January 15, 2026 Issue

Susan Tallman

The Empire Gives Back

What does a fair policy of museum repatriation look like? A new book considers the issue in terms of human rights, cultural sovereignty, and stewardship.

Who Owns Beauty?

by Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, translated from the French by Andrew Brown

Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

by Dan Hicks

Kevin Power

All the Sad Unliterary Men

David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.

Flesh

by David Szalay

Marilynne Robinson

At What Cost?

New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.

Jeremy Denk

Satie’s Spell

Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship.

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

by Ian Penman

Yiyun Li

A Talent for Living

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.

Joe Dunthorne

Uganda’s Two Tyrants

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation.

A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda

by Derek R. Peterson

Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State

by Mahmood Mamdani

Robert P. Baird

God of the Gaps

Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

by Ross Douthat

Nicholas Guyatt

The Most Rancorous Line

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a long-standing colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation

by Edward G. Gray

Christopher de Bellaigue

Hype and Fraud in India

Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.

Maureen N. McLane

Bamfordtown

Maria Bamford’s wild and constantly inventive stand-up style relies on her never flinching from the most difficult realities.

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere

by Maria Bamford

You Are (a Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-Up Comedy

by Maria Bamford

Hogbook and Lazer Eyes

by Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy

Bill McKibben

It’s a Gas

There have been five great mass extinctions on Earth: four have been the result of carbon dioxide flooding into the atmosphere and raising the temperature.

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World

by Peter Brannen

Michael Dirda

Little known today, Fitz-James O’Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes—among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots.

Collected Speculative Works: An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848–1854); The Diamond Lens and Others (1855–1858); What Was It? and Others (1858–1864)

by Fitz-James O’Brien, selected and with an introduction by John P. Irish

Clair Wills