Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For a not insubstantial number of women watching Heated Rivalry—a smutty new Canadian romance about a nearly decade-long affair between closeted pro hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—the show has become an all-out obsession bordering on psychosis. When they are not rewatching one of its six episodes, they are replaying them in their mind, or endlessly consuming related content about the show and its stars, previous unknowns Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie (of course, the algorithm gladly obliges). These women speak of the trouble they’re having leaving the HR world behind; they report sleepless nights, a loss of interest in their work or home lives, and conversations that always end up back on their boys.

I am one of these women. I am very sick and this is a cry for help.

There is so much supplemental content to consume about the show. (My personal favorites are the episode recaps on Empty Netters—by all accounts a normal hockey bro podcast hosted by two very straight ex-pro players until Shane and Ilya came along and broke their brains. The comments on YouTube are all gay men talking about how watching the Netters discuss the show with so much genuine excitement, tenderness, curiosity, and, yes, horniness, is healing them.) And yet I’ve read nothing that is even attempting to answer the most important question: Why the fuck is this happening to us? I’ve heard about all the weird shit the CIA got up to with MKUltra; could this be Canada’s answer? Some subliminal hypnosis-type shit? WHAT IS THE ENDGAME HERE?

Romance writers are having a field day online arguing that the mainstream is just getting acquainted with the intoxicating contours of their genre, which aims to light up the pleasure centers, not to disappoint. After all, the show was adapted from Game Changers, a gay hockey smut series by Rachel Reid. The show—and the authentic, embodied chemistry between its leads—elevates the committedly lowbrow aesthetic of slash, a genre in which mostly women write erotic romances between famous male duos, real and fictional. (The slash comes from the ur example, Kirk/Spock, but imagine Harry/Draco, or Lennon/McCartney. HR takes its inspiration from the real-life feud between hockey stars Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.) In my very basic armchair analysis, it seems the female attraction to slash, and to “boy love” in general, may be a way of imagining sex and love without the steep and often violent power imbalances inherent in heterosexual relationships. In other words, the fantasy is equality. Indeed, though Shane and Ilya do sometimes hurt one another, they are also peers (ahem, rivals)—rich and famous phenoms on the international stage. No women were harmed in the making of this soft core. To account for the loss of the erotics of power, the love is forbidden, hence its setting in male pro sports, one of the only provinces left in North America where queerness remains entirely unspoken.

But whatever, no need to overthink things. It’s hot, it’s romantic, it’s beautifully shot. Though I can’t say it’s particularly deep (certainly not as deep as Normal People, its hetero counterpoint in more ways than one), there are some scenes, especially in the latter half of the series, that are so well-written, well-acted, and well-choreographed that I was literally screaming at the screen. One commenter on a post asking for an explanation for their Heated Rivalry psychosis, touting their therapeutic credentials, said the answer is simple: joy. I’m still not sure that Canada isn’t building an army of middle-aged women supersoldiers. But fuck it, everything is so dark. Treat yourself and watch the gay hockey show.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In 1980, International Harvester closed the Wisconsin Steel Works in South Chicago. Not content to lay off thousands of workers, the company also employed a complex legal scheme to renege on its pension obligations—signed off on by a corrupt company union connected to the Chicago Democratic machine.

The company did not reckon, however, on the steel workers themselves, who organized, under the name “Save Our Jobs,” what their lawyer called a “spiritual union” and fought a 17-year campaign of protests, pickets, and lawsuits to claw back their pensions. They were led by Frank Lumpkin, a Black Communist steelworker who was already 64 years old in 1980.

