October 23, 2025 Issue

Jacob Weisberg

Algorithm Nation

Fights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That’s because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

by Renée DiResta

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Elaine Blair

Equality Without Feminism?

The Soviet Union’s ambitious program of gender equality could never be separated from its abuses of power.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

by Julia Ioffe

Eric Foner

The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

by Marcus Rediker

Andrew Katzenstein

Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control.

Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

Gavin Francis

Hope Management

Two recent books on the elusive work of psychiatric care explore the subject from both sides of the couch.

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Art of Binding People

by Paolo Milone, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand

Suzanne Schneider

From the Cesspool to the Mainstream

The “new fusionist” intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

by Quinn Slobodian

Nicole Rudick

Becoming Acquainted with America

From the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, Ben Shahn sent a clear message in his art about individual people and the conditions that oppressed them.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York City, May 23–October 26, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition by Laura Katzman, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Christof Decker, and John Fagg

Jay Neugeboren

The Homeless We Don’t See

As housing costs have risen and affordable housing remains in short supply, even Americans with full-time jobs are experiencing homelessness.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

by Brian Goldstone

Christopher Tayler

In the Fourth Person

In Olga Tokarczuk’s work, knowing how to pick mushrooms—organisms open to unruliness and interconnection and resistant to easy labeling—is a sign of good character.

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Victoria Chang

The Swan, No. 20 (Hilma af Klint)

a poem

Vicente L. Rafael

Massacre Under the Starry Flag

The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators.

Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History

by Kim A. Wagner

Ange Mlinko

Questions of Compression

In their new poetry collections, Peter Balakian’s elliptical notations let his images speak for themselves while Angie Estes’s concentration reveals a rapturous virtuosity.

New York Trilogy

by Peter Balakian

Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City

by Angie Estes

Geoff Mann

The Price of Tomorrow

The current discount rate means that the government views the long-term future of humanity as not metaphorically but literally worthless.

Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology

by Liliana Doganova

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Stripped of Myths

Sjón’s Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated.

Red Milk

by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb

Ariel Dorfman

Pinochet and the Vans of Death

In 38 Londres Street Philippe Sands investigates a Nazi war criminal’s collaboration with the Chilean dictatorship’s system of repression, torture, and murder.

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia

by Philippe Sands

David Cole