The Obsolescence of the Human, Günther Anders
First published in German in 1956, the philosopher Günther Anders’ The Obsolescence of the Human appears in English at an opportune time. Anders offers a more penetrating analysis of our relation to technology than anything currently being written about artificial intelligence. Several of his conceptual coinages deserve a place in those discussions. One is “Promethean shame”: the strange feeling of inadequacy to our own inventions; another is “cozification,” an inverted alienation in which what should be radically alien presents itself to us as familiar (think here of the ingratiating flattery to which chatbots subject users). Unlike many tech critics, Anders is no nostalgist: He insists that “artificiality is the nature of human beings,” and that what is needed is for philosophical thought to become adequate to its new forms.—GS
Pornocracy, Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel
In Pornocracy, Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel describe how the availability and intensity of pornography has expanded alongside growing ideological polarization between men and women, declining intimacy, and plummeting birth rates. They also critique our refusal to censure pornography, an attitude that even extends to institutions claiming to protect children. They refuse to shy away from the tough arguments, including pornography’s role in shaping trans identities. Pornography, they write, “does not serve our sexual tastes; it shapes them.” The book does not seek to stoke a moral panic, but rather to critique a form of “limbic capitalism” that has grown adept at hijacking desire coupled with a culture that cannot seem to just say no to porn.—AF
Pan, Michael Clune
A Bildungsroman set in the suburban ’90s, Michael Clune’s Pan tells the story of Nick, a fifteen-year old son of recently divorced parents who starts having strange experiences—forgetting how to breathe, forgetting how to move blood through his body—that are diagnosed as “panic attacks.” Some etymological research leads Nick to the root of the word in the name of Greek god Pan, prompting him and his friends to elaborate a sort of ad hoc mythological and ritual apparatus around his limit-experiences. Set in the era before ubiquitous internet access—and its attendant phenomenon of rampant psychiatric self-diagnosis—Pan is about, among other things, the possibilities and limitations of different sorts of meaning-making in response to social fragmentation and malaise. It’s also very funny.—GS
The End of Woke, Andrew Doyle
If you read only one polemic against wokeness, let it be Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke. Wokeness, Doyle argues, was not liberalism gone too far, but its negation. Exploiting liberal live-and-let-live instincts, it used the language of anti-racism and care as cover to hatch an illiberal ideology that consumed liberalism from within. Hence, trans activists intentionally sought to shield themselves from democratic debate, training law enforcement to police “non-crime” hate speech, and bundling their desired legal reforms in with more popular legislation like gay marriage. This is why the rise of authoritarian and anti-liberal instincts in response to wokeness is concerning. Wokeness may be losing, but as Doyle reminds us, freedom—the kind that comes from education and self-discipline—has not yet won.—AF
Vaim, Jon Fosse
Vaim, the first novel from the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse since he won the Nobel Prize in 2023, begins simply enough. Jatgeir, a man who wants to replace a button on his shirt, sets out buy some thread from a nearby city. When a shopkeeper asks him to pay an outrageous price, he finds himself unable to say no. There is a fairytale element here that becomes more resonant when Jatgeir runs into Eline, a youthful crush he has never quite moved beyond. She, too, makes an improbable request that he will be unable to resist. This is a story of passive men falling under the sway of a forceful woman—not unlike classic film noir. But here there are hints of a third force, a providence capable of producing unexpected harmonies from human dissonance.—MS
The Golden Thread, Vol. 1, James Hankins
James Hankins and Allen Guelzo, childhood friends who both became distinguished historians, have teamed up to produce a two-volume history of the West. The first volume of The Golden Thread, covering the ancient world and Christendom, is written by Hankins, whose departure from Harvard has occasioned discussion about the decline of historical instruction in America’s prestige universities. It is a masterpiece—staggeringly learned and judicious in its handling of Western civilization’s glories and failings. The many maps and photographs considerably add to the value of the text. When I was a boy, I read a set of illustrated Time-Life histories someone gave my parents. I wish I’d had this instead.—MS
Strangers and Intimates, Tiffany Jenkins
