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Democracy is under attack everywhere, and today I want us all to remember that while we’re calmly peeling back the layers of the January 6 conspiracy, people are dying for their right to be free in Ukraine.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason. This rifle has ruined America. Long COVID could be a “mass deterioration event.” No Letup

The January 6 committee will be back in session tomorrow, when I’ll return to what we’re learning about the fight for democracy in America. (Personally, I’m already enjoying the clip of the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann telling the coup whisperer John Eastman, in effect, to go home and get his shine box.)

In Ukraine, however, another battle for democracy is being fought not with papers and emails and texts, but in blood and ash and fire. All of this is happening because a dictator in the Kremlin has told the Ukrainians to bow in obedience, relinquish their freedom, and become his subjects, and they have refused, some at the cost of their lives.

The Ukrainians are, so far, surviving. The Russians, defeated in the battle for Kyiv, are now fighting a savage war of attrition on Ukraine’s eastern front. Vladimir Putin’s dream of capturing the country is gone, but the short-term operational goal now seems to be to grind down the Ukrainians, soldier by soldier, and capture territory, meter by meter, in the Donbas.

This is why Western strategists are watching the battle for Severodonetsk so closely. The city is wedged in between two major Russian-controlled areas, and capturing it would solve a lot of Moscow’s problems. The city, now “split in half,” is likely to fall. This matters because afterward, it may look like the Russians are pausing or letting up, when they will more likely be consolidating a significant gain across the Ukrainian eastern front that will allow them to launch a major offensive later in the year.

So far, the West is doing the right things—or, most of the free West is, anyway. Still, we need to do everything faster and bigger. In The New York Times yesterday, Bret Stephens referred to a Richard Nixon quote I’d never heard; when told what assistance the Israelis needed to defend themselves during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Nixon ordered his staff to “double it” and then to “get the hell out of here and get the job done.”

This is good advice for the Biden administration, which this afternoon pledged another $1 billion of aid. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Brussels today, heading a “contact group” of nearly 50 nations to help get even more assistance for Ukraine and to transition Ukraine from Soviet-era weapons to modern NATO arms.

I want to add a word here about Secretary Austin. When he was nominated, I was uncomfortable. I worked for the Defense Department for a quarter century, and I am rather old-school in my hesitance to appoint senior military officers to Cabinet positions (unless your name is George Marshall). I prefer civilians, who have not acquired the ingrained habit of military obedience to the president, which is why I cautioned about Donald Trump’s fascination with hiring generals into the White House.

And yet, Austin’s appointment turned out to be a lucky break.

In a less dangerous period, it would be great to have a defense intellectual in the Pentagon who can work with the president on a vision for a better and more modern Department of Defense. When Russia launched the largest war in Europe since the Nazis marched east, however, what the United States and NATO needed was a military leader who understands operations on the ground and the kinds of weapons systems that are in play. Austin has plenty of that experience, including as commander of Central Command and from his time in Syria. This isn’t the time for a lot of chin-pulling big-think; this is a time for talking to our friends and allies in very detailed terms about weapons systems and how to get them where they need to be. Austin’s the right man for that.

Moscow’s grab for Ukraine has been defeated. But the war is not over, and we need to shake off romantic notions that the Ukrainians are going to march onward and recapture all the occupied Ukrainian territories. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has often compared his country’s struggle against Russia to World War II, a fight between a free people and a barbaric invader. He’s right, and it won’t be over soon. We need to stay firm in our support.

Further reading:

In Ukraine, youth has ended The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical American vulnerability

Read all of our coverage of the war on Ukraine.

Today’s News The Justice Department charged the Buffalo-supermarket shooting suspect with 26 counts of hate crimes and weapons violations. The  Federal Reserve announced the largest interest-rate increase since 1994, as it attempts to combat rising inflation. The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from several Republican-led states to defend a Trump-administration immigration policy. Dispatches Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg asked an artificial-intelligence tool to draw a “Hanukkah Monster.” It delivered. Wait, What?: Trump’s failspawns took a turn at the January 6 hearings, and it was embarrassing, Molly Jong-Fast writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf highlights a blunt-force proposal for fixing inflation. Evening Read (Illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Gallo Images / Getty; Ed Habershon / BBC)

They Bent to Their Knees and Kissed the Sand

Story by Cullen Murphy

When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago—his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had been expelled 50 years earlier—he carried five wrought-iron crosses.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How TikTok killed the video star A rabbi explains why her religion makes her pro-abortion. Brexit promised Britons freedom. “Instead, we got little stamps on beer glasses.” Culture Break (Getty)

Read. Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez, is a philosophical novel that also happens to be a page-turner.

Or try another pick from our reading list of books you might’ve missed when the world shut down in 2020.

Watch. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, released 20 years ago, offers a warning about technology the world is only beginning to heed.

Play our daily crossword.

