This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV...

When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny-backed, white-bellied, tufted-eared red squirrels, to be exact. For hundreds of years, society’s elites stitched red-squirrel pelts into luxurious floor-length...

Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on May 3, 2024President Joe Biden will make a speech on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, May 7, by way of observing the Holocaust remembrance in the Jewish religious calendar. If the speech is not to fail, or even backfire, the president needs to be very clear in his mind about what he has to say, and why.The questions Biden needs to...

Representative Lauren Boebert had an important point to make. But it could be difficult to hear the rabble-rousing Republican from Colorado over a packed-in crowd of counter-agitators.“So this is what the students here at GW University are facing each and every day,” Boebert was trying to say into a bank of microphones in the middle of the downtown...

For writers living under an authoritarian regime, the price of intellectual independence is clear—censorship, prison, exile—but so is its value. They are compelled to understand inner freedom as the essential condition for doing their work. Their determination to say what the state doesn’t want to hear gives them a sense of connection with one another,...

one afternoon in the mid-1980s, while on scholarship at the University of Oxford, Walter Kirn came upon a bulletin announcing that Jorge Luis Borges was visiting the campus and wished to meet students informally. Kirn, the future writer and critic, then in his early 20s and a recent Princeton graduate, glanced at his watch and realized that the event...