We’re living in a moment of political and economic upheaval. We asked New Yorker staffers to recommend books to help better understand all that is unfolding around us. Plus:
- Why bad ideas go viral
- The criminalization of Venezuelan street culture
- Can the Southern Baptist Convention survive without women pastors?
These are tense times. Attempts to make sense of contemporary life can often feel fruitless. For some clarity, staffers recommended books they’ve found instructive about our strange shared reality. Their picks examine the power of demagogues, the injustices of the immigration system, the reasons protest movements have failed, and the fear of others.
By George Saunders
I’ll bet Saunders wishes he had been less prescient than he was when he wrote this fable, twenty-odd years ago, about a demagogue who exploits his compatriots’ fear of foreigners to launch himself into his nation’s Presidency—inaugurating a new era of cruelty and violence against the weak. The demagogue, Phil, a “slightly bitter nobody” who resides in the large and strong country of Outer Horner, discovers that he has a talent for swaying audiences by disparaging the inhabitants of a tiny neighboring land. Inner Horner can hold, at the most, only one of its citizens at a time, leaving the others no choice but to spill over into Outer Horner—an aggressive border incursion, to hear Phil tell it. Soon Outer Horner begins levying taxes (tariffs, anyone?) on the Inner Hornerites, and physically attacking them when they can’t pay. Phil speaks in a Trumpian register, though with a touch more whimsy: a day that didn’t go his way, “Dark Dark Thursday,” is followed by “the Memorable Friday of Total Triumphant Retribution.” Let’s just hope that Saunders’s prophetic vision holds when it comes to the “brief” part.—Douglas Watson, copy editor
By Valeria Luiselli
Ten years ago, the Mexican American novelist Valeria Luiselli started working as a volunteer interpreter at New York City’s main federal immigration court. She was tasked with asking unaccompanied child migrants the forty questions that are listed on the intake questionnaire, and then translating their answers into a story in English, with the hope that some narrative cohesion could protect them from deportation back to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. “Tell Me How It Ends” is a studied, sober examination of the way language—“safe,” “alien,” “threat”—becomes machinery for the state, and how absurd its boilerplate reads during a struggle for survival. In just over a hundred pages, Luiselli paints a grotesque picture of the American immigration system, and forces the reader to replace names and numbers with faces and full lives. The book interweaves an account of her own family’s green-card process with the dark history of U.S. military involvement in the Americas, policy briefings, and excerpts of her interviews with children as young as five—among them a boy who saw his younger brother get shot and killed by gang members and another who, because of his pending bid for asylum, couldn’t attend the funeral of a friend he’d watched die. Published two months into Trump’s first term, it weighs heavier now than ever, as civil protections continue to erode and the rule of law is failing to hold.—Holden Seidlitz, fact checker
By Vincent Bevins
If you have ever marched for something and lost, you should read Vincent Bevins’s “If We Burn.” This postmortem of the mass protest movements of the twenty-tens—such as the Arab Spring and the Movimento Passe Livre, in Brazil—asks why they often ended in “something even worse than failure,” giving way to even more brutal regimes with fewer rights. Bevins’s insights—about how the fall of the Soviet Union soured the left on Leninist-style structure and discipline, endearing it to leaderless horizontalism; how both social and mass media overwhelmed protests with unaccountable, ideologically dissimilar supporters and distorted their messages; how excitement and euphoria can build movements but also distract them—are disturbing and exhilarating. This all might sound grim, but the truth is our friend right now, and Bevins has no contempt for the activists he interviews, only empathy and a sense of urgent curiosity. “If We Burn” is a piece of an emerging activist playbook that’s intelligent about twenty-first-century conditions, and it left me, against the odds, very hopeful.—Jael Goldfine, fact checker
By James W. Loewen
Last year, on the weekend after the election, I wondered what I could do to try to understand what was happening. I turned to Black history—knowing that my experience as a Chinese American was inextricable from the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people—and I read “Sundown Towns,” by James W. Loewen. After reconstruction, “sundown towns,” communities that expelled or excluded Black residents, emerged all across the U.S., mostly outside of the South. In this specific and expansive history, Loewen demonstrates how the stories of unequal existence in this country have an almost predictable repetitiveness to them. Published in the mid two-thousands, the book also shows what happened when immigrant groups were eventually allowed to move into these white-only areas after the towns’ populations had dwindled—and how other ethnicities triangulated themselves from the dichotomy of white and Black. “Sundown Towns” offers a window into our nation’s past and illustrates the lasting consequences of reactionary and exclusionary policies.—Jasper Lo, fact checker
For more: The New Yorker recommends new and notable books every week, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Editor’s Pick
Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral
A new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” argues that beliefs get adopted not because of their virtue but because of their catchiness. Gideon Lewis-Kraus investigates the push and pull between reason and charisma in our online lives—and considers a new way forward. Read the story »
- Oriana van Praag on the criminalization of Venezuelan street culture
- Justin Chang on the powerful warning of the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes
- Daniel Lombroso’s short documentary “Hold the Line” explores an influential evangelical church’s move to cast women out of the ministry
Our Culture Picks
Listen: Annie DiRusso’s single “Legs” isn’t quite appropriate for network television. Amanda Petrusich spent time with the singer-songwriter as she worked on a cleaner version.
Watch: Craving more Nathan Fielder? “The Curse,” co-starring Emma Stone, is an unflinching look at a very unsettling marriage.
Read: If you want to feel very bad about the near future, dive into “AI 2027,” a scenario that predicts the “impact of superhuman AI over the next decade.” Tread carefully.
Daily Cartoon
Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Theme of a parade with lots of blue-pink-and-white flags—ten letters.
Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
P.S. Rafael Nadal was honored at the French Open this past weekend, in a tear-soaked ceremony that put the final punctuation on his storied career. Nadal’s raw show of emotion was a reminder of what Gerald Marzorati identified as his gift to tennis fans: “a vehement competitiveness with no trace of anger or rancor; a considerate ferocity.” 🎾
Ian Crouch contributed to this edition.