His wife, Beatrice Lumpkin, who is still alive (and currently, keinehora, 107 years young), wrote a biography of her husband, “Always Bring a Crowd!” The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker (1999), focusing on the battle with International Harvester. The book, like its protagonist’s life, bridges between the Old Left and the desperate 1980s battles against deindustrialization. Lumpkin moved North from Florida during the Great Migration, and he participated in the wave of post-World War II strikes and in Communist efforts at racial integration in the late 1940s, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Movement. The political repression of McCarthyism crushed the Left organizationally, but could not repress the spirit of class struggle. When the moment arrived, Lumpkin seized it to organize a multiracial, militant group. Save Our Jobs shaped Chicago and even national politics, contributing to Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral victory over the Democratic machine, and anticipating Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the last progressive presidential campaign until Bernie Sanders in 2016. And though the plant never reopened, Save Our Jobs wrung substantial settlements from International Harvester and its shady corporate partner—exemplifying the simple idea that when workers fight, we win.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, the wildly eccentric artist Alex Melamid, formerly half of the marvelous team of Komar and Melamid, devised something called the Art Healing Ministry. Working out of a small gallery in Soho, patients would bring him their problems, psychological and physical, for which he’d prescribe works of art, usually housed at the Frick Collection, the sight of which would cure their malady. I’m certain that Alex—whose work at the time I helped propagate by having him as designated artist-in-residence at Queens Hospital Center, where I then worked—would prescribe the current exhibition, “Renoir Drawings”, on display at the Morgan Library until February 8th, 2026, for almost anything that ails you. “Joyful” might be a cliché in describing Renoir’s work, but if it is, it’s only because it so aptly applies to his oeuvre, including the works on display here.

Joyful and alive. When I visited the show, the woman standing next to me before Renoir’s drawing of a salon, its walls, and the people and furniture in it enthused over how alive everything was, how the walls and the chair were as vibrant as the people. This is true everywhere in the exhibition.

The curators have assembled the preliminary stages of several of the larger and more impressive drawings. The most thorough tracks a painting through all of Renoir’s preparatory work. There are many sketches for Three Bathers, a large work depicting the pink, fresh-skinned young women who dominate Renoir’s art. They are first drawn separately, with Renoir experimenting with the right poses, the right gestures, and the right way to draw their feet. One drawing in particular, of a model who appears in several of the works, a young woman with bangs, shows her nude body turned away from the viewer so only her back is seen. In the sketch, done on paper on canvas, Renoir has worked the skin color to the point of perfection. The enormous work involved, we must remember, was for a sketch, something that Renoir never would have expected to be displayed. The final image is one of sheer youthful joy bursting from the large frame.

Grim times require respite. Alex Melamid was entirely right: In any given dreadful situation, there exist works of art that can rescue you. The hour or two you spend at the Morgan with Renoir’s drawing will be time well and fruitfully spent.

Mari Cohen (Senior Editor, Politics): A month ago, I finally canceled my Spotify subscription. For a few years, I’d already felt unsettled about supporting a company known for its paltry payments to artists and shady schemes to pad the platform with mass-produced content under the name of “ghost artists.” When Spotify’s CEO made a major investment in an AI military tech company and then the platform began running ICE ads earlier this year, I realized it was time to cancel the family plan I maintained, write them a sternly worded explanation, and move over to Apple Music. I’m not under much illusion that Apple is a particularly ethical company to support either, but at moments when a just consumer boycott is cohering, despairing over how every alternative is compromised can become an excuse to do nothing. So I feel good about making the choice to move to a slightly better option—one that I actually used to use until peer pressure pushed me over to Spotify seven years ago. (Doesn’t hurt that I was able to transfer all my playlists, too.) It’s taking a bit of time to re-familiarize myself with the Apple Music interface, but I can’t say I particularly miss Spotify’s uncanny AI-generated personalized playlist titles or its repetitive recommendations. So with that preamble out of the way, I’m happy to present my annual playlist of my favorite songs released during the year, courtesy of Apple Music.

This year, my favorite album was largely overlooked by major year-end lists. I couldn’t stop listening to the impeccable melodies and emotional vocals on Bloodless by indie singer-songwriter Samia. The more widely recognized Bleeds by Wednesday made for my close second: Frontwoman Karly Hartzman knows how to transform intricate evocations of Southern life into catchy hooks—and she’s not afraid to scream them when necessary. Meanwhile, if Lorde’s limp 2021 offering Solar Power was a disappointment, I found this year’s Virgin to be a return to form, an album that can light up headphones or a dance floor, with a thematic depth still rare in the megapop world. (If you get a chance to see the Ultrasound tour, don’t hesitate—Lorde’s spare, artsy tour production drew me all the way in from the highest spot in the balcony.)

