June 12, 2025 Issue

Fintan O’Toole

Can the Church Evolve?

The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical.

Christina Davis

Keeping Up with Mrs. Jones

Nettie Jones’s debut novel, published in 1984 and newly reissued, is still breathtaking and shockingly bawdy.

Fish Tales

by Nettie Jones

Yuliia Iliukha

Arms Race in Ukraine

New drone technology is transforming the battlefield in Ukraine—and demonstrating the obsolescence of much Western weaponry.

Tim Flannery

Electrome Dreams

Could the bioelectricity generated by our cells be responsible for more than communication in the nervous system?

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

by Sally Adee

Christina Davis

Unraveling a Repressive Regime

Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause recognizes the achievements of the Soviet dissidents who for decades found the strength to resist stultifying Communist rule.

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

by Benjamin Nathans

Christopher Benfey

Anecdote of the Teapot

A teapot made in South Carolina during the 1760s by an enigmatic English émigré potter named John Bartlam provides an allegory for porcelain’s journey from the East.

Michael Hofmann

Novels Without Food

How did a writer as unconventional as Andrey Platonov manage to write so many irresistibly interesting books?

Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, with an introduction by Robert Chandler and an essay by Vladimir Sharov

The Foundation Pit

by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson, with notes and an afterword by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson

Happy Moscow

by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and others

Soul

by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman, with an afterword by John Berger

Philip Clark

The Atonal Genie

Arnold Schoenberg’s music still challenges listeners, but his twelve-tone technique turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, from horror film scores to cartoons to jazz.

Schoenberg: Why He Matters

by Harvey Sachs

Dawn Marie Paley

A Shelter or a Prison?

There’s a severe shortage of public treatment options in Mexico for people who use drugs and wish to stop. Small, clandestine private clinics fill the gap.

The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City

by Angela Garcia

Jenny Uglow

Orchid Frenzy

The discovery of a Brazilian orchid with huge red-and-purple flowers in the early nineteenth century set off a mania for the exotic plants in Victorian England.

The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession

by Sarah Bilston

Saving Orchids: Stories of Species Survival in a Changing World

by Philip Seaton and Lawrence W. Zettler

Colin Thubron

In a quartet of books about life in the mountains of southern Bulgaria and North Macedonia as they descend into Greece, Kapka Kassabova gives voice to the shepherds, nomads, horse breeders, dog breeders, villagers, and refugees who live there.

Anima: A Wild Pastoral

by Kapka Kassabova

Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time

by Kapka Kassabova

To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace

by Kapka Kassabova

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

by Kapka Kassabova

Susan Neiman

The Conformist

Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director, documents the little compromises that led G. W. Pabst, like millions of other people, to accept fascism.

The Director

by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin