LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB “Alien“,which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 10.19.25 Issue features Astead W. Herndon on the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani; Emily Bazelon on the state of the rule of law in the U.S. under Trump; Andrew Ross Sorkin on 1929 and the rise of crypto investing; Parul Sehgal on Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel; and more.
The conflict over compulsory service for the nation’s ultra-Orthodox has become a stand-in for a larger struggle over the country’s right-wing, religious turn — and could determine its future.
The showdown has highlighted Republicans’ failure to produce an alternative to Obamacare, which many assail but concede is too politically risky to undo.
In New Jersey, Virginia and beyond, voters see ads linking Republican candidates to President Trump. Some Democratic strategists see a missed opportunity.
Ukraine Braces for New Talks Without the Leverage of New Missiles
President Trump backed off selling Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, opting instead for talks with Russia. Still, Ukraine’s negotiating position has strengthened since the summer.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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