Don’t worry, I also liked a few albums by men, including Southern rock king Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow, which I’ve already extolled in this newsletter, as well as the blues-inflected rock and political poetry on Greg Freeman’s Burnover. The playlist also heavily features selections from Spanish pop star Rosalía’s operatic tour-de-force Lux, as well as the whispery but energetic stylings of her countrywomen AMORE (Top Hits, Ballads, Etc...); the miraculous reunion of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield with twin sister Allison on Snocaps, bringing back the grungier rock sound of my favorite Waxahatchee record Out of the Storm with the help of MJ Lenderman on guitar; the audacious and addicting power pop tunes on Blondshell’s If You Asked for a Picture; the many permutations (two different versions with two different track lists, plus a b-sides release) of fka twigs’s experimental dance pop record Eusexua (“Girl Feels Good” might be my top song of the year); a welcome return of the interesting version of Justin Bieber on laid-back, groovy SWAG (no, I will not speak about SWAG II here); the throbbing beats and soaring vocals on Sudan Archives’s The BPM; and this year’s rich solo projects from both The National’s Matt Berninger and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Shoutout also to Bad Bunny, Ethel Cain, Oklou, Alex G, and The Beths. (Neither of the latter two matched the heights of their respective 2022 albums, but I enjoyed this year’s offerings nonetheless.)

If you’re waiting for me to mention Geese and Cameron Winter, I’ll say I have genuine respect for what the kid is doing—enough to drop a chunk from both albums onto the playlist, though if I had to choose, I think I prefer the full band—but I have a hard cap on for how long I can truly enjoy listening to his warble. I don’t really get the Addison Rae thing more generally but “Diet Pepsi” is a banger. In the Taylor Swift department, I only wanted to drop a few songs from major disappointment The Life of a Showgirl on this playlist—most happily ”Ruin the Friendship,” the only track that maintains the tight, picturesque storytelling that originally had me blasting her music while cleaning my room in middle school—but I would like to present the “Taylor Swift Song of the Year award” to Lady Gaga for “How Bad Do U Want Me,” which uses a remarkably Swiftlike melodic pattern to great effect. As my friends and I used to say about Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” “How Bad Do U Want Me” has those chemicals they put in Doritos to get you to keep eating them. At least someone is putting them to good use!

This rec also serves as my farewell before I head off on my sabbatical at the start of next year. I’ll see you all in May 2026!

Daniel May (publisher): The Voice of Hind Rajab is hard to “recommend.” It’s difficult to think of another movie that I found as physically painful to sit through; I ended up watching most of it with my jacket pulled halfway over my head, as if the padding might shield me from its blows. I left feeling drained and dizzy, but knowing that I had seen a very, very special film.

The entirety of the movie is set in the Ramallah offices of the Red Crescent, the organization that provides emergency health services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the close quarters evoke a claustrophobia more familiar to the stage than cinema. When I initially heard the conceit—the audio from Hind, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, is the actual recording, while actors portray the aid workers that received the call—I thought it sounded formally inventive but practically awkward. I was wrong. The effect is intensely intimate, forcing the viewer to sit with the workers of the Red Crescent for 89 torturously long minutes.

The film has a narrative structure so simple that, were it not based on well-documented events, would seem contrived. Omar, the weary and dogged aid worker who receives Hind’s call, is responsible for keeping her on the phone while his colleague and supervisor Mahdi arranges for an ambulance to retrieve her. While the ambulance in Gaza is only a 12-minute drive from Hind, Mahdi will not authorize the pickup until he has clearance from the Israeli Ministry of Defense that the ambulance will not be fired on. As the hours go by and Hind becomes more scared, desperate, and despairing, Omar unravels. He grows increasingly impatient with Mahdi for not simply directing the ambulance to go to Hind, furious at his deference to the Israelis. His increasing rage makes him a poor source of support for Hind, and his colleagues Rana and Nisreen step in to try and offer words of calm to the girl.

Initially, our sympathy is with Omar, who sees Mahdi as overly obsequious to the same army killing his people. “You’re the reason we’re occupied!” he screams at Mahdi. But when Mahdi points to the wall of photos of the many ambulance drivers already killed in Gaza, telling Omar that if he loses another he is going to quit the job, we see the grief behind his stubbornness.

The hours go on. Omar loses himself, collects himself, loses himself again; Nisreen and Rana talk to Hind about daycare, her favorite colors, anything at all. As they assure her that help is on the way, her voice grows thin in weakness, exhaustion, and fear. It slowly becomes clear to Hind that she is alone and dying, and as much as Rana and Nisreen try to tell her the ambulance will be there soon, in time the six-year-old stops believing them.

