Anticipation for the promise a new year brings is, in 2025, heavily tempered by trepidation about what Donald Trump’s second term will look like. For the big story of our first edition of the new year, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour surveys how the world from Moscow to London, Tehran to Beijing and Brussels to Kyiv is gearing up for 20 January. Whether they be populists or hard-headed foreign-policy realists, it is clear that leaders are prepared to talk back to Trump in his language of power. Equally true is that despite the incoming White House administration’s preference to concentrate on America first domestic issues, the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and tensions with China force themselves to the forefront of Trump’s agenda and are unlikely to be solved in either his first day, week or month in office. As the year unfolds, Guardian Weekly will continue to help you make sense of Trump’s return and the biggest global issues of 2025.
1 Spotlight | Air disaster compounds South Korea’s troubles A major fatal air accident is a tragedy for any nation but as Justin McCurry and Raphael Rashid report, the Jeju Air crash has come against a continued background of political division and instability.
2 Science | Time’s paradox A timely exploration by Miriam Frankel of recent research has found out about the factors that make life drag or fly by. And, importantly, what you can do to help reset your inner clock to a more satisfactory tempo.
3 Features | The millennium bug that didn’t bite us A quarter of a century ago, doomsayers thought the world would end as we clicked over to a new century due to malfunctioning computer systems. But, Tom Faber reports, the much-feared bug was always going to be a damp squib.
4 Opinion | Uneasy parallels between the McCarthy era and Trump 2.0 Richard Sennett reflects on how postwar paranoia about the ‘enemy within’ changed his family and what it can teach Americans when a similarly anti-liberal administration is in power.
5 Culture | Another side of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan shuns discussion of his early years, so how did James Mangold, the director of a new biopic, and his creative team approach their script – and what happened when Dylan asked for a meeting? Alexis Petridis finds out.
Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States anoints him as “Disruptor in Chief”, a vital role with world-historical significance. Trump’s ascension to this position was presaged in Ayn Rand’s stupendous novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), whose central character, John Galt, confronts a similarly sclerotic America, which he sets out systematically to disrupt in a radical, transformative manner. This highly controversial novel is important in illuminating what is at stake at the cultural level in the struggle to come, and in emphasising the scale and direction of the challenges facing Trump, his administration and his supporters. Atlas Shrugged is also valuable because, together with Rand’s earlier novel The Fountainhead (1943), it offers in compelling fictional form a powerful, necessarily hyperbolic, statement of the philosophical values that must be reasserted to make America great again.
If Hillbilly Elegy was compulsory reading for observers of American politics wanting to understand Trump’s first presidency, Walter Isaacson’s biographical portrait of Elon Musk is mandatory holiday reading for those wanting to understand how Donald J. Trump turned so many critics into passionate supporters and won a resounding presidential vote in 2024, and to gauge how his nation-reshaping policies might play out over the next four years.
In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.
Romeo + Juliet – a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, October 24, 2024–February 16, 2025
English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result. By Manvir Singh
Alice Munro’s Passive Voice
The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story. By Rachel Aviv
Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
The history of recorded music is now at our fingertips. But the streamer’s algorithmic skill at giving us what we like may keep us from what we’ll love. By Hua Hsu
Hoover Institution (December 22, 2024): The depth of Hoover’s scholarship is reflected in the numerous books published by our fellows on a broad variety of topics and issues.
Edited by Matt Pottinger (Hoover Institution Press) Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has openly expressed his intention to annex Taiwan to mainland China, even threatening the use of force. An invasion or blockade of Taiwan by Chinese forces would be catastrophic, with severe consequences for democracies worldwide. In The Boiling Moat, Matt Pottinger and a team of scholars and distinguished military and political leaders urgently outline practical steps for deterrence.
the full proceedings from this conference—the presentations, responses, and discussions. In it, participants debate the meaning of getting monetary policy “back on track,” the significance of recent bank failures, and how to improve forecasting and oversight.
In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span centuries, from the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World, to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.
By H.R. McMaster (HarperCollins Publishers) Publication Date: August 27, 2024
At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive president drive necessary shifts in US foreign policy at a critical moment in history. H.R. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyperpartisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump’s presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term might look like.
By Charles G. Palm (Hoover Institution Press) Foreword by Condoleezza Rice, Introduction by Stephen Kotkin Publication Date: June 1, 2024
In late 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. Over the next 12 years, the Hoover Institution microfilmed and published the newly opened records of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State. Charles Palm, who led this mission, details how he and his colleagues secured a historic agreement with the Russian Federation, then launched and successfully carried out the joint project with the Russian State Archives and their partner, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.
