In the summer of 1948, a young American, a Bennington College graduate visiting Paris, lost her purse in the Jardin des Tuileries. Inside it were her passport and ticket home. Many travelers in her situation would panic. She decided it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to leave France. She quit her job at Doubleday, then the biggest publisher in New York, and moved into a friend’s aunt’s apartment, where she launched a clandestine supper club to support herself. Perhaps she’d “open a small restaurant,” she wrote to her horrified parents. In another letter, she reassured her father that although she knew she’d made a risky choice, “one has to take chances and there are many advantages to be had. Anyway, I am an adventurous girl.”

That girl was Judith Jones, one of the most important editors in American history. She pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of a slush pile during her second stint at Doubleday—in Paris this time, in 1949—a discovery for which her male boss took credit. Eight years later, she moved to Knopf, where she worked until 2013, publishing authors such as John Hersey, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. She was an avid cook—that supper club of hers was a hit—and, as an editor, single-handedly elevated the cookbook to its contemporary status, working with all-time greats including Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Irene Kuo, Claudia Roden, and many, many more.

According to The Editor, a new biography of Judith Jones by the oral historian Sara B. Franklin, Judith was also an avid worker, a visionary editor devoted to her job. (Franklin, who interviewed her at length, calls her Judith, which creates a compelling sense of intimacy on the page; I’m going to follow suit.) The Editor focuses primarily on Judith’s cookbooks, for which she is best remembered now, but more important, it draws out the connections among the varied projects Judith chose. Many of her authors, such as Plath and Olds, wrote about what Franklin calls “the frictions between women’s private and public lives,” digging into the tensions between who women were supposed to be publicly and who they were. Judith’s own life illuminates these same tensions. The Editor presents her as both a case study and an agent of change in American conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. But it also reads, more often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven-decade romance between a woman and her work.

I never met Judith, but my interest in her is personal: My step-grandmother, Abby Mandel, was one of her authors. Around the time Julia Child got famous, Abby was a divorced Jewish mother in greater Chicago. She’d been cooking for her family—siblings first, then children—since age 8, and after recruiting Child to star at a fundraiser she was hosting for her alma mater, Smith College, she grew fascinated by the idea of cooking professionally and moved to Paris for culinary school. After training at La Varenne and in kitchens across Belgium, France, and Switzerland, she returned to Chicago and began writing features and food columns for, among other outlets, the Chicago Tribune and Bon Appetit. Soon enough, those columns turned into cookbooks, edited by Child’s editor at Knopf: Judith.

Abby died 16 years ago this August, having not just written six cookbooks—including a series of Cuisinart books that taught home chefs how to use the new gadget and caused James Beard to call her the Queen of Machine Cuisine—but also founded Chicago’s pioneering Green City Market, which Alice Waters once called the “best sustainable market in the country.” Abby had, in every sense, impeccable taste. She was devoted to her projects. She was demanding, charming, generous, diligent, and rigorous about every single thing. I miss her more with every year. I, like Abby, love to work. I feel a true passion for my job, which might seem like a surprising statement in a social moment of work creep: Remote jobs, smartphones, and side hustles mean your work can follow you everywhere you go. Women in straight relationships, meanwhile, still tend to work a “second shift” at home, cleaning and cooking and caring more than their male partners. I don’t want endless labor, and yet I think of the French doors connecting Abby’s office and kitchen, remember her developing recipes with 6-year-old me perched on the counter, and wonder what advice she would have given me about braiding my work into my life.

Judith, by Franklin’s account, was constantly blending the two. She befriended her authors, tested their recipes in her own kitchen, managed their egos with the same strategy of delicate persuasion she used on her husband, Dick Jones, a writer she met while living in Paris. Judith saw no reason not to use her feminine wiles at work.

Like many powerful women of her generation, she did not describe herself as a feminist. She thought the movement encouraged women to “adopt stereotypically masculine traits in a ‘strident or angry way,’” which she considered counterproductive. She also bristled at the critique that Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, leveled at her first star, Julia Child: that cooking is fundamentally grunt work, and that by making it fun, Child was really just helping to keep women at home, working without pay.