You know how the story ends. After almost four hours, the ambulance was finally granted clearance, and several yards in front of Hind’s car it was shelled by a tank. Both of its drivers were instantly killed, and12 days later Hind was found dead in her family’s car.

If all this sounds crushing to watch, it is. But what flattened me was not primarily the awful killing of Hind, whose story is well known and whose voice has already been heard by millions. Nor was it the portrayal of the mundane mechanics of genocide; the bureaucrats that refuse to offer the ambulance authorization are never shown, the tank that kills the drivers and attacks Hind’s car is heard but not seen. The film is not ultimately about the victims or the perpetrators of this genocide, but about its witnesses. In the hands of director Kaouther Ben Hania, the offices of the Red Crescent in Ramallah are a crucible in which the agony of those witnesses can be revealed in ferocious intensity. Her relentless focus is on four that happen to have more power to help than most but, in the end, have far, far less power than they need.

In the reflections she offered after the screening I saw, Ben Hania noted that narrative film is above all an emotional medium, and in bringing us so close to those aid workers, the movie demands that the viewer sit with the agonizing feeling of their powerlessness. As specific as the story is, the experience calls up in acute form a feeling that I have often found myself trying to keep muted these last two years, just to get through the days. The film is about the dedication and efforts of Omar and Rana and Nisreen and Mahdi, but like them we’ve all had some power to stop all this killing—and ultimately, not nearly enough. Ben Hania asks that we see the toll it took on them, and face the toll it takes on us.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The US war crimes in My Lai, encompassing the slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, were first revealed by journalist Seymour M. Hersh. Hersh also played an essential role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, working in parallel to Woodward and Bernstein. Hersh laid bare the many crimes of Henry Kissinger, and, much later, the monstrous acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.

In their new film Cover-Up, screening in theaters for a week and then streaming on Netflix, Laura Poitras and Mark Oberhaus take us through Hersh’s work in all these cases in detail. The amazing work he’s done, the skill and luck that have made him a redoubtable figure in the world of muckraking journalism, are presented with great clarity. Hersh has never hesitated to go after the US government, and particularly the military, when they throw off the shackles of law and decency. He has contributed to the firing of malefactors within the government, like the head of the CIA’s counterespionage division, James Jesus Angleton. His astounding work on My Lai revealed the vileness and callousness of military justice—which released the leader of the slaughter, Lt. William Calley, from his life sentence after just three months—as well as the moral degradation of a swath of the American public, which viewed Calley as a hero and a martyr.

But Hersh has also been guilty of sloppiness, as in the case of a fake Marilyn Monroe-JFK correspondence which, in his hunger for a scandal, fooled him entirely, seriously wounding his credibility. There have been other incidents of sloppiness that get scant attention in the film. But Cover-Up doesn’t shy away from showing Hersh to be what any regular reader of his work would assume to be the case—an egomaniacal, temperamental, nasty piece of work. The egocentrism that bursts forth on every page of his writing also appears in every scene of this film.

Though his difficult youth as the child of Jewish immigrant in Chicago is dealt with well, the rest of his personal life is a blank. His wife and children must have chosen not to appear, and he speaks little about them. He is petulant, prickly, and curt with the filmmakers. We learn that it took 20 years for Hersh to agree to do this film with Poitras. There are moments when she must have regretted his consent.

Cover-Up, precisely because of these unpleasant moments, feels like an accurate portrait of Hersh and not a hagiographic suckup. It’s not a muckraking film on a muckraker, but it is an honest film, portraying its subject warts and all.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In the Q&A after the screening I saw of All That’s Left of You—Cherien Dabis’s intergenerational epic following a single Palestinian family from 1948 to the present day—the moderator, actor Morgan Spector, remarked on the film’s Hollywoodification of the Nakba: gorgeous actors, classic dramatic cinematography, big emotional storytelling. He meant it as a compliment, and Dabis excitedly received it as such. Indeed, this was exactly what she intended. Open Netflix and you cannot help but be overwhelmed by slick dramas dedicated to the Holocaust or World War II. That history has become a shared American cultural touchstone largely through film. Why hasn’t the Nakba, and the Palestinian story writ large, with all its inherent drama, ever gotten the big-budget Hollywood treatment? (A largely rhetorical question, considering the lengths that American media, especially Hollywood, has gone to suppress that story for decades, and the current maneuvering at networks and studios to make sure it stays that way.) Dabis wanted to correct for that lacuna, to make a film about the Palestinian experience whose formal conventions (confections?) might help it enter the cultural bloodstream before rousing the antibodies.

