Valeria Luiselli is celebrated for demanding novels that collect sounds and teeth, that challenge regimes of labor and borders. With Beginning Middle End, she fulfills her daughter’s wish—finally writing a novel that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But maybe not in that order.

Hunger spreads across the histories, becomes a weapon, becomes forever a memory of horror. Esther Dischereit about her exchange with the poet Husam Maarouf, asking what there is left to write about from here, now.

After Berlin’s state election, two debates have been perniciously conflated: one on Die Linke’s alleged antisemitism, the other on its plans to socialize housing. If the German political center continues to speak this way, it might cement an insidious concept: anti-landlord antisemitism.

“I am, of course, not arguing that we should think like Steve Bannon. I am, however, struck by how precisely Bannon has identified what makes people commit to political ideas and take action, how well his movement has weaponized this insight”—a memo in light of our Volksbühne event on October 27.

Bringing together sixty architecture firms working in Albania, The Albanian Files presents a country perpetually “in transition.” But the book is less a document than an instrument of politics it claims to describe, giving form to historical amnesia, tax tricks, and the allure of the undeveloped.

In her pursuit of a “low-character fiction,” Rachel Cusk turns to the austere. Her latest work, Life of M, chips away at the load-bearing columns of fiction in a game of writerly Jenga played against herself—one she does not quite win.

Berlin is full of trash—something political parties across the spectrum want to change, according to measures ranging from the authoritarian to the communitarian. Somewhere between ideology and pragmatism, “trash” itself has become an arena for various political views to spar.

Berlin’s public pools have become battlegrounds over race, security, and national decline. The moral panic surrounding the Volksbad project asks what remains of the pool as a public good, and what kinds of social life can still take shape there.

Two recent books examine the life of Magnus Hirschfeld—a sexologist and trans advocate in Weimar Germany—to better understand today’s anti-trans backlash. Yet both “misread the moment and in some cases the historical record, and remain stuck in more comforting and less useful narratives.”

Once among the world’s most open, Russia’s internet is now a maze of proxies, spyware, mandatory apps, and sandboxed networks. Writing under a pseudonym, a Russian journalist reports on what remains of the free web under Putin’s wartime regime.

Disguised as a literary biopic, Fatherland follows Thomas Mann through a divided Germany in 1949 to accept two parallel literary prizes. But beyond dramatizing an oft-invoked moment in history, the film offers a reflection on the condition of the aging intellectual and the force of the past.

Analytic philosophers in the United States are increasingly embracing AI, both by taking advisory positions at tech companies and by using large language models for their own research and writing. Some argue AI can already philosophize competently. But what does it mean to ‘do’ philosophy after all?

Part memoir, part archive, part political history, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton traces the intertwined histories of cotton, labor, family, and border violence across twentieth-century northern Mexico.

A new counter-canon turns away from the fascist monuments that became architectural classics to look at forgotten antifascist projects. From Red Vienna to Gaza, Antifascist Architecture traces buildings shaped by solidarity, resistance, and collective life rather than power and spectacle.

With its emphasis on craft and a PR campaign tailored to the genius of its director, Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” wants to save cinema from the fangs of AI. But for all its visual magnificence, the film is marred by bad dialogue, flat characters, and a refusal to tell the truth about “the West.”

Nobody killed the humanities. And yet they lie in guilt and agony in their cave, reaching for the last roasted scraps of the Sun God’s sacred cattle. What does this end-of-the-world Odyssey summer mean for the public intellectual? And can they survive it?