[Read: The key to Julia Child’s success hid in plain sight]

Judith saw things quite differently. In her childhood home, a “woman of standing” was not meant to “dirty her hands” with chores, cooking included. But once she got into the kitchen, she was enamored of the “sensual richness” of even dull or challenging prep tasks; after she and Dick, also a home chef, married, cooking together became “the anchor of their domestic life.” (It also led to  domestic equality: Along with cooking, Dick did more chores than Judith did.) Franklin consistently links the physical pleasures of the kitchen to both adventurousness and adulthood; the word sensual crops up constantly (Olds, a poet famous for her writing about sex, told Franklin she was thrilled to discover, in Judith, an editor who was a “fellow sensualist”). Judith plainly felt that a grown woman should know how to enjoy getting dirty and exerting herself.

Of course, it’s a function of Judith’s whiteness and upper-class background that she got to opt into cooking. Historically, women rarely get to choose their own relationship to domestic labor, a fact Franklin draws out in more ways than one. She describes the Black southern chef Edna Lewis, one of the most talented authors on Judith’s list, fighting to make this point in The Taste of Country Cooking, which juxtaposes recipes with stories of her enslaved grandmother, who had to lay bricks all day while her children waited in their cribs. (Lewis herself, though venerated as a chef, had to hire herself out as a private cook and domestic worker well into her 60s because magazine editors and restaurant owners so habitually underpaid her.) Franklin also writes about the great suppression of women’s labor after World War II, when working women were “ousted en masse from paid jobs” so men who’d been at the front could take those roles back.

Judith came of age precisely at that moment. She had to fight to hang on to jobs in publishing; the fact that she managed to do so suggests the gap between her experience and that of working-class women her age. It also reflects her grit, her talent, and her devotion to her job. She was her household’s primary earner nearly her whole marriage; she pushed through years at Knopf when she got treated like—and referred to as—a secretary, even though she was editing Updike; she not only remained in publishing until her late 80s, but also took on the role of author, writing a handful of books at the end of her career. Franklin describes Judith’s 2009 cookbook, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, as a display of the skills—and the philosophy—Judith learned as a cookbook editor. It was a “manual for living as much as cooking.” At its core was the joy Judith took in food, which she saw as both a way toward a happily physical, unconventional, grounded life and a “worthy purpose in and of itself.”

Judith’s passion for cooking has helped countless Americans cook for fun, exploration, and connection. At the start of her career, this would have seemed highly unlikely. In the 1950s, major manufacturers pushed convenience foods using ads that cast cooking skills as “old-fashioned and obsolete” and promised to wrap everything up so the “‘poor little woman’ wouldn’t soil herself” with dinner prep. Judith decided to use her editorial power to resist—and maybe even counteract—this trend. She wasn’t against practicalities; she did, after all, work with Abby, the Queen of Machine Cuisine. But she hated the thought of cooking getting dismissed as a tired mess or what Franklin calls a “gendered trap.” Although she would not have used this language, she seems to have espoused a different kind of feminism from Friedan’s, one that embraces possibility rather than condemning anything traditionally considered women’s work. An interesting parallel with romantic love is hiding here: Although some feminists have tried to reject men, others have argued that straight relationships can be potential opportunities for radical repair and progress. For Judith, the kitchen was a place where radical progress could happen. She wanted to share her passion for food, which meant getting the American public on board with the idea of cooking as a “gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life.”

[Read: Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover]

Julia Child was Judith’s first companion in this project, and her most influential one. Gradually, though, Judith created a whole community of kindred spirits in her cookbook authors, nearly all of whom were women—and not “little housewives,” as Judith said to Franklin. They were a group of curious, courageous thinkers who, with Judith’s guidance, turned food into an intellectual project, writing books that, far from denigrating cooking as drudgery, presented it as a daily necessity that also, per Judith, “empowered you, that stimulated you.”