Speaking of Spielberg (and World War II), every year on Memorial Day, there’s a lot of rewatching of Band of Brothers, the amazing HBO miniseries about a company of U.S. soldiers in Europe. But don’t neglect Michael Kamen’s majestic score the rest of the year, including stirring suites that you didn’t hear in the series.

— Tom

P.S. Our podcast team wants to hear your questions about Dobbs v. Jackson and the future of abortion rights. Please send a voicemail of about a minute or shorter to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com to tell us what’s on your mind about the legal, practical, and other implications of the SCOTUS decision.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

For the past 18 months, Senate Democrats have been trying to find a climate deal acceptable to all 50 of their members. The main obstacles, so far, have been Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the owner of a coal-trading company, who wants any deal to reduce the federal budget deficit, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who refuses to increase tax rates, the easiest way to satisfy Manchin’s deficit-reduction goal. Senators are now back at the negotiating table, trying to work within the rules Manchin has insisted on.

But their timeline is dwindling. Last month, an environmental lobbyist told me that if the talks did not produce a framework deal by Memorial Day, then he didn’t think they would succeed at all. No such deal came together. Now only about 17 working days remain before Congress’s August recess. Reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure that senators use to pass legislation with 51 votes, gobbles up floor time, so even if Manchin does agree to a deal, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may not be able to get it to a final vote before the clock runs out.

So it seems possible, even probable, that sometime in the next three or four weeks, Schrodinger’s climate deal will turn out to have been dead all along. Democrats may not admit defeat until the last day of September, when this year’s reconciliation resolution expires.

At that point, the record will be clear. Even though President Joe Biden described climate change as one of the country’s “four historic crises” during the campaign, his administration—like the Obama administration before it—will have failed to pass a climate bill. Come November, Democrats will likely lose one or both houses of Congress. And the United States will stumble into a fourth decade without significant legislative climate policy—or even a coherent energy policy.

So for the sake of mental preparation, if nothing else, it’s worth asking: What will happen then? Over the past few days, I’ve asked this question of energy analysts and climate scholars.

Some of them have found it too depressing to contemplate. Others have shrugged. Even setting the legislative uncertainty aside, this year has been one of the most destabilizing moments for energy markets this century. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new price regime for fossil fuels: Oil is now trading at all-time highs in most major currencies, and America’s liquid-natural-gas exports are helping create a single, global price for the commodity. Even coal prices are soaring. “Who the hell knows,” Danny Cullenward, the policy director at the think tank CarbonPlan, told me. “My crystal ball is cloudier than it’s been in a long time.”  

But we can make some safe bets. If Congress fails to pass climate legislation, the effects won’t be felt immediately outside of a few areas. (They may include fossil-fuel prices, which could stay elevated for longer.) But over the coming decade, the world will wind up a hotter, poorer place. Carbon emissions will remain high, and the basic framework of the Paris Agreement on climate change may start to crumble.

[Read: The Democrats really are that dense about climate change]

The United States, in particular, would be left measurably worse. Although the country has never been a responsible actor on climate change, its peculiar inability to pass any significant legislative climate policy would set back its self-conception, international reputation, and economic mojo. At this point, not having a national energy and climate policy is like not having an internet policy in the 1990s—so strange that it makes the entire system look diseased and antique. While fossil fuels remain essential to today’s economy, the next stage of economic development is unmistakably decarbonized and electrified. Without the kind of robust policy support on offer in Europe or China, America’s climate-friendly companies will not be able to keep up. And so the country will fall behind.

Don’t get me wrong: Even then, the United States will remain rich, well educated, and integrated into the global economy, although intensifying wildfires and other climate disasters will eat away at its housing stock, industrial base, and treasured Pax Americana. But the country will be worse off—less wealthy, less at ease, less free—than it could have been. Oil and gas prices will still dictate the shape of American budgets; climate-driven inflation will intensify. And the American public’s understanding of the future will remain clouded—by a public-policy problem first recognized more than 30 years ago by President George H. W. Bush.

The country, in short, will stagnate. And stagnation is a choice.

The most immediate consequence is straightforward. The country will build less zero-carbon infrastructure than if the climate package had passed. Utilities will erect fewer wind and solar farms, and consumers will buy fewer electric vehicles. Fewer Americans, too, will switch to efficient induction stoves or heat pumps. The bill’s delay has already put hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in clean energy on hold. If the bill fails, some of that spending will be canceled.

That cancellation won’t dent only the growth of hippie-dippie renewables. The reconciliation bill’s tax credits had an innovative design, subsidizing all sources of zero-carbon electricity production, not just wind and solar. This design was a large part of why economists at the University of Chicago and the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, projected that the tax credits could produce as much as $1.5 trillion of economic surplus by 2050. In their absence, all zero-carbon power would suffer: Existing nuclear-power plants may shut down earlier than they otherwise would, and some new nuclear and geothermal power plants will never get built.