There is no caveat coming; it’s a beautiful film. Perhaps in a lesser director’s hands, these aims might have come with egregious compromises; the tragedy might have been reduced to melodrama, the broadly humanist messaging might have landed a little too pat. One might quibble with the convenience of leaving Palestinian armed resistance out of frame. But Dabis’s investment in character helps each beat feel earned. It is a testament to her craft that a great many elements of Palestinians’ oppression—from the seizing of property, farmland, and valuables in the Nakba, to the medical apartheid, permit regime, and military violence and humiliation that characterize the occupation of the West Bank—are dramatized for the audience without ever feeling heavy-handed or didactic. The film does not tell a single story about the affective strategies that Palestinians have employed to ensure their survival, on and off the land; a defeated quietism sits uneasily within families alongside strident nationalism and a will to confrontation. And though the plot builds toward a stunning act of generosity on the part of a Palestinian family toward Israelis, there is no feel-good coexistence narrative on offer. At a time when it seems that the horizon of American politics is linked to our ability to face the Nakba alongside other imperial catastrophes, Dabis has given us a tool wrapped in a work of art wrapped in a Hollywood movie.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians—equal parts historical family drama and spiky contemporary satire—begins in a sumptuous living room in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 1923. An immigrant family is going through papers with an expensive lawyer, who is helping them defend their status in the United States. “Asīga īnč əsél é, ‘white person’?” asks the increasingly confused grandmother, speaking un-subtitled Armenian. The line drew boisterous laughter at the performance I saw, thanks in large measure to Andrea Martin’s masterful delivery: Spitting out those two English words with a sharply enunciated ‘t’ and ’p,’ she expressed the character’s innocent frustration even as she knowingly poked a 21st Century audience’s tender ribs.

You didn’t have to know that the first part of the line translates to “What does this mean?” nor recognize the words that follow—“As parə hokīs hanét͜s. Īnč əsél é?”—to sympathize with the grandmother’s bafflement and exasperation. (Translation, thanks to the playscript: “I am exhausted from this term. What does it mean?”) The shifting, shady, and often absurd concept of whiteness in the United States—one’s weariness of debating it and terror over its deployment—pounds at the heart of this hilarious and harrowing play.

The family in the first act are the Cartozians, and the case they are preparing for is based on the real-life United States v. Cartozian of 1925, a challenge to the US government’s effort to revoke the citizenship of a successful carpet dealer from Armenia named Tatos Cartozian (played by Nael Nacer with heartrending delicateness.) The back story is this: Congressional statutes revised after the Civil War allowed for the naturalization only of “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity” and “of African descent.” As early 20th Century immigration from Asia began to produce a wave of applicants for citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 and 1923 respectively that people from Japan and from India were not white, and hence not fit for naturalization.

These cases paved the way for the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which barred even from entry to the US anyone who was ineligible for citizenship—a law that was not fully repealed until 1965 (and one for which Stephen Miller sounds maniacally nostalgic.) Though Armenians had been absorbed legally and culturally into America for decades, in this new climate—and in the wake of the Armenian genocide—the Cartozian suit was a high-stakes test case that hinged entirely on the question of whether Armenians are white. (It’s not just Jews who had been—as Eric Goldstein put it in The Price of Whiteness—“a racial conundrum.” Although, as far as I know, we never had to pull up our sleeves to show our skin to a judge, as Cartozian did.)

In beautifully paced domestic scenes, the family’s lawyer, Wallace McCamant, coaches them on proper comportment, urging them to cast off any evidence of suspicious foreignness, insisting that they replace ads for their rugs that bear images of camels and “Mohammedans,” that they shift their traditional Christmas celebration from January 6th (the Epiphany) to December 25th and commit other dispiriting acts of assimilation.