My own romance with food, which began when I was a college student with my first dorm kitchen, owes a lot to Abby—and everything to Judith. I make the biscuits from The Taste of Country Cooking all summer, every summer. My copy of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook is held together with painters’ tape. Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food has gotten me through the holidays I’ve spent away from home. And the rest of my cookbook collection, contemporary titles that cross the country and globe, is clearly in Judith’s lineage: books that teach me cultural history along with culinary technique, that deepen my understanding of the United States and of the many diasporic communities that influence American cooking.

My daily life, too, is in a debt of sorts to Judith, something I saw plainly as I read The Editor. For me, as for Judith, food and books are routes to exploration. I garden because I cook; I walk to the farmer’s market in the D.C. summer heat because I cook; I learn about sustainable agriculture because I cook. In a way, yes, this is work on top of the work I do at my desk all day, but it’s pleasure and education, too. Just like writing, it opens my brain up. It makes me an adventurous girl, and for that, I have Judith Jones to thank.

You may think you know stories like this one, but it’s important not to become numb to their evil and horror. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was attending the Nova music festival on October 7 when the Hamas terrorists descended. He and three others rushed to their car and tried to escape by heading north. But the terrorists were shooting drivers on the road, so Hersh and his friends instead sought refuge in a nearby bomb shelter.

More than 25 young people were crammed into a 5-by-8-foot enclosure. The Hamas fighters, filming themselves with GoPro cameras, began lobbing hand grenades into the shelter. Seven times, Hersh’s friend Aner picked up a grenade and threw it back out before it detonated. The eighth grenade exploded while he was still holding it, killing him.

The terrorists continued to spray the shelter with grenades as well as gunfire. When the attack was over, 18 concertgoers in the shelter were dead, seven were alive but hidden under the pile of bodies, and Hersh and three others were slumped against a wall, exposed.

Hersh was taken at gunpoint to a pickup truck and in one video can be seen hoisting himself onto the truck bed. His left arm had been blown off at the elbow, leaving a stump with a bone protruding from it.

Later that day, his parents learned what had happened. Over the ensuing seven months, Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin have become the most visible faces of the hostage families, relentlessly advocating for the release of all the hostages. If you’ve followed this story at all, you’ve probably seen one of their interviews, or their visits to Congress or the United Nations.

The political and social issues that surround all of this are complex, but as I watched the Goldberg-Polins’ interviews, the questions that preoccupied me were simple: How do two people endure this much agony and still manage to get out of bed in the morning? How are they able to keep up this remorseless schedule when their child has had his forearm blown off and now sits imprisoned by terrorists underground somewhere in a war zone?

[Graeme Wood: A close read of Hamas’s hostage-taking manual]

The resource guides for parents whose children have been abducted in various circumstances are rich with compassion and advice on how to practice self-care: Make sure you eat properly, find time for physical exercise, give yourself some personal space, focus on your emotional well-being, keep a journal. In this paradigm, the parents are the victims, passively trying to cope.

But Hersh’s parents have embraced an entirely different paradigm: They have found that the best way they can endure trauma is through direct action. They will travel anywhere, lobby anyone, talk to anyone who might possibly be able to help them liberate their son. The hostages don’t get a day off, the Goldberg-Polins told me recently when I interviewed them via Zoom, so they don’t get a day off. They have found in the horror an all-consuming sense of purpose, a determination that is striking to behold.

“I have never in my life, nor has Rachel, nor have most people, been on a mission that is so clearly focused on literally life-or-death matters,” Jon said. “And it’s a good thing that most of us don’t have this experience.” He adds that this mission is binary: Their son’s safe return is success; anything else is failure. For them, there is no such thing as a partial victory.

They’ve been at this now for more than half a year. “We both struggle with the challenge of self-care,” Jon said. “My head says to me, You’ll be more successful on the mission if you eat well, if you get your sleep. And I know that to be true, but it’s so hard to do. I tried four or five times over the last 222 days to get some exercise, but when I’m in the middle of it, I think, No, I’ve got to answer three emails and make two phone calls.”

“The only time I feel okay is when I’m working to help save Hersh or the other hostages,” Rachel said. “I’m not feeling good, but I’m feeling like I’m doing what it is that I’m supposed to be doing.”