That lack of capital turnover will ripple across the economy. Because fewer Americans will switch to zero-carbon technologies, they will need more fossil fuels, keeping energy prices elevated for longer. Every electric-vehicle driver, after all, is one less buyer of gasoline; every heat-pump owner is one less buyer of natural gas.

That means that the United States will release more carbon pollution than it would otherwise, accelerating global warming and ocean acidification. Don’t get me wrong: The country will not immediately become a cartoonish, smoggy wasteland like in The Lorax, with smokestacks coughing untold amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. (At least, it won’t soon become any more of a climate villain than it is today.) But as its chronic carbon addiction runs its course, its environment and economic fundamentals will get worse.

[Read: There’s no scenario in which 2050 is “normal”]

It’s worth diving into the numbers to get a sense of what that could mean. Last year, America dumped 5.4 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, about 17 percent below 2005’s all-time high. With no further policy, the country’s emissions are projected to flatline or modestly fall from that level. The U.S. could still make its first Paris Agreement goal of cutting climate pollution 26 percent below the all-time high by 2025, almost entirely as a consequence of the effects of inflation and the Ukraine war. “Because of high fossil-fuel prices, the 2025 target is within the range of uncertainty,” John Larsen, the lead U.S. climate analyst at the Rhodium Group, told me.

But to avert the worst impacts of climate change—that is, to avoid more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming by the end of the century—the country would have to slash its carbon pollution to half of its all-time high level by 2030. That’s what the Biden administration pledged on Earth Day last year, and it will prove much harder than the 2025 goal. Leah Stokes, a political-science professor at UC Santa Barbara, told me that she did not think the country could reach the target without a reconciliation deal. “Most of the models say you need these investments to really hit these ambitious targets that President Biden put forward,” she said.

Even beyond the climatic consequences, the failure to pass a climate bill will make people sicker and hurt the local environment. Because fossil-fuel-burning cars, factories, and power plants also produce conventionally toxic forms of pollution, America’s air will carry more particulate matter, tiny shards of ash that can poison the heart, lungs, and brain. By 2030, some 25,000 more Americans will die than if the bill had passed, according to Princeton’s energy-policy analysis project.

Those are the direct and most straightforward consequences of the climate deal’s failure, the ones that suggest themselves just by extending current trends into the future. But as the disease of stagnation progresses, other, more dire symptoms will begin to appear. In the coming days, the Supreme Court will rule on a landmark case that could gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Without a reconciliation deal, the Court’s ruling will determine whether there’s any hope of making the 2030 goal. If the Court preserves most, or even part, of the agency’s power, then the Biden administration can still attempt ambitious climate regulation over the next two years, requiring utilities, carmakers, and perhaps even industrial facilities to cut their climate pollution. And because fossil fuels are so expensive right now, and renewables are so cheap, the agency could justify deep cuts to carbon pollution when conducting a cost-benefit analysis.

Would that be enough to meet the 2030 targets? Gina McCarthy, the White House’s climate czar, has claimed that even with no additional legislation, the government can still hit them. But energy experts are skeptical. “It’s just hard to see all of that happening,” Larsen, the Rhodium Group analyst, told me. “I agree with Gina McCarthy when she says that the federal government has all the tools it needs. But without hundreds of billions of [federal] investment, it makes it 10 times harder to use all the tools in a way that makes it likely the targets would be reached by 2030.” State governments would also have to step up, he said, passing far more sweeping clean-energy rules than even California or New York have on the books today.

[Read: The 1.5 degree goal is all but dead]

And that’s the good outcome. If the Court’s entrenched conservative majority kneecaps the EPA, then the White House will be out of options, and American climate activism will likely take a grim turn. Progressives will have watched the collapse of their legislative and regulatory routes to cut carbon pollution, and the ongoing Republican backlash to corporate activism will foreclose their ability to green even their workplaces. Just as President Donald Trump’s win electrified campus activists, a resounding defeat for climate action could empower those climate campaigners who are already eager to blow up pipelines.

What happens if the United States misses that 2030 goal—or even if it appears likely to miss that goal for much of the 2020s? The effects could ripple across geopolitics. The world has moved on from the bromides of the mid-aughts: Every major polluter has now committed on paper to zeroing out its emissions between 2050 and 2070. America’s failure to hit its pledge under the Paris Agreement—an international treaty shaped to satisfy the peculiar requirements of the U.S. government—could destroy that consensus. Other countries could back out of their own Paris pledges, locking the world into warming by more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said could produce famines, droughts, and more deadly heat waves within a decade or two.

Or the world could simply leave the United States and its kludgy economy behind. Gregory Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of How Solar Energy Became Cheap, argues that the world is now on track to transition no matter what the United States does. “There’s so much momentum right now in this clean-energy transition. It will still happen, but it will happen more slowly” if no bill passes, he told me.

