July 24, 2025 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Death in the Air

In Murderland, Caroline Fraser traces the correlations between rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

Jarrett Earnest

‘I Am the Heir to Delacroix’

Jack Whitten’s brilliantly restless innovation is a rigorous interrogation and a surging expansion of what painting can do.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 23–August 2, 2025

Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, Second Edition

edited by Katy Siegel

Fintan O’Toole

A Show of Force

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.

Anahid Nersessian

How Can I Help You?

The hypocrisies of our social contract are exposed in John Tottenham’s hilarious debut novel about a wage worker in a bookstore.

Service

by John Tottenham

David Shulman

Engineering a second Nakba and annexing the occupied territories are integral parts of Netanyahu’s war against the State of Israel’s democratic institutions, its social solidarity, and above all the rule of law.

Milan Děžinský,
Nathan Fields

After a Car Crash

a poem

Regina Marler

From Riches to Rags to Renown

Like so many of the adventures recounted in their anthologies of fairy tales, the Grimm brothers’ journey to lasting fame might never have begun had they not suffered a striking reversal of fortune in childhood.

The Brothers Grimm

by Ann Schmiesing

Aryeh Neier

Locked Up by Erdogan

For his work as an activist and philanthropist, Osman Kavala has been unjustly imprisoned in Turkey for seven and a half years.

Michelle Nijhuis

Saving Graces

What we conserve and why—art, heirlooms, animals, even the planet—are increasingly urgent questions.

What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation

by Erich Hatala Matthes

Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History

by Whitney Barlow Robles

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures

by Katherine Rundell, with illustrations by Talya Baldwin

Peter Canby

Padre Marcelo’s Last March

For decades, an activist priest from Chiapas campaigned for the state’s indigenous poor and against the violence of its cartels. Last year, he himself was assassinated.

Casey A. Williams

‘The Red and the Green’

The Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito’s proposal for “degrowth communism” as a solution to the climate crisis has inspired fierce debate, including among other Marxists.

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

by Kohei Saito, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom

Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

by Matthew T. Huber

Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

by Kohei Saito

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

The Collector as Autocrat

Even as he assembled a world-class art collection, Albert C. Barnes always saw himself as an embattled underdog.

The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream

by Blake Gopnik

The House of Barnes: The Man, the Collection, the Controversy

by Neil L. Rudenstine, with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Yve-Alain Bois

Ian Johnson

Lessons of the Father

New biographies of Xi Zhongxun and Hu Yaobang provide insights into the opaque culture of the Chinese Communist Party and the political ascent of Xi’s son, Xi Jinping.

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

by Joseph Torigian

The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer

by Robert L. Suettinger

Lola Seaton

Incorrigible Nudity

The illusion of effortlessness is a major source of the pleasure of Sheila Heti’s work: it makes us feel as though we could capture the world as easily.

Alphabetical Diaries

by Sheila Heti

Devon Walker-Figueroa