Charles Taylor’s revelatory Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Harvard University Press, 2024) draws together different strands from Taylor’s storied philosophical career to present a new account of Romantic poetry. “Philosophy moves us because it convinces us; poetry convinces us because it moves us.” Taylor asks what it would mean to take seriously poetry’s ambition to reveal new dimensions of the world through the resources of image and symbol. Readers of Friedrich Hölderlin or William Wordsworth are familiar with the feeling that a poem is true or right in some deep sense, without being able to defend or even describe that rightness in philosophical terms. Consider the climax of Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” which serves as Taylor’s central example. The poet discerns
A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of thought, And rolls through all things.
A New Theory of Evolution
By Jessica Riskin
Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity (Princeton University Press, 2024) makes for an exhilarating reading. It is not just a book but an intellectual revolution. The authors show that the experiences and behaviors of living beings shape the course of evolution. You might find it strange that this would be a revolutionary idea. You might wonder how it could possibly be otherwise: How could the experiences and behaviors of living beings have no bearing whatsoever on the course of evolution?
Adventures With Books
By Priya Satia
Debate about the role of Western education in Britain’s colonies and former colonies (including the United States) is as old as the British empire itself. Those ever-evolving debates have, in turn, been studied for decades by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and other scholars trained in the Western system that has become a global inheritance. Saikat Majumdar’s The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) opens up a startlingly fresh perspective on these debates, attending to the unexpected and agonistic ways in which this education system shaped particular individuals whose work has had profound impact around the world.
Psychedelic Rabbit Holes
By Susan Stryker
I came for the acid, and stayed for the deep roots of gender theory that I found in Benjamin Breen’s Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central Publishing, 2024). Admittedly, gender is not the main focus of Breen’s book. But in using the personal, professional, and intellectual partnership of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson to structure the narrative of this work of breathtaking originality, Breen reveals the kernel of a far-flung constellation of ideas and contexts that has rewired my brain’s understanding of the gender concept’s origins.
What does political revolution require of writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers? How do they transform their ways of making in order to keep pace with such upheaval? In Soviet Factography: Reality Without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Devin Fore uncovers an entire archive of radical responses to these questions in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, revealing a fascinating array of original strategies to record a world turned upside down. We follow all manner of “factographic” authors and artists (writer Sergei Tret’iakov and filmmaker Dziga Vertov are only the best known) as they scramble to register the revolution as immediately as possible. Their aim is not to arrest this transformation but, on the contrary, to dynamize it anew, to carry it forward into all areas of life, private and public, subjective and social. This riveting study of “reality in revolution” pressures our understanding of both terms; it also shows us how a reordering of any society involves a refashioning of its individuals.
Corinne Fowler’s enjoyable and thought-provoking The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire (Scribner, 2024) achieves many things with an admirably light touch. Combining her lifelong passion for walking with her pathbreaking work linking England’s buildings and landscapes to the nation’s imperial past, she explores the many ways in which rural Britain was indelibly shaped by its overseas endeavors. She highlights how money, people, and rural industries closely connected the Cotswolds to Calcutta, the Scottish Highlands to Jamaica, Cornwall to West Africa and the Americas, and so on.
Ego, Redux
By Jonathan Lear
It surprised me to discover that The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) is distinguished by its fidelity to two authors, not just one. Over 30 years in the making — though time was wasted with in-fighting among psychoanalysts — The Revised Standard Edition (RSE) aims to reanimate the distinctive translation into English of James Strachey. This is striking because so many of Strachey’s choices — for example, translating Ich as “Ego,” or Besetzung as “cathexis” — have been the subject of intense criticism. Why, the criticism goes, translate the wonderfully colloquial German that Freud used into a Latinized, “scientific” English? And why not use the occasion of a revised edition to make corrections?
Neil Gong’s Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2024) does what the best ethnographies do: provide the reader with an empathetic understanding of its subject. Gong’s comparative work provides a portrait of “sidewalk psychotics” in Los Angeles and compares their experiences to the children of elite families who have similar mental-health struggles.
For those on the street, the aim of most social programs begins with getting them housed. Gong follows people from homelessness into apartments and finds that our social programs of “tolerant containment” do little to tackle mental-health challenges. Policies and programs that focus on housing first are meant to provide a wider range of services, and through detailed observations Gong shows that this rarely happens. The mantra seems to be: get housed, and hopefully the rest will take care of itself. Once housed, people are quite free from intervention or monitoring, including free from programs that might help them address their mental health.
In 1660, the first national post was established in England. By the Victorian age, there were 12 mail deliveries a day in London; friends could dash off a letter in the morning and expect to continue an exchange until late at night. Today, the personal letter in its physical form is largely extinct. But in the era of WhatsApp chats and exchanges on X, its legacy has never been more obvious. Far more than the novel, confession, or diary, the letter is the literary genre at the origins of the modern self: social rather than solitary, reactive rather than reflective, on the cusp of public and private life.
Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024) may not make for particularly cheerful reading for the holidays. But it is essential for any scholar seeking to make sense of a range of current trends: the ongoing retreat from 1990s-style globalization, the crisis of liberal democracy, and the rapid return of hot wars, cold wars, and trade wars to a world that just yesterday claimed to have overcome them all. It was written before Donald Trump was re-elected as president of the United States, but it helps make sense not only of the recent U.S. election but the broad trend of elections over the last decade and a half, from roughly the start of the financial crisis of 2007-8 down to the present, and not only in the United States but around the world.
It is a bold move to write a biography in 2024 of an artist like Josiah Wedgwood, a British man of the 18th century. Iris Moon knows as much. She describes her book Melancholy Wedgwood (The MIT Press, 2024) as an “experimental biography,” by which she implies something more than defiance of the genre’s conventions. Wedgwood is most familiar today as the name attached to your grandmother’s prized vase. To a narrower audience, he is known as the ceramics entrepreneur whose successful factory embodies the emergence of modern capitalism in England. Neither of those stories is at the heart of Melancholy Wedgwood.
The circumstances that you bring to read — that bring you to read — shape how you receive a text. It just so happens that I was reviewing a stack of grant applications and planning an ethnographic writing course for next term when I stumbled upon The Ethnographer’s Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design (Duke University Press, 2024), by the anthropologists Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson. This research-design manual, whose title is a play on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, is unconventional in many ways: It eschews a linear, hierarchically constructed style of formulating “scientific” research proposals and encourages a collective, creative, and conceptual approach to research design that pushes back against the demands of the neoliberal university and the idea of the “lone, isolated anthropologist.” It’s even a little woo-woo. (The authors admit as much). Peterson and Olson’s model for building and working in community from the inception of a research project aims to “mitigate disheartening experiences of disconnection that occur throughout institutionalized landscapes, such as those between professors and students, people working inside and outside of bounded organizations, and those with expertise versus those with experience.”
The last @TheTLS of 2024, featuring Ian Ground and Simone Gubler on animals and us; @TATFS on Wendy Cope; Marie Darrieussecq on arrondissement XVIII; @TobyLichtig on festive theatre; @JamesCahill on Caillebotte; Patricia Storace on Radwa Ashour; @bjkingape on turkeys – and more pic.twitter.com/cfqQgBNPER
But between candidates who are defenders of the system and those who are anti-system. Democrats lost because they allowed Trump to be the only voice of antiestablishment rage.
Or reflexively denouncing every Trump policy. While we mustn’t underestimate the danger he poses to our democracy, when he says he wants to end war, the left should call his bluff.
Simply named Kiosk, this book features photos of more than 150 modernist, modular kiosks that brighten streets across central and eastern Europe.
Authors David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka aimed to draw attention to the surviving, unusual structures that were constructed in factories in the Eastern Bloc from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Written by academics Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder and Dezeen editor Tom Ravenscroft, 100 Women: Architects in Practice showcases the work of architects from 78 different countries.
The book contains interviews with some of the world’s best-known architects including Liz Diller, Tatiana Bilbao, Mariam Issoufou Kamara and Lina Ghotmeh, along with numerous women who have not yet received extensive global attention.
The book not only contains many of the key buildings created by the movement’s trailblazers but also those designed by more under-represented architects.
Sacred Modernity aimed to showcase the “unique beauty and architectural innovation” of brutalist churches across Europe.
The book contains 139 photographs of 100 churches taken by photographer Jamie McGregor Smith over five years, along with essays by writers Jonathan Meades and Ivica Brnic.
Simon Phipps’ follow up to his Brutal North and Brutal London books, Brutal Wales highlights architecture in the brutalist style across the country.
Alongside photography of 60 buildings, the book has explanatory texts in both Welsh and English, as well as an introduction by social historian John Grindrod.
The Donald Judd Furniture book contains photos of all the furniture pieces created by the artist for his New York and Marfa, Texas, properties that remain in production.
Along with the photos, the book contains archival sketches by Judd, newly commissioned drawings of each piece and several essays by the artist.
London Estates documents the modernist council housing built in the UK capital in the post-war period.
Described by publisher Fuel as “the most comprehensive photographic document of council housing schemes in the capital”, the book was photographed by Thaddeus Zupančič.
Photographer Christopher Payne’s Made in America book contains images taken over the past decade in the USA’s factories.
Payne created the book as a way of helping to preserve the legacy of industry in America, while documenting the skill of workers who are featured in the photography.
The latest book in the 50 ideas series, 50 Design Ideas You Really Need to Know contains essays tracking the evolution of design from the 19th century to today.
Written by John Jervis, the book aims to make a broad range of design concepts accessible to a wide audience.
Boomers Daily 