[Read: Biden’s climate goals rest on a 71-year-old defense law]

Another probable outcome is that the next generation of clean-energy technologies won’t get scaled up in the United States; the expertise to produce them will be created elsewhere in the world. I’ve written before about how American labs and companies invented solar photovoltaic technology in the 1950s, only to squander their competitive advantage and allow other countries to reap the benefits of mass production. Without a climate bill, that could happen again for the next round of decarbonization technology, such as hydrogen produced by renewables, direct air carbon capture, and sustainable-aviation-fuel production. China, meanwhile, has thrown its weight behind renewables manufacturing, encouraging companies to scale up domestically and investors to support them.

By contrast, if the tax credits pass, “you start to see a world where with some of these emerging technologies, like [direct air capture] or hydrogen, the U.S. has a competitive head start and has the potential to get into a dominant position,” Larsen said.

The most likely outcome might be a mix of these scenarios. Some new climate-tech start-ups may build their first facility here, because last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law authorized more than $11.5 billion for demonstration direct-air-capture and hydrogen projects. But that money can’t necessarily help build a company’s third, fourth, or fifth facility, and when it comes time to scale up, those same firms may go abroad. “Nobody’s going to build a scale-up business on a fingers-crossed hope that there’s a tax credit at the end of the decade,” Larsen said.

“We’re talking about $1 [trillion] to $4 trillion a year in investments due to energy transition,” Nemet added. “If that spending happens elsewhere, or U.S. firms don’t do that hiring, that’s a lost opportunity.” It could also be a national-security blunder. Look at the role that batteries and other climate tech have played in the war in Ukraine, where soldiers have used small drones to drop grenades on Russian trenches and fired anti-tank rockets from e-bikes. In a future conflict, having the industrial capacity and engineering know-how to mass-manufacture such gadgets could prove decisive.  

Even if the U.S. forgoes that investment, Nemet’s largest fear is that the transition will happen too slowly. Even the most conservative assessments say that the world will need to use technology to remove one to three gigatons of carbon every year by the middle of the century. That implies an almost unimaginable level of technological growth given what exists today. “For direct air capture to reach one gigaton a year in 2050, it would have to grow at 40 percent a year, every year, from now to 2050,” he said. Solar deployment, by contrast, has grown 30 percent a year for 40 years, according to Nemet’s research. “And solar’s been kind of miraculous that way, so we’d have to go a little faster,” he said. Even cellphones grew only 15 percent per year at their peak. “If we’re talking about taking our foot off the gas a little bit in the U.S., that’s gonna make it harder” to meet those targets, Nemet told me.

Democrats might get another few chances to pass some climate policy in the coming decade, even if this effort fails. Historically, the party has found more success by tacking energy policy onto other legislative vehicles—such as a must-pass defense or budget bill—rather than separating it out. That could prove true again now. The first opportunity might come after the midterm elections this year, when a lame-duck Congress could pass a bipartisan “tax extenders” package that pushes each party’s cherished tax policies forward. Even if that passes, though, it will likely cover only another year or two, and it won’t restore the tax credits to their highest historical levels, as a reconciliation deal could. It also won’t make the existing set of tax credits, which favor wind or solar specifically, more technology-neutral.

Two milestones stand out after that. The first will arrive next year, when Congress will review agricultural policy and pass a new version of the Farm Bill. The last draft of the Build Back Better proposal included $27 billion to encourage soil-based carbon-capture techniques; that money could be slotted into the Farm Bill. After that, the next opportunity won’t arise until 2025, when most of the major provisions in the Trump tax credits will expire and Congress will debate whether to renew them. Democrats could propose to extend certain Trump-era reforms in exchange for some clean-energy tax credits. But taking advantage of that moment will require Democrats to hold on to some shred of power at the federal level.

And even then, climate policy will matter less than it does now. Companies are deciding where to locate their manufacturing plants now, not in 2025. One of Manchin’s favored policies in the package, a tax credit that encourages firms to build new factories, could shift their decision about where to locate their facilities, but it has to come in the next few years, before those decisions are locked in.

Perhaps one of the biggest risks is that the country’s energy system remains stuck for years to come. Public markets are trapped in a moment of Hamlet-like indecision about energy: Investors can forecast the end of global oil-demand growth, which makes them unwilling to fund efforts to increase oil supply, but they also can’t fund the rapid scale-up of renewables and other clean-energy technology without public support. (High interest rates will make such a build-out even harder.) Consumers are stuck in the resulting gap, facing higher energy prices across the board as money dawdles between fossil fuels and clean energy. Without clear, muscular policy that makes a zero-carbon energy system all but inevitable, industrial firms could just sit around for years, waiting for a better investment signal.  

More widely, the failure will speak to the sclerosis of American governance. If Congress cannot bring itself to pass a climate bill, this will be the second time in a row that Democrats have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress and failed to get a climate deal done: In 2010, President Barack Obama could not coax a bipartisan climate bill through the Senate. Arguably, this is the third time that the Senate will have killed climate legislation: Bill Clinton’s Btu tax, which died in 1993, would have amounted to a kind of approximate carbon tax. But this will not just be a Democratic problem: Barring the intercession of the courts, neither party has been able to accomplish many of its governance objectives lately.