The Goldberg-Polins have not watched TV or listened to music since October 7. Rachel hasn’t put on makeup or worn her hair down, or done the New York Times crossword puzzle, which she used to do with Hersh. “There can be no normalcy,” she says. “It is not acceptable. And I don’t want to feel good. Feeling good does not feel good. The only time I feel okay is when I feel bad.”

Every day begins with a decision—the decision to get out of bed and run to the ends of the Earth to help the hostages. Each day, the Goldberg-Polins write the number corresponding to the length of Hersh’s captivity on a piece of masking tape and put it on their shirts, over their heart. I spoke with them on day 222. They have a team working with them on their mission to help them free Hersh, but they have found that they have little time for those who just want to offer comfort. A friend asked Rachel if she could come over and give her a hug. “That’s the absolute worst thing you can ask me,” she told me. “I had to say, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that, because it’s not comfortable for me.’ The only time I’m comfortable is when I’m working.”

Rachel describes experiencing moments of extreme pain, both emotional and physical. Twice, she says, she went to gatherings with large numbers of family members of the hostages and suddenly it was like she was feeling all of their pain at once. “It’s like someone has shot me in the lower back, and I fall to the ground and I’m in agony.”

“I feel like I’m inhaling the trauma of hundreds of people, and my body can’t bear it,” she told me. “It is an absolute physical reality even though I know it’s through a spiritual and emotional portal that it is entering me.”

Social encounters can be hard. Jon says he sees people’s eyes go wide when they see him and his wife, or they start to cry. “I understand it,” Rachel said. “I understand that we are everyone’s worst nightmare and so we are very scary. It’s like we have leprosy. I know that my presence makes people uncomfortable, and that’s a really challenging place to be.”

The worst is when people come up and ask how they are doing. “It feels like I have a meat cleaver sticking out of my chest,” Rachel said. “Please don’t ask me how I am. It feels so inappropriate—and yet I know that it is without malice, so I need to be more compassionate.” Jon consulted a rabbi who reminded him that they are enduring an experience so rare that nobody knows what to do or say. Much of what people tell them is inappropriate, but they don’t mean harm.

[Listen: ‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’]

Nonetheless, the Goldberg-Polins have been fortified by the thousands of people who have contacted them. “It’s amazing, the strengthening power of hearing from strangers every day who reach out from every country of the world, Rachel said. “They often mention their religion—‘I’m Catholic’ or ‘I’m Hindu.’ To get that from people every day is both strengthening and it’s a responsibility.”

A childhood friend whom Rachel had not seen in 40 years and who now has breast cancer reached out. She reminded Rachel that in the Book of Job, things begin to turn around for Job when he begins to pray for others, rather than just agonizing about his own fate. So she asked Rachel to pray for her in her cancer battle, and they have become prayer partners. Being involved in a mutual relationship in which succor is exchanged has turned out to be easier than just being on the receiving end of someone else’s pity. This is an elemental reminder of one of the crucial laws of effective compassion: Don’t do things for people; do things with people.

On day 201, Hamas released a video showing that Hersh is still alive. He looked pale and worn, his left arm ending in a nub in the middle of the forearm. In the video, which was obviously directed by Hamas, he condemned the Netanyahu government, and expressed love for his parents and sisters. Jon and Rachel were overwhelmed to see him for the first time in more than 200 days. They listened to his voice, not the words he was compelled to utter, and they heard his toughness and conviction. As parents, they also noticed things that might have been invisible to the rest of us—for instance, the possibility that he might be under the influence of mind-altering drugs.

“People have a hard time swallowing it when we say we feel blessed,” Rachel said. “We say to each other in bed at night, ‘It’s shocking how you can have such trauma and unity at the same time.’ We have had so much benevolence and grace showered on us. It is truly grace. This undeserved generosity of spirit, of kindness and thoughtfulness, gives us a lot of strength.”

Hersh is a big soccer fan, and his favorite Israeli team has a sister team in Bremen, Germany. Hersh had visited fans in Bremen three or four times in the six months before he was kidnapped. During games now, fans display giant signs supporting Hersh, and Rachel recorded a video expressing her gratitude to them..