In Act Two, which takes place 100 years later in the affluent Glendale area of Los Angeles, we meet an accomplished group of Armenian Americans, whose ties to their heritage are felt but frayed. The living room in this home has been turned into a makeshift TV studio—furniture rearranged, standing lights glaring—for the shooting of a reality show, whose name gives the play its title. The group (same actors, new roles) has gathered for the Christmas episode in which they are to share aspects of their cultural observance with the show’s uber-famous star of Armenian descent. (If you have a pulse, you know the reference. And there’s more than one swipe at her skin tanner.)

The star is delayed “wrapping up glam,” the cameraman explains, so he asks the group to let him shoot as they introduce themselves to her empty chair—and they do, to uproarious effect. They end up squabbling over a movement to add “Armenian” as a subcategory of the Middle Eastern/North African classification in the 2030 census. Now, at a time when the simit one of them has baked for the occasion is gluten-free, some of the assembled argue that Armenians are not white. “My own lived experience is I’m not white at the airport,” notes one, who also reveals that he lost a promotion at his academic job because “they didn’t want to give tenure to another white man.” Now it is the cameraman—of Irish descent—who, standing in for the audience, is confounded by the slipperiness of racial classification. Monahan takes a couple of cheap shots here, but her aim is always sure, and it was moving to sit in a mainstream theater among a seldom-represented audience and witness them responding audibly to every recognizable reference and character from their community.

I laughed a lot through the play—but watching it as citizen ceremonies have been canceled, asylum and refugee processes paused, and immigration processing halted—it was the kind of laugh that stings the throat.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): On January 29th, 2024 the IDF murdered Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, after returning to the scene where they had already killed six of her relatives and two ambulance workers. In its cruelty, cowardice, stupidity, and impunity, this single event can stand as a synecdoche of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. It stands to condemn Israel forever.

Hind was in her uncle’s car when the IDF killed her relatives, stuck in a kind of no man’s land into which no one could enter to rescue her. The Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah attempted to send an ambulance for her, but it needed to jump through a number of administrative hoops before dispatching a crew of rescue workers. The little girl was in a panic, so workers in Ramallah stayed on the phone with her to keep her morale up. The situation, though, was almost hopeless from the start. After all that circuitous bureaucracy, the ambulance sent to rescue her was inexplicably fired on and destroyed, the crew blown literally to pieces. Hind stayed in the family car and her dead body was only recovered 12 days later. Israel promised an investigation. We’re still waiting for the results.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s almost unbearable dramatization of the killings and the failed attempt to save the child, is concentrated in the Ramallah office, where the angry, impetuous Omar (Motaz Malhees), who first contacts Hind, attempts to speed up and even circumvent normal processes in order to rescue the child. He is opposed by his supervisor, Mahdi (Amar Hlehel), who, though a stickler for procedure, is being especially punctilious in order to avoid adding the ambulance crew to the day’s death toll. Hind is put off by Omar, and so she spends most of her time on the phone with Rana (Saja Khilani), who keeps her occupied and as calm as possible.

The film is made even more difficult to watch because of a choice the director made that underlined the horror of that day in northern Gaza. Ben Hania used the actual recordings of Hind’s pleas, which lasted for hours. The voices of the Red Crescent workers are usually those of actors, interspersed in moments of special drama with those of the actual dispatching crew. Hind is deathly afraid, caught in a car full of murdered, bleeding relatives, but the workers do a miraculous job keeping her hopeful.

It’s all for naught. The film ends with footage of the destroyed car and ambulance, and of old video of Hind playing in a water filled sand pit, the closest thing in her short life to the beach we hear her mother telling us she so wanted to see again.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): For years, Call It Sleep—Henry Roth’s 1934 autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century—languished in my pile of to-read books. It shifted from my dresser to my desk to my nightstand, nearly 500 pages long with small type.

I wanted to read it; it had been described to me as a modernist Jewish epic akin to Ulysses, or, as the cover blurbs reminded me every time I relocated my copy, “arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life” (Lis Harris) and “the most profound novel of Jewish life by an American” (Alfred Kazin). But the descriptions I’d heard from friends were not exactly enticing. They often used words like “brutal” and “depressing.” They frequently mentioned the ubiquitous portrayals of abuse and abject poverty. It didn’t seem, by most accounts, to be a particularly enjoyable read. (To say nothing of Henry Roth’s own troubling biography, which I only discovered far later.) In our current political context, where I find much to be horrified about every day, I was not eager to pick up fiction that would plunge me into fresh despair.