Of course, this history is not yet written: Senate Democrats could still hustle a deal together in the next week or two. But the outlook is not good. In retrospect, what might amaze our descendants is that there were so many ways to tackle climate change through policy. The problem was amenable to progressive and conservative values; whether you believed in conquering nature or mothering it, you could find a plausible remedy to the carbon problem. But our politicians chose none of them. They opted for perhaps the worst possible path of all—they bickered while the world burned.

There are moments when one can dive into the sustained dream of a book and stay there for hours. The spring of 2020 was not one of those times. If you weren’t actively battling COVID-19 or grieving a loved one, your life was likely all of a sudden relentlessly logistical: the sudden evaporation of childcare, the Tetris of fitting multiple working adults inside one tiny apartment, the paranoid wiping down of groceries. Reading often felt impossible, even for those of us who love to read. How could anyone focus long enough, amid all the chaos and grief, to absorb complex ideas? Instead, I found myself flicking through the latest headlines and my multiple email inboxes, or obsessively checking COVID-19 case statistics in my area. The world was on fire, and it was hard to tear my eyes away.

It wasn’t just bad for readers. Early 2020 was simply a very bad time to publish—and publicize—a book. First-time author and Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan, whose book Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World came out on April 7, reflected on the experience of releasing a book into “a giant dumpster fire” on Twitter a year later: “I realized I felt guilty for feeling so robbed, and honestly just acknowledging the guilt and frustration was a good step forward.” The publishing industry mostly moved online, and suddenly publicists couldn’t easily send out physical review copies, whether because of supply-chain issues or because the books were trapped in offices that were now inaccessible. Libraries and physical bookstores closed, launch events were canceled, and publishers hadn’t quite figured out Zoom yet.

Still, once I was finally able to focus, sometime in the fall, I found that among the galleys and not-so-new releases I had packed into boxes were titles that I immediately longed to talk to someone about. The nine works below, a selection of excellent books released between March and June 2020, include some of those gems. Each illuminates some underappreciated aspect of contemporary life or allows us to see the greater context beyond our own circumstances—perspective that the early days of the pandemic swept away.

Feminist Press

Fiebre Tropical, by Julián Delgado Lopera (March 4, 2020)

What makes this novel is the swaggering, vulnerable, bilingual voice of Francisca, the 15-year-old narrator newly arrived in Miami, much to her chagrin. “This wasn’t a Choose Your Own Migration multiple-choice adventure with (a), (b), and (c) laid out at the end of each page and you could simply choose (b) Stay in Bogotá, you idiot. Cachaco, please,” she thinks. She’d rather wear all black and listen to the Cure than get involved in the youth group at the evangelical church that forms her relatives’ social and emotional world. That is, until she catches the interest of Carmen, the pastor’s charismatic daughter. As the two become more intimate, Francisca can’t tell whether she’s feeling Jesus or falling desperately, confusedly in love. There are gorgeous interludes depicting her mother and grandmother at around Francisca’s age, in 1970s Bogotá and 1950s Cartagena, filled with the same yearning and stubbornness. It’s a coming-of-age story in triplicate, where dreams don’t quite pan out in messy reality—including the glamorous vision of the U.S. that draws the family there in the first place. But the longing that suffuses the writing has its own beauty.

Pantheon

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA, by Neil Shubin (March 17, 2020)

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin wants us to know that feathers didn’t in fact develop specifically to help animals fly, nor did lungs or legs appear to help animals walk on land. This absorbing book traces how monumental evolutionary changes actually happen, and Shubin’s answers are illuminating even to people who think they know how evolution works. Life as we know it, the reader learns, was actually formed by a grand process of bricolage, where body parts like feathers and lungs appeared, then eventually conferred advantages on their owners to serve different purposes than what they initially arose to do. (Evolution, in other words, is kind of like MacGyver.) Our own genomes are littered with randomly duplicate genes and the viruses that once infected our ancestors; we now use that DNA to make proteins crucial for pregnancy and the formation of memories. Through the stories of scientists like Susumu Ohno, who used cardboard cutouts to theorize about gene duplication, and Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering that certain genes move around within a genome, one gets a sense of how quickly our understanding of genetics has progressed—and how human the scientific endeavor is.

