February 26, 2026 Issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Crime of Witness

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.

Trevor Jackson

The Struggle for the Fed

The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?

Our Money: Monetary Policy As If Democracy Matters

by Leah Downey

Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America

by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

by Kenneth Rogoff

Ingrid D. Rowland

Painted Sermons

The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality.

Fra Angelico

an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, Florence, September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026

Namwali Serpell

Toni Plays the Dozens

What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?

Mary Jo Salter

President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.

The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China

by Ya-Wen Lei

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt

The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

Rachel Donadio

A Student of Power

In his experiences and chronicles of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, Curzio Malaparte was a shape-shifter—pitiless, clinical, cynical, unsentimental, indifferent to morality and idealism.

Malaparte: A Biography

by Maurizio Serra, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley

The Kremlin Ball

by Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee

Diary of a Foreigner in Paris

by Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian and French by Stephen Twilley, with an introduction by Edmund White

Mussolini: Son of the Century

a television series directed by Joe Wright

Ben Tarnoff

People Think

Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

Vivian Gornick

Mother Trouble

In her new memoir, Arundhati Roy tries to find the language to grapple with the shadow of her formidable, extraordinary mother.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

by Arundhati Roy

James Arthur

Thin Skin

a poem

Joy Neumeyer

Poland: Halfway to Democracy

What do the far right’s fluctuating fortunes in Poland suggest about countries seeking an off-ramp from autocracy?

Democratic Backsliding in Poland: Why Has Poland Gone to the Dark Side?

edited by Łukasz Zamęcki, Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, and Adam Szymański

The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty

by Jarosław Kuisz

Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment

by Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk

Aborcja i demokracja: Przeciw-historia Polski, 1956–1993 [Abortion and Democracy: The Counterhistory of Poland, 1956–1993]

by Marcin Kościelniak

Ian Tattersall

Call Me by Your Names

The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon.

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

by Jason Roberts

Maurice Samuels

Rescuing the Refugees

After the fall of France many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.

Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature

by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles

Larry Rohter

Chasing Ghosts

With its brilliant prose and unrelenting darkness and pessimism, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night towers over Chilean literature.

The Obscene Bird of Night

by José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Alejandro Zambra.

Brenda Wineapple

Lost and Forgotten

Although his own writings are little known today, Malcolm Cowley became one of the great champions of American literature.

The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature

by Gerald Howard

Oscar Lopez

Torn Asunder

As Guatemala and El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.

Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

by Rachel Nolan

Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador

by Elizabeth Barnert, with a foreword by Philippe Bourgois

Ben Rhodes

An American Reckoning

Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today.

McNamara at War: A New History

by Philip Taubman and William Taubman