In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.
Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.
What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.
Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place by Dan Chiasson
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
Here’s a question I often bat around with graduate students in my International Political Economy seminar: In book 12 of the Odyssey, how do the shipmates know which Ulysses to trust?
You know the story. Ulysses and his crew have been on Circe’s island for a year. They’re finally about to depart when the goddess takes Ulysses aside and warns him of the dangers that await them. The first of these is the “piercing songs” of the Sirens. “So listen,” she says, “I will give you good instructions; another god will make sure you remember.”
Circe tells Ulysses to put wax in his sailors’ ears but that he can listen to the Sirens if he wants to — as long as his shipmates bind him “hand and foot” to the mast: “So bound, you can enjoy the Sirens’ song. But if you beg your men to set you free, they have to tie you down with firmer knots.”
As their ship approaches the Sirens’ sharp rocks, the wind dies down, they pull the sails, and they begin to row. As predicted, Ulysses yells out to his men to set him free. He is still their captain. But instead of obeying his orders, Eurylochus and Perimedes stand up and “tie him down with firmer knots.” How, I ask my students, do they know to trust the first Ulysses over the second? How is it that as readers, we never question their choice?
Albert Kahn has been called “the father of industrial architecture” and “the architect of Detroit.” His firm was certainly prolific: it was responsible for the Ford Motor Company of Canada factory in Toronto, near a laneway that bears his name, and the General Motors assembly plant in Regina, along with nearly 900 buildings in Motor City alone. Kahn’s oeuvre encompassed offices, grand homes for his industrialist clients, and libraries and fraternity houses at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, not to mention a post office, a synagogue, and multiple hospitals and skyscrapers. Many of Kahn’s buildings reflect a pastiche of styles that might be considered a precursor of a postmodern eclectic. Yet this prolific architect is relatively unknown today, especially outside of Michigan.
Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905–1961 by Claire Zimmerman
The mood on the Sea Adventurer’s bridge was grim. “She’s only making eight knots,” said our expedition leader. “We need to hit at least fourteen to keep to our itinerary.” We were four days into a two-week sailing and anchored off Ilulissat, near a UNESCO World Heritage site nestled into the crenellated western coast of Greenland.
Earlier that day, I had found myself at the helm of a Zodiac, manoeuvring the rubberized craft through thick fog, near-freezing water, and growlers. The ten high-paying passengers under my care likely had no idea that this was my first trip with the tour operator or my first time north of the Arctic Circle.
The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.
A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.
Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future.
East Side Story
Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.
L’Affaire Carlson
Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it.
‘They Killed Our People’
More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested.
‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’
If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?
Imagine sitting near the apex of power in an empire and then being shown the door. You might want to write a tell-all book about it. If so, however, you would be advised to proceed with caution. Now, imagine what would barely be conceivable today: that you undertook to write your exposé while you were still in office. You would need all the finesse of a tightrope walker.
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Claremont Review of Books 25th anniversary gala, held at the Metropolitan Club in New York City on November 6, 2025.
In the early hours of March 11, 1874, word spread around Washington that Charles Sumner was on the brink of death. The 63-year-old senator from Massachusetts had suffered a massive heart attack the previous evening. By 9 a.m., a crowd of several hundred had gathered in front of his home on Lafayette Square. “Colored men and women mingled with white in knots about his home,” wrote TheNew-York Tribune. Government workers, merchants, shopmen, waiters, and even “old colored women with baskets and bundles on their arms” stood together. Many were crying and begging to be let inside. They were stopped by one of Sumner’s friends and two policemen standing guard at the front door.
It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable.
Doublethink & Doubt
Orwell: 2+2=5 By Raoul Peck (dir)
George Orwell: Life and Legacy By Robert Colls
Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’.
In this prodigiously researched epic, Torigian details the life of Xi Zhongxun—the father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping—to explain the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Along the way, readers gain a sense of how the younger Xi became the man he is today.
Luce, a gifted storyteller, chronicles the personal life and intellectual journey of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who played a significant but underappreciated role in opening the United States to China, bringing the Cold War to an end, and shaping the world that came after. In writing this gem of a book, Luce has rendered a genuine service to history.
Soldatov and Borogon, two Russian journalists, tell the story of their one-time group of friends and colleagues—young Russians who, over the course of the Putin years, steadily drift toward nationalist and illiberal ideas and end up as supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In this masterful study, Varouxakis tracks the meanings of “the West” from the late eighteenth century to the present—and argues that the modern notion of the term emerged in the 1830s as a way to distinguish western Europe from Russia. Today, for beleaguered countries such as Ukraine, “the West” is still a powerful idea.
Foreign Affairs Magazine: The very best of the hundreds of books on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and book reviewers.
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