Hersh was named after his great-uncle Herschel, who was killed in the Holocaust. “It gives me hope to think that 80 years from now, Israeli and Palestinian children will be at a soccer stadium together enjoying a game,” Rachel said. “Right now, that’s unthinkable—but in 1943, the idea that Germans would be honoring a Jewish hostage would also have been unthinkable.”

When I logged on to Zoom to talk to Jon and Rachel, I had expected to feel pity and compassion. And, yes, those emotions were there. But I was also struck by the strength and determination that emanate from them. The way the Goldberg-Polins have handled their situation reminds me that while we don’t always get to control what happens, we do get to control our response. They demonstrate that it’s possible to retain an inner strength and a firm rebuttal to dark forces, even in the face of life’s worst.

Warm weather brings with it freedom and leisure—and it can also call to mind the particular pleasure of losing yourself in a book. The relatively idle quality of summer opens up the chance to read something just for fun, or it provides a needed stretch of time for finally picking up the paperback that’s been patiently waiting on your bedside table. This year, The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods. Perhaps you want to transport yourself to another place, or you’re determined to learn something completely new. It’s also the right time to start the book you’ll read all summer or immerse yourself in a cult classic. You might hope to feel wonder about the universe or dive into someone else’s mind—or maybe you just need to indulge in a breezy beach read. Here are 25 books to pick up as your summer unfurls.

Transport Yourself to Another PlaceI Capture the Castleby Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain, 17, lives in a crumbling medieval castle in 1930s England. Her father purchased it with the royalties from his one successful novel, the income from which has long since run dry. As an escape—and as practice for her own novel, which she hopes might spring her family from its now-less-than-genteel poverty—Cassandra has dedicated herself to “capturing” the characters around her in a diaristic, curious first person: irascible, blocked-writer father; bohemian stepmother; beautiful, dissatisfied older sister; lovelorn farmhand. Cassandra’s circumstances are at odds with her romantic temperament, but they animate her narration; charm, humor, and frustration spark off of every page. I Capture the Castle has the enjoyably familiar trappings of the Jane Austen marriage plot—there are wealthy bachelor neighbors and sisterly schemes in the damp yet charming English countryside. But in this book, the tropes collapse in on one another in comic and quietly poignant ways as the reader is welcomed into the nostalgic mood of interwar Britain, with its tea cozies and tweeds and trousseaus bought in London. It’s a novel that you sink into like a chintz armchair, only to emerge warm but wistful as the light fails and the evening mist appears.  — Christine Emba

Wandering Starsby Tommy Orange

Orange’s previous novel, There There, conjured an interconnected cast of characters who were a part of a widespread Native community in Oakland, California. Wandering Stars, a sequel of sorts, is in part an exploration of what happens after the earlier book’s dramatic and painful ending—but it is also Orange’s attempt to provide a deeper, historical backstory to the contemporary, urban reality he described so well. The novel rewinds more than 100 years, beginning in the 19th century with a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and following his bloodline through the decades, with characters wandering to and around California until they end up back in the present day, in Oakland. You can’t understand these people unless you delve into the years of brutality and assimilation that brought them here, Orange implicitly argues—and he brilliantly captures the confusion of the youngest generation, which feels disconnected from its roots even as its inheritance weighs heavily.  — Emma Sarappo

Someone Like Usby Dinaw Mengestu

At one point in Mengestu’s new novel, the main character, Mamush, having missed a flight from his home in Paris to Washington, D.C., decides on a whim to buy a ticket to Chicago instead. He’s not dressed for the freezing cold, which provokes a stranger’s concern, but Mamush remains nonplussed: “What she saw was a shadow version of me,” he thinks. “My real self was hundreds of miles away in the suburbs of northern Virginia.” The soul of this short, disorienting book, which drifts between continents and cities, does indeed lie in the anonymous, dense suburbs north and south of Washington, D.C. These communities are where Mamush, a failed journalist, grew up in a milieu of Ethiopian immigrants. Mamush’s French wife, Hannah, struggles to wrap her mind around these American nonplaces—and even Mamush fails to describe them with anything but the blandest words. “We lived in apartment buildings, surrounded by other apartment buildings, behind which were four-lane highways that led to similar apartments,” he remembers. His trip home, meant to be a family reunion, becomes a sobering and eerie voyage after a sudden tragedy. But as his visit unlocks long-buried memories and secrets, these places that began as ciphers end up specific enough to make the hairs on one’s neck stand up in recognition.  — E.S.