I was surprised when I finally read Call It Sleep earlier this year. Make no mistake: It is indeed a heavy book, and it does not shy away from the harsh reality that was life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. But to define the novel solely on the basis of the suffering it depicts is, perhaps, the same trap we fall into when we define people based on their suffering. The gift of Call It Sleep is the remarkably rich world it portrays, complete with sights, sounds, and smells that are more than a century old. As the protagonist David Schearl wanders around the streets of the Lower East Side, we are wandering with him—and experiencing every mystery, mishap, and adventure along with him, too. Rather than feeling weighed down by misery during the month that I read Call It Sleep, I felt like I was living part-time in its universe—hitching a rollerskate ride on the back of a horse-drawn buggy, or walking along trolley tracks on Avenue D, only to look up and remember that I was aboard a smartphone-filled Q train car in Eric Adams’s New York.

(An aside for the New York City geography nerds among us: David lives on East 9th Street and Avenue D, in the neighborhood now called “Alphabet City.” As a native New Yorker who grew up with the notion that the Lower East Side ends at Houston Street—and who now lives in a part of Flatbush that the realtors have christened “Prospect Park South”—I was fascinated to encounter yet another example of the longstanding New York City practice of gentrification-rebranding.)

Roth made a few important stylistic choices that contribute to the immersive feeling of Call It Sleep. Probably the best known is that when the characters speak in English, their accented speech is rendered phonetically—for example, “I know sommbody wod he hoided his hand on de Futt f’om Jillai—wid a fiyuh crecker.” (I sometimes found myself reading aloud in order to figure out what was being said.) When they speak in Yiddish, however, the transcription is delivered in perfect English, and often poetic: “She was very small, my grandmother, very frail and delicate. The light came through her hands like the light through a fan.” The effect of this is to reverse the standard othering of immigrant languages—while Yiddish may be the “other” in the characters’ new land, in Call It Sleep it is the master tongue, the “correct” way of speaking as opposed to the strange, foreign English that David hears and speaks outside of his home.

Roth’s other choice that allows us so completely to enter the world of Call It Sleep is a simple one—so simple, in fact, that I didn’t notice it until I was halfway through. The entire novel is written strictly, and without aberration, from the limited perspective of a child. There are no dips into omniscience; for all 440 pages, we see only what David sees. As adult readers, this is somewhat like being dropped into an unfamiliar landscape and having our glasses taken away from us. We watch as David parses the strange and inscrutable, from sex to his father’s mental illness, and while we may put the clues together faster than he can, we are ultimately at the mercy of what he perceives. He is at the helm; we are passengers along for the ride of his experience, and what an astonishing experience it is.

I might argue that Call It Sleep is a novel as much about agency as about despair. David’s world is full of danger and even terror, but we are moving through it on his terms, and in doing so we remember that human beings—even children—are fundamentally agents of their own existence. I am thinking a lot these days about how we tell stories of suffering—stories that bend the mind in horror, but that sometimes erase the lives at the center. What does it look like to make a different choice?

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Before coming across Run and Hide while searching for Pankaj Mishra books at the library, I admittedly hadn’t even known that the political essayist also wrote novels. But I was drawn in from the first few pages of the 2022 book, which begins with an unsettling scene of the narrator and his two college roommates, Aseem and Virendra, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, undergoing the traditional hazing from upperclassmen, calibrated for their class and caste backgrounds. The college hostel setting is made immediate in its detail (“The walls of our room were distempered sallow, with marks where oiled heads had rested”) but the narration comes from a distance. There are frequent references to the pre-college past—in which the narrator and the other boys endured poverty while their parents put all resources into their education in the hope of upward mobility—and to some undetermined time in the future, in which Aseem, Virendra, and their upperclass tormenter Siva have apparently managed to rise to positions of wealth and influence, and have then experienced some type of disastrous downfall.