Harper Perennial

The Everlasting, by Katy Simpson Smith (March 24, 2020)

This time-skipping novel tells the stories of four characters living in Rome at vastly different historical moments: an aquatic biologist named Tom in 2015; Giulia de’ Medici, self-conscious of her African heritage, in 1559; Felix, a closeted monk in 896; and Prisca, a 12-year-old girl who becomes a Christian martyr in 165. All come to Rome from elsewhere, all are haunted by unattainable love, and all are desperately lonely. A metal fishhook performs a decisive role in each arc. And Satan himself interjects throughout, responding to the characters’ rhetorical questions with snark and affection—he can relate to their romantic anguish; he's never gotten over his breakup with God. The Everlasting meditates on faith, contingency, and human longing through a wealth of period detail in each setting: Who knew that spending time in a putridarium, a room beneath monasteries where the corpses of monks were seated on toilets to rot, could be so riveting? From seeing what changes and what stays the same in these glimpses of the Eternal City, an intimate sense of history arises.

[Read: The exquisite pain of reading in quarantine]

Algonquin Books

Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez (April 7, 2020)

Alvarez’s first book for adults in 14 years is a quiet, philosophical novel, fraught with questions of what we owe to others and to ourselves. It also happens to be a page-turner. Antonia is a recently retired English professor whose beloved husband died nine months ago, and all of her instincts are to practice self-care and hold herself apart from others—which, throughout the story, can seem necessary, selfish, or both. That slippage is the central point of the novel. Antonia is always piously lecturing her three sisters about personal responsibility: “Take care of yourself so you don’t become a burden on others,” she says, and they set their phones to play the sound of church bells when she calls. But then her erratic sister Izzy goes missing and a pregnant 17-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant named Estela takes shelter in Antonia’s garage, and Antonia is caught between her own inclinations and the memory of her husband, Sam, who would likely help others in need even at a cost to himself. “A bleak world of self-protections,” she thinks close to the end. “Did she really want to live in it?” Antonia’s constant self-questioning anchors this deft work, showing readers the thoughts of a woman who decides to do the right thing despite herself.

St. Martin’s Publishing Group

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, by Deirdre Mask (April 14, 2020)

Addresses are sort of like flush toilets, I concluded after reading this wide-ranging exploration of the subject: an assumed part of modern life you only really see once you go somewhere without them. Mask traces the origins of addressing systems beginning in Enlightenment-era Europe, when burgeoning nation-states were eager to collect more detailed information about its citizens in order to provide them with services, but also to tax, conscript, and surveil them. Today, simply giving someone an address—a resident of a Kolkatan slum,  or a homeless person in the U.S.—could help lift them out of poverty by allowing them to open bank accounts and apply for jobs. Charming historical facts abound, including a chapter describing the way ancient Romans likely navigated a city largely without street names. But the book’s most striking point is how passionately people throughout history have felt about the names of their streets, from reunified Berlin to Tehran, South Africa, and Hollywood, Florida. They invite such heated debate, Mask writes, because “they are about power—the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.”

Grove

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, by Kay Ryan (April 14, 2020)

In 1976, when she was 30, Kay Ryan bicycled across the United States in order to decide, once and for all, whether to become a poet. Today she’s about as decorated as a poet can be—a Pulitzer Prize winner, two-term U.S. poet laureate, and a MacArthur fellow. Synthesizing Gravity is the first collection of her prose, written over three decades; it includes an essay that tells the story of that cross-country bike ride, as well as ones that dissect her favorite poets: Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith. It’s a little ironic that I have so many quotes from this book dutifully recorded, considering that one essay elaborates the danger of notebooks. (“Almost everything is supposed to get away from us,” she argues.) Even her criticism inspires envy and an urge to jot down everything she writes: “Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born to be posthumous,” she tells us, and Annie Dillard “could get high C out of a potato.” What she advocates for is a life of simplicity, repetition, and solitude, and her insights are so bracing that the collection feels like a palate cleanser for everything that’s overwhelming about our world.

[Read: You won’t remember the pandemic the way you think you will]

Coffee House Press

Sansei and Sensibility, by Karen Tei Yamashita (May 5, 2020)

In this collection, Yamashita’s characters are all growing up as sansei, the relatively pampered children of a generation of Japanese Americans who had been sent to internment camps during World War II. They’re grappling with the weight of a history their parents never talk about. One protagonist considers what it means to apply the KonMari method to artifacts from the camps; a woman locked in her dead aunt’s apartment becomes interested in the Japanese antiques and old groceries she left behind. Throughout, there’s a pleasingly casual sense of intimacy. One of the “stories” is in fact a timeline of important events in Los Angeles’ Japanese American community, while another incorporates recipes from Yamashita’s friends and family, with directions like “Toss, and serve with sake and beer. Play cards.” Oh, and the book’s latter half consists of extremely witty sendups of all of Jane Austen’s completed novels—yes, even Lady Susan—set in the Southern California of Yamashita’s childhood. Eligible teens attend prom instead of fancy balls and Emma is now Emi, afire with plans to “start the Japanese American revolution.” The transplanted stories are fun (who doesn’t love an Austen adaptation?) and also revealing, as this particular milieu is rife with unspoken expectations about what station in life the young protagonists are meant to attain.