Learn Something Completely NewThe Secret Life of Groceriesby Benjamin Lorr

Great nonfiction books take you into worlds you could never otherwise know: deepest space, Earth’s extremities, the past. The best nonfiction books explore places you know intimately but haven’t thought nearly enough about. The Secret Life of Groceries begins elbow-deep in trout guts and melting ice, a smell “thick in the air like you are exhuming something dangerous, which perhaps you are,” as the low-wage laborers who make a Manhattan Whole Foods fit for the daily rush do their best to clean the fish case. Lorr starts there because it’s a near-perfect metaphor for the American grocery store and its global machinery: It is gross, it is miraculous, it is where plants and animals become products, and where desire becomes consumption. After following him from specialty-food shows to shrimping boats to new-employee orientation, you’ll never think of groceries the same way again.  — Ellen Cushing

Becoming Earthby Ferris Jabr

In his new book, Jabr invites the reader to consider the true definition of life. Earth doesn’t just play host to living beings, in his telling; it’s alive itself because it is fundamentally made up of the plants and creatures that transform its land, air, and water. “Life, then, is more spectral than categorical, more verb than noun,” he explains. It is “not a distinct class of matter, nor a property of matter, but rather a process—a performance.” Plankton release gases that can alter the climate; microbes below the planet’s surface sculpt rock into caverns and, Jabr suggests, might have even helped form the continents. Jabr is a science journalist who has written searching articles on inter-tree communication, the possibilities of botanical medicine, and the beauty of certain animals; here, he travels from the kelp forests near California’s Santa Catalina Island to an observatory high above the Amazon rainforest in Brazil to his own backyard in Portland. Along the way, he makes a convincing, mind-opening case that “the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth,” which means that humans are just one part of a changing, multifarious whole—and that we must work urgently to mitigate our disproportionate effects on the planet.  — Maya Chung

Daybookby Anne Truitt

Truitt’s sculptures—tall wooden columns of pure color—are almost mystically smooth. But her writing, especially in her first published journal, Daybook, flies in the face of those unbroken surfaces: She chronicles her complex experiences as a mother and a working artist, giving readers an intimate look into how her biography and her process cannot be separated. Daybook, which covers Truitt’s life in the late 1970s, emerges directly from her maxim that “artists have no choice but to express their lives.” In her case, that means capturing serene meditations on the creative spark, recounting the labor of applying 40 coats of paint to her forms, and groaning over the financial discomfort of raising three kids. Most spectacular are her ruminations on how life is what we feed to art in order to make it grow. Watching her daughter take a bath is a source of inspiration. “I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam’s blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to,” she muses. Daybook is full of all the luminous colors Truitt, who died in 2004, evoked—the soothing lilacs, blaring yellows, revolutionary reds. It’s a powerful lesson that an artist is not only a person who planes towering poplar sculptures but also someone who removes a splinter from a child’s finger.  — Hillary Kelly

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poetby James Atlas

You might not ever have heard of Schwartz, and it doesn’t really matter. Atlas’s biography of him is such a psychologically acute, stylishly executed portrait of a doomed genius and his milieu of New York intellectuals that it effortlessly propels the reader through its pages. Schwartz was supposed to become the American W. H. Auden; he had the potential to be the greatest poet of his generation, and his work provoked the awe of peers such as Saul Bellow (who loosely based the novel Humboldt’s Gift on Schwartz’s troubled life). Atlas depicts a legendary conversationalist, a brilliant wit (Schwartz coined the aphorism “Even paranoids have real enemies”), and a life brutally overtaken by mental illness.  — Franklin Foer