This is the setup for a sober, contemplative novel that makes use of Mishra’s facility with both prose and social critique. Each IIT student confronts the 21st century vision of a “New India”—the hope that, via increased economic and political liberalization and globalization, the giant country might become a hub of modernity, mobility, and financial power, with the spoils accessible even to those from the poorest backgrounds. Aseem has a vision of a New India that will allow him a chance at cultural cachet; on his path there, he makes an impressive commitment to social justice journalism, but also displays an unending appetite for status and a pernicious misogynistic streak. For Virendra and Siva, the New India means a chance for jobs at American hedge funds and untold riches, and the attendant temptations of corruption. Arun, the narrator, is more ambivalent, committed to escaping the one-room, unfurnished cabin and volatile father of his childhood, but exhausted by the social world of the Delhi cultural elite; he works as a literary translator and retreats to an almost monkish existence in a Himalayan village, where real estate speculators are slowly beginning to hunt for land. In the meantime, he learns that for many of his countrymen, the dream of a New India is increasingly synonymous with the Hindu nationalist vision of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some readers might complain that most of the characters in the book remain archetypes, designed to flesh out a moment of complex political transformation rather than to stand alone, and they would not be wrong. Still, the novel remains propulsive, thanks in part to how the narrator continually addresses a mysterious “you”—a woman named Alia, apparently working on a book about the trajectories of men like Siva and Virendra, whom we eventually meet. When we finally do see Arun’s romance with Alia, who comes from a well-off family and is a rising name in leftist advocacy on Twitter, our narrator is initially caught up in the ease and excitement of her international lifestyle. Eventually, though, the sparkle wears off: Mishra paints an uncomfortably accurate portrait of the superficiality of a certain set of well-meaning affluent lefty literary types. (At one party in London with Alia, Arun records the chatter taking place around him, with someone saying, “Maybe Rebecca Solnit is an exception, but white feminists are the embodiment of neo-imperalism” as another comments, “Airbnb really should have a filter for smart TVs.”)

Arun, more and more, gravitates toward retreat into Buddhist meditation—a retreat, his monk guide promises him, from the “self” entirely. Mishra’s narrative successfully punctures the idealization of a New India, making plain how unevenly its benefits have accrued, and equally deflates any faith in the social media-inflected political response of Alia and her cohort. Yet if the book is often harsh on Alia, the finale, which I won’t spoil here, comes to complicate that picture, as Arun begins to recast some of her public activism as resolute and brave. Was Alia truly so shallow, or was he just too distant to fully see her? Her hypocrisies and stumbles may be embarrassing, but, the novel posits, not so shameful as Arun’s attempts to “run and hide.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy, on display at Poster House in Chelsea until February 22th, 2026, is a remarkable show for many reasons. It put me in mind of the former Communist turned Fascist Black Shirt Niccola Bombacci, who claimed that the two great revolutions were the Russian and Fascist revolutions. Bombacci, who was executed and whose body was displayed alongside Mussolini’s when the latter was killed by partisans, meant it in a political sense. But in this wide-ranging display of advertising posters, political messaging, self-praise on the part of the government, and exaltation of the Duce, I was reminded of nothing so much as Russian revolutionary posters—indeed, of radical posters and art from around the world.

Mussolini didn’t wage war on degenerate art the way Hitler, his student and later master, did. He might not have really cared for any avant garde literature or art, but he knew how to praise it and make use of it. Italy was a key player in modernist art, so cutting the country off from it would have been a foolish move, even more so in that so many of Italy’s most important artists, most famously the Futurists, were Fascists of the first hour. We are accustomed to being told how the geist of Futurist art was inherently fascist; in The Future Was Then we get the opportunity to see how that fascism manifested itself in directly political terms. Most striking is a strange bust, Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s “Profilo continuo” (Continuous Profile), which on first glance looks like a pawn in a chess set, but when viewed from certain angles is the profile of Mussolini in motion. Mussolini and the masses are blended in posters like “L’Italia fascista in cammino” (Fascist Italy on the move) and a 1932 poster for an exhibition celebrating ten years of Fascist rule.

That Mussolini should be the focus of so many works, either his image or just in striking versions of the letter “M”, which in context can only stand for the name of the Duce, is hardly surprising. The man, his image, and his party were everything. The posters we see here express the totalitarian nature of the state in ways that are aesthetically surprising, but that are in many ways like the work produced in the early years of the Soviet Union, when the Russian avant garde placed its talent at the service of the new state.

The works cover a wide number of aspects of life in fascist Italy. The exaltation of aviation, that most modern means of transport, are stunning, and sport is shown to be a key part of Fascism. More surprising are simple advertising posters for fabrics and milk and cars (FIAT, of course) and chocolates, among other things. The art work on all of them is far from merely functional. It is, in fact, revolutionary.