W.W. Norton and Company

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, by Jia Lynn Yang (May 19, 2020)

“For most of this country’s past,” Yang points out, “it had been firmly established that being an American was inextricably tied to European ancestry.” Her book charts the long, agonizing fight to recast the U.S. as “a nation of immigrants,” in which lawmakers and activists created a story about the country’s core values that became popular more recently than one might expect. This history is bookended by two laws: the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred nearly all new Asian immigrants and established national quotas based on eugenics and white nationalism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated these quotas and banned discrimination against immigrants based on race or ethnicity. It’s a fascinating and often sobering picture of how immigration in America has been shaped by a host of factors—foreign affairs, political expediency, anti-Communist hysteria, and principled, determined lawmakers—and valuable context for the still-roiling battles over what it means to be an American. In the end, Yang argues, those of us who believe in multiculturalism as one of our country’s fundamental values have “unfinished work” if we’re to create a vision that recognizes and actively embraces our country's unprecedented diversity.

[Read: How I came to love my epic quarantine reading project]

Graywolf

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, by Wayétu Moore (June 2, 2020)

It feels nearly impossible to write about one’s experiences as a 5-year-old with the clarity and narrative surety of a novelist, and yet that’s exactly what Moore does in this memoir, which chronicles her family’s escape from Liberia to the United States after civil war breaks out in 1989. The hardship itself commands attention—the family, including three children, walks for weeks, passing through checkpoints surrounded by volatile soldiers and dead bodies. But Moore’s storytelling abilities and structural ingenuity are what made this one of my favorite books of 2020; after reading it I felt, despite everything that was going on, mildly outraged that people weren’t gushing about it on every platform. As Moore’s family flees, we feel her father’s and grandmother’s terror and, simultaneously, the confusion of a child who weaves her own mythology of princes and dragons to make sense of the chaos. And, at a crucial juncture in their escape, the memoir leaps in time to Moore as a young woman in America, adjusting to racism and her identity as a West African immigrant, not to mention the buried trauma of her childhood. Her search for the female soldier who helped smuggle them out of the country brings her back to Liberia and a conclusion that moved me to tears.

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Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

Starting in mid-August, European Union countries will stop importing coal from Russia, which means they’ll have to find alternative suppliers. Already, South Africa is one such supplier, and the world’s fifth largest exporter of coal.

Between January and May of this year, roughly 40% more tons of coal have been exported to Europe from South Africa’s Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) than were exported in all of 2021, according to Reuters. Recipient countries include Spain, Poland, and Germany, which did not import any South African coal last year, as well as France, which increased its imports sevenfold year-over-year.

Turning away from Russia

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The dispute, in one of the most remote corners of the world, was brought to an end with an exchange of alcohol.

The tripartite agreement will allow 'significant' exports of Israeli gas to Europe for the first time.

When the British government announced its latest “Brexit dividend” at the start of the year—a return to stamping a tiny crown onto our beer glasses—I was surprised. Mostly because I had not noticed that we’d stopped. Clearly I gave up pretending to like beer sometime before 2006, when the rules supposedly changed.

Except they didn’t. A close reading of the government press release revealed that in 2006, the European Union began to ask manufacturers to apply a common mark—“CE,” referring to the French acronym for “European conformity”—to certify that their glasses held a full pint. There was no requirement to drop the existing crown stamp. And now, in the glorious post-Brexit land of freedom, the government was merely “providing this guidance on how manufacturers can apply a crown symbol to beer glasses as a decorative mark on a voluntary basis.”

[Read: Why Britain’s Brexit mayhem was worth it]

So the EU never forced us to remove the crown mark, and the government is only suggesting we reinstate it. Freedom! But what’s this? The guidance also notes that any manufacturer who wants to keep supplying glasses to the EU, that huge single market on our doorstep, must continue to use the “CE” mark on them. So must anyone trading in Northern Ireland, too, because of its fluid trade border with the Republic—an issue Boris Johnson failed to sort out in his Brexit deal and is now desperately trying to renegotiate.

The saga of the crown mark is the perfect metaphor for Brexit: invested with enormous symbolism, fiendishly complicated and faintly absurd in its implementation, and, above all, a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Yet no one should be surprised that this is what Brexit has amounted to. Notoriously, before Johnson was a politician, he built a career in journalism on the back of stories like the crown mark. As a correspondent for The Telegraph in the 1990s, he sent regular dispatches about the alleged evils of Brussels bureaucrats and their petty rules against bendy bananas and insufficiently large condoms. (The man in charge of the condom standards, the improbably named Willy Hélin, was still annoyed nearly three decades later about how Johnson had misrepresented his work: “We had had requests from medical institutions across Europe to check on the safety of condoms,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “That has nothing to do with the size of dicks.”) These stories created a potent mythology of the British bulldog muzzled by gray-faced bureaucrats.