Start the Book You’ll Read All Summer

At the Edge of Empireby Edward Wong

For years, the only uniform that Wong, The New York Times’ former Beijing bureau chief, could imagine his father wearing was the red blazer he put on to go work at a Chinese restaurant every day. Then he saw a photo of young Yook Kearn Wong dressed as a soldier, and two stories opened up. His nonagenarian father had once been in Mao’s army and witnessed firsthand the Communist attempt to resurrect a Chinese empire; he dramatically left China in 1962 for Hong Kong and then Washington, D.C., disillusioned with what he had seen. This mix of memoir and efficiently recounted history covers 80 turbulent years. Wong is especially detailed about the decades his father spent in the People’s Liberation Army; he was sent to Manchuria, where he trained with the Chinese air force, and Xinjiang, where he met the Muslim populations of Uyghurs and Kazakhs that the state has struggled to subdue. Along with his father’s history, Wong unpacks his own years reporting on Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power and quashing of dissent—a mirror of what his father saw. This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate.  — Gal Beckerman

Kristin Lavransdatterby Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina Nunnally

Kristin, the pivotal character in Undset’s historical 1,000-page trilogy, is introduced as a young girl in 14th-century Norway. She is the adored daughter of Lavrans, a widely respected nobleman who runs their family’s estate with wisdom and faith, and a member of a well-drawn social world of relatives, friends, and neighbors with defined feudal roles. As she grows up, she becomes beautiful, bighearted, and religious, though she is also willful and disobedient in ways that will bring her deep sorrow for the rest of her life. Kristin’s saga, rich with detail, has shades of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ tragedy and Brideshead Revisited’s piety, but more than anything, the story is deeply human. Readers follow an imperfect, striving, warm, petty, utterly understandable woman from her childhood during the peak of medieval Norwegian strength to her death during the Black Plague, a time when Catholicism ordered social and political life but pagan traditions and beliefs were not yet forgotten. Her journey from maid to sinner to pilgrim to matriarch, first published in the 1920s, is gorgeous, fresh, and propulsive in Nunnally’s translation. A century later, spending weeks or months tracking the years of Kristin’s life remains wildly rewarding.  — E.S.

The Bee Stingby Paul Murray

The setup for the Irish author Murray’s fourth novel is a classic one: Take one family and explore its dynamics in intimate detail, turning it over to reveal all of its flawed facets, and expose it as a microcosm of larger social and cultural forces roiling us all. Jonathan Franzen is the current American master of this particular novelistic gambit, but Murray brings new energy to the enterprise with his portrait of the Barneses, Dickie and Imelda, and their two children, Cass and PJ. They’re a once-prosperous family living in a small Irish town; they’ve been suddenly struck down by the 2008 financial crash, which sends Dickie’s chain of car dealerships and garages into freefall. You could read this book in a week, and you’ll want to, but give yourself the whole summer to appreciate how fully Murray inhabits the perspectives of each family member chapter after chapter. Their psychologies—scarred in so many ways, both subtle and dramatic—become impossible to turn away from. After 600 pages, the elements Murray has been putting in place build to a wrenching climax, one that, like in all great tragedies, was foretold from the first page of this beautifully crafted book.  — G.B.

Immerse Yourself in a Cult Classic

In the Actby Rachel Ingalls

If nothing else, read In the Act for the fights. Helen and Edgar, who are unhappily married, have developed a caustic fluency in the art of spiteful exchange. “You’re being unreasonable,” he says at one point. “Of course I am. I’m a woman,” she replies. “You’ve already explained that to me.” But also, read Ingalls’s sneakily brilliant 1987 novella for the absurd plot, which begins at a grouchy, oddball simmer—Edgar is adamant that Helen give him privacy to work on a mysterious project in the attic; Helen, suspicious of the sounds she hears up there, is determined to learn more—and ultimately reaches an exhilarating, tragicomic boil. In between, we discover the particular, creative way in which Edgar is two-timing Helen, the equally creative way in which she takes revenge, and just how delightful a story can be when each lean, mean sentence carries its weight.  — Jane Yong Kim

