March 27, 2025 Issue

Neal Ascherson

Ordinary Germans

We know who the Nazis were and what they did. In Hitler’s People, the distinguished historian Richard J. Evans seeks to explain what made them capable of doing it.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich

by Richard J. Evans

Laura Marsh

A Self Divided

Since the rise of cable TV, corporations have sought to capture our valuable attention. But the way social media shatters our ability to focus has new implications for public discourse and politics.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

Martin Filler

Build, Britannia!

As one of England’s foremost authorities on architecture, Gavin Stamp distinguished himself by focusing on how buildings are lived in, rather than how they look.

Interwar: British Architecture, 1919–39

by Gavin Stamp, with a foreword by Rosemary Hill

J.T. Townley

Cases Closed

How would the Mueller investigation have unfolded if the Supreme Court’s recent, chilling Trump v. United States decision had been in effect?

Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation

by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein, with a preface by Robert S. Mueller III

Clare Bucknell

Sir John Soane’s museum represents the rare survival of a collection that was more like an early modern cabinet of curiosities—flamboyant, overflowing, full of anomalies—than a nineteenth-century institution.

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection

by Bruce Boucher

Ben Tarnoff

The Labor Theory of AI

Artificial intelligence may be the first attempt to automate and discipline human labor that even its creators don’t fully comprehend.

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Fady Joudah

Barzakh

a poem

Jed Perl

Echoes of Eternity

The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.

Nicole Eustace

An Expanding Vision of America

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

by Kathleen DuVal

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History

by Ned Blackhawk

Jacob Weisberg

The Lucky One

Who was the “real” Reagan behind the carapace of vagueness, self-delusion, and contradiction?

Reagan: His Life and Legend

by Max Boot

Catherine Nicholson

A Milton for All Seasons

The many radical rereadings of Paradise Lost

What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost

by Orlando Reade

David Oshinsky

Vaccines at Warp Speed

The development of the Covid vaccine relied on a public–private partnership that built on years of research into synthesizing RNA molecules. Will the next generation of RNA-based pharmaceuticals have the same basis in careful study and experimentation?

The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets

by Thomas R. Cech

Nell Irvin Painter

‘This Land Is Yours’

Two recent books recover the missing Black history of upstate New York, challenging the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.

The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier

by Amy Godine

A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family

by Debra Bruno, with an afterword by Eleanor C. Mire

Michael Dirda

The Chronicler of Unhappiness

Ford Madox Ford’s sensuous, vital novels often drew on the events of his rich and muddled life.

Ford Madox Ford

by Max Saunders

Sally Rooney

Angles of Approach

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it.

Unbreakable

by Ronnie O’Sullivan

Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything

a documentary film directed by Sam Blair