In Strangers and Intimates, a history of the rise and decline of private life, shows that the private sphere was not a universal human inheritance but is instead the hard-won product of conflicts over conscience and authority. Crucially, Jenkins reminds us that there is no public sphere without the private and that the vitality of each depends on the boundary between them. It is true that we are sloppier, looser, and indeed more offensive in the private realm than the public. But the fact that the private realm must allow room for error and excess does not make our public selves “phony,” writes Jenkins. Instead, “it is what makes society, politics and collective identity possible.” This is a book for everyone who feels that privacy is important, but who has forgotten why.—AF
Crabgrass Catholicism, Stephen Koeth
In Crabgrass Catholicism, the priest-historian Fr. Stephen Koeth draws upon extensive historical research to map out how the migration of Catholics from American’s urban ethnic enclaves to assimilated suburbs during the midcentury impacted parish life, religious education, and faith. Whereas most accounts of postwar Catholic life present the Second Vatican Council as the crucial moment—leading either to a welcome openness, or a lamentable loss of identity, depending on the author’s views—Koeth suggests suburbanization had a no less profound influence. Leaving urban neighborhoods frequently meant a loss of religious practice, as well as ethnic identity.—SA
In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us offers the first comprehensive account of how liberal governance failed the Covid test. Eminent academics who describe themselves as progressives, Macedo and Lee contend that “journalism, science, and universities [were] undermined by class bias, political polarization, partisan animosity, premature moralization of disagreements, and intolerance of reasonable dissent and contestation.” Their aim is to persuade their peers in the “expert class” that their institutions betrayed their values in 2020 by retreating into dogmatic groupthink. The book’s mostly positive reception offered modest encouragement that there is more willingness to question that orthodoxy today.—GS
The Sofa, Sam Munson
Sam Munson’s novel The Sofa begins with a family driving home after a pleasant day at the beach. The next morning, not unlike Gregor Samsa, they awaken to a bizarre metamorphosis: their “wide and deep” sofa, “upholstered in dark fabric,” has been inexplicably replaced by a “narrow and shallow” one, “covered with a yellow-green striped fabric,” that “[gives] off a slight, damp smell.” The rest of the novel recounts the paterfamilias’s mostly futile efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery, which involve, among other things, an apparitional man with a mustache and a shadowy drycleaning company in the Bronx. The Sofa is a darkly hilarious exploration of the uncanny in the strictly Freudian sense of unheimlich: those points at which the coziest recesses of domestic comfort abruptly become portals into a nightmare realm.—GS
Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata
Sayaka Murata is celebrated as a feminist writer, but her most recent novel to be translated into English presents a feminist future that looks a lot like dystopia. Amane is born into a family that clings to outdated notions of romance, but she overcomes them by moving to Experiment City. All children are conceived through randomized IVF, and implanted not just in women but in artificial wombs attached to men. The burdens of childcare are perfectly socialized, and individuality is so thoroughly expunged that all children smile, coo, and cry identically. Shulamith Firestone and Sophie Lewis would probably love it. But it is possible to detect something inhuman and cruel behind this world’s perfect rationality.—MS
Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray
Twenty years after the rise of the New Atheism, something new has taken its place. The New Theism is a movement made up of earnest believers and stubborn skeptics who agree on a single thing: the importance of Christian faith for sustaining Western society. Its representatives include the convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the self-described cultural Christian Richard Dawkins, and the irenic Catholic Ross Douthat. Add to their number the social scientist Charles Murray, whose Taking Religious Seriously is a case for faith by a man who still harbors doubts. Murray has a wonderfully clear and unassuming style, and his book is more convincing than the productions of many apologists.—MS
Abortion and America’s Churches, Daniel K. Williams
In Abortion and America’s Churches, the historian Daniel K. Williams revolutionizes our understanding of abortion politics. He shows that Roe v. Wade, a decision often seen as a bulwark of secularism, in fact reflects distinctively liberal Protestant assumptions that were taken for granted by the bulk of the Supreme Court. This helps explain why Roe was repealed. The issue was not simply that it faced sustained assaults from the right; the more fundamental problem was that the assumptions that formed it lost their hold on American life as the Protestant mainline declined. I’ll have more to say about Williams’s book in a forthcoming issue of First Things. For now, suffice to say this the best book on abortion since Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.—MS