Let’s Talk About Loveby Carl Wilson

What might a music critic with a knee-jerk distaste for Celine Dion stand to gain from careful, open-minded consideration of her work? This is the premise of Wilson’s 2007 touchstone of cultural criticism, which proved so popular that an expanded edition, released in 2014, includes response essays by luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill and James Franco. Let’s Talk About Love focuses on the singer of “My Heart Will Go On,” yes, but at its core it’s an investigation of taste: why we like the things we like, how our identities and social status get mixed up in our aesthetic preferences, and how one should wrestle with other people’s wildly different reactions to works of art. The book will have you scrutinizing your own preferences, but its true pleasure is unlocked simply by following along as a critic listens to music and thinks deeply about it—particularly one as intelligent, rigorous, and undogmatic as Wilson.  — Chelsea Leu

Ripley’s Gameby Patricia Highsmith

The suave serial murderer Tom Ripley’s actions can be notoriously hard for readers to predict—but in Highsmith’s third novel about the con man, Ripley surprises himself. No longer the youthful compulsive killer of The Talented Mr. Ripley, the character is aging and getting bored. So when a poor man named Jonathan responds coolly to him at a party, Ripley fashions an elaborate drama for his own amusement: He cons the mild-mannered and entirely inexperienced Jonathan into taking a job as a freelance assassin targeting Mafia members, but the more Ripley watches Jonathan struggle with the task and his morals, the more Ripley itches to get his own hands dirty again. When I revisited Highsmith’s books ahead of their (rather dour) Netflix adaptation, I found myself unexpectedly drawn most to Ripley’s Game and its absurd humor. The novel explores a classic Highsmith preoccupation: how reducing strangers to archetypes can feel irresistible. Ripley is as much a petty meddler as he is a cold-blooded murderer—and that makes him endlessly fun to follow.  — Shirley Li

Sirena Selenaby Mayra Santos-Febres

In 1990s San Juan, Puerto Rico, the drag queen Martha Divine hears a young boy singing boleros while picking up cans. She helps transform him into Sirena Selena—a beguiling drag performer who is soon invited to sing at a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic and inspires an erotic obsession in one of its rich investors. Santos-Febres has pointed out that the Caribbean has long “been a desire factory for the rest of the world,” and her story looks squarely at the power dynamics inherent in these fantasies, especially those between tourists and locals. When it was published in 2000, Selena’s story was immediately heralded as crucial Puerto Rican literature, and it remains beloved partially for the force of its central allegory: Tourism, it argues, forces Caribbean people into a performance of exoticism—yet another type of drag. Santos-Febres will make you reconsider gender and the travel industry while luring you in with prose so sumptuous that reading it feels like putting on a pair of delicate satin gloves.  — Valerie Trapp

Feel Wonder About the Universe

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural Worldedited by Ada Limón

This collection of verse defines the natural world loosely: Here, yes, we have lovely descriptions of ancient redwoods and the “buttery platters of fungus” ascending their trunks; sparrows and spiderwebs and “geckos in their mysterious work.” But the book is largely about human nature, and our place in a world that contains so many other living things. An address to a saguaro becomes a meditation on immigration; a walk with a baby is tinged with sadness for the climate disasters surely to come; bearded irises give someone the strength to keep living; lilacs and skunk cabbage are envisioned through the haze of distant memory—it’s an ephemeral act, “like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.” Who are we, the poets ask, as individuals and as a species? How have our surroundings shaped our pasts and our presents, and what can they tell us about how to exist in the future? The Earth here is rather like a supporting character—a foil—who can surprise us, devastate us, and bring us back to ourselves. As Limón writes in a gorgeous introduction, she started repeating “You are here” to herself after seeing the phrase on a trail map. When I feel like a disembodied mind this summer, I’ll take myself to the ocean, this book in hand, and try doing the same.  — Faith Hill

Lives Other Than My Ownby Emmanuel Carrère

Carrère’s books demand some surrender on their reader’s part. You have to be okay not knowing exactly where the story—to the extent that there is anything resembling a traditional story—is going. You are there to spend time with his mind. Lives Other Than My Own, my favorite of his works, is no exception. It begins in Sri Lanka in 2004, where Carrère was witness to the tsunami that pulverized the island. Amid the immense death and destruction