And so it shouldn’t shock anyone that Johnson’s government still indulges his most florid op-ed writer’s impulses when trying to advertise the benefits of Brexit. Leaving the European Union does have tangible consequences, but they are not ones that his government would like to boast about: For example, Britain might have “taken back control” of our borders, but immigration has remained high, while it has also become harder for British musicians to tour abroad and European students to study here. This country has made billions of pounds’ worth of new trade deals—which largely replicated the old trade deals.

The British government has also “taken back control” of our laws. But as the 14 paragraphs about the regulation of beer glasses in that press release makes clear, Britain doesn’t need Brussels to impose meddling fine print on us. We can do that all by ourselves. Our Parliament rolled the Measuring Instruments Regulations 2016 into English law, and there is very little appetite now to unpick it clause by clause. (If you polled a thousand Britons on how they felt about “red tape,” they would be against it, but the answer would be very different if you asked: “Would you like to make it easier for pub owners to cheat you out of beer that you have paid for?”) One of Johnson’s predecessors as prime minister, David Cameron, once hired an alleged blue-sky thinker named Steve Hilton to cut through the alleged swaths of bureaucracy holding back Britain. Hilton’s campaign faltered when officials gently told him there was a very good reason to ensure that sofas weren’t flammable. “He did not so much collide with reality as arrive late to meetings with it, shout at it, question what makes it tick and then storm off, appalled at reality’s obstinacy,” wrote one former colleague.  

Rather than fight reality, Johnson ignores it, hoping it will eventually give up and go home. More than anyone, he knows the value of being the leader who “got Brexit done,” even if no one is quite sure what that means. Brexit, like the crown mark, is more about symbolism than reality.

[Read: Boris Johnson has only delayed the inevitable]

Recently, I attempted to come up with ways that my life had visibly, materially changed since Britain left the European Union in January 2020. No catastrophic food shortages have occurred, although there have been sporadic supply-chain problems, particularly in Northern Ireland. Friends tell me that shopping for anyone with food allergies is harder now, because specialty products free from gluten or nuts come and go. Last year, I could not get the chicken pasty I wanted at a roadside caf​​é, but I don’t think the United Nations food program needs to become involved. We did not have an immediate recession, despite what George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer, predicted. And while the British economy is now sluggish and afflicted with high inflation, the economic effects of Brexit are impossible to separate from those of the coronavirus pandemic, which arrived two months later. (One economist recently suggested that 80 percent of British inflation was caused by Brexit, but Johnson’s government can gesture across the Atlantic to America’s similar problems, which makes his critics’ argument more difficult.) Small businesses have borne the brunt of Brexit, because of the increase in customs paperwork required to move goods between Britain and the EU. In other words, Brexit created its own red tape. But to most Britons, such problems feel abstract, rather than obviously unjust. The occasional Amazon package arrives late, or with extra packaging. So what?

Most of the concrete effects of Brexit on my life—the ones I can connect to our relationship with Europe with absolute confidence—are minor. When I renew my passport, it will be blue-black rather than burgundy. The more vindictive European countries now make me stand in a longer queue at immigration.

[Anne Applebaum: Brexit reveals a whole new set of political wounds]

The very worst effects of Brexit are felt by a small enough number of people that even my most ardently Remainer friends have bowed to the inevitable: Britain is not rejoining the EU anytime soon, and there is no political appetite to keep fighting that battle. You can even see the loss of Remainer enthusiasm online. Many of those who built a Twitter identity on being pro-European switched their political focus in the spring of 2020 to calling for strict coronavirus lockdowns.

Even so, Johnson and like-minded politicians can’t give up the specter of the meddling Brussels bureaucrat, a figure that has served them well for decades. What was the prime minister’s big Platinum Jubilee policy announcement? “Forging ahead to remove the ban on selling [goods measured] in pounds and ounces.” Not doing it—no, that would be too much like hard work—but “forging ahead” in its general direction, presumably as measured in furlongs or yards or barleycorns. For too long has proud Britannia chafed under the unjust yoke of the overly comprehensible metric system, which operates in base 10 and can therefore be easily explained to schoolchildren. (In Britain, the only people who still think in ounces are Boomers and weed dealers.) Why not go further, and undo the decimalization of our money? Maybe the cost-of-living crisis won’t feel so painful if we have to pay for fuel in shillings and guineas.

An honest analysis of Brexit would reveal that it has been neither as catastrophic as its fiercest critics predicted nor as utopian as its champions claimed. What it did do was clog up Parliament for three solid years—an opportunity cost that is hard to fathom and even harder to forgive. I can live with the blue-black passport and the crown mark. I’ll even learn, if I must, how many meters are in a furlong. My greatest disappointment is having to accept that the cultural side of Brexit—the forever war against the banana regulators and condom checkers—has not ended, and will never end, because it is simply too politically useful. As the former Cabinet minister David Gauke commented on the potential return of pounds and ounces: “The announcement of the return of imperial measurements is an important recent tradition which we should all celebrate. I’m already looking forward to the next time this is announced.”

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.