, 2025

Adam Hochschild

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920

by Manisha Sinha

Andrew Delbanco

The Connoisseur of Desire

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great theme of erotic anticipation is never more alive than in the longings of Jay Gatsby.

The Annotated Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III, with an introduction by Amor Towles

Issue Details

Cover art
A page from Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Colorama/Fantagraphics)
Series art
Debbie Millman: Crowns, 2025