December 4, 2025 Issue

James Gleick

How the Web Was Lost

The Internet was not meant to suck.

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

by Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture, and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow

Ursula Lindsey

Clarity and Delusion

The Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has a gift for depicting painful, confusing, and mortifying relationships.

If Only

by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

Sophie Pinkham

Mixed Blessings

Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism?

Ural Tansykbayev: 1904–1974

an exhibition at the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty, March 18–June 1, 2025, and the Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, September 3–November 1, 2025

Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI

edited by Boris Chukhovich, Davide Del Curto, and Ekaterina Golovatyuk

Recipes for Broken Hearts: Guidebook

by Diana Campbell and Timur Zolotoev, with Qamoos Bukhari

Gordon F. Sander

Not for Sale

President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland have caused consternation and fear among Danes and Greenlanders alike.

Michael Gorra

Fathers and Daughters

Susan Cheever’s recollections of her childhood illuminate the obsessions and failures that lay behind her father’s fiction.

When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever

by Susan Cheever

Karl Kirchwey

Presidential Library and Museum

a poem

Dan Kaufman

‘We’ve Got to Kill and Kill and Kill’

As Francisco Franco’s reputation grows on the far right, a new history of his regime reminds us of its unrelenting violence.

Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain

by Paul Preston

Susan Neiman

Where Wokeness Went Wrong

Symbolic struggles cannot be a force of resistance to the Trump administration.

Desire and Fate

by David Rieff, with a foreword by John Banville

Sylvie Kandé,
Nancy Naomi Carlson

Call of Air

a poem

Robert Sullivan

The Third Sovereign

If there is hope for the earth, it will depend in part on acknowledging indigenous sovereignty in the face of insatiable resource extraction.

Treaty Justice: The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights

by Charles Wilkinson

On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

by Ryan E. Emanuel

Natasha Wimmer

The Bureaucrat in His Labyrinth

Benito Pérez Galdós’s mid-career novel Miaow sketches the absurd tribulations of a laid-off civil servant.

Miaow

by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Adam Kirsch

The Apolitical Life

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben exalts an ideal of what he calls “inoperativity”—a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s politics of power and domination.

Self-Portrait in the Studio

by Giorgio Agamben, translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell

Anthony Domestico

Ever Inward

A biography of the poet Amy Clampitt shows how poetry germinated throughout her life and blossomed in a late-career flourishing.

Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

by Willard Spiegelman

Ferdinand Mount

Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script

Understanding Britain’s postwar reforms like the National Health Service requires peering into the “lost world” of wartime conservatism.

Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War

by Kit Kowol

Zephyr Teachout

Selling a Defective Dream

How did multilevel marketing schemes come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The answer has to do with how we think of workers and how we think of consumers.

Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America

by Bridget Read

Attention, Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy

by Kathleen Thelen