Vasily Grossman in War and Peace

In both his life and his writing, the novelist and journalist captured the complications and contradictions of the Soviet century.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Adam Gopnik and the Cul-de-sac of 21st-Century Liberalism

In his new book, the New Yorker writer sets out to defend liberalism from its critics, but only ends up revealing its current limitations.

David A. Bell

There’s No Band Quite Like Big Thief

Wrapped into their new album U.F.O.F.’s delicate folds are fragility and resilience, love and trauma, nature and ether, enclosure and space, light and dark. 

Olivia Horn

The Tangled History of American and Israeli Exceptionalism

Amy Kaplan’s new book examines the pioneering cultural myths that have tied Israel and the United States together.

Rashid Khalidi

Navigating Freedom With Cass Sunstein

When nudges won’t set you free.

Samuel Moyn

Melii Is Not Playing Around

The Afro-Latina Harlem rapper’s brash music slides seamlessly between languages, cultures, and the boundaries of genre.

Julyssa Lopez

Mange Meat

Alicia Mountain

Twenty-First Century Woman / Ankle-Length Cardigans / Looking in the Mirror

Amanda Nadelberg

John Lanchester’s Eerily Resonant Novel About Borders and Rising Sea Levels

His speculative new novel, The Wall, imagines a dystopian future but offers us a warning about our present. 

Laila Lalami

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Social Democracy

In her new book, King and the Other America, historian Sylvie Laurent situates the Poor People’s Campaign and Martin Luther King Jr.’s later years in a longer history of black activism and social-democratic thinking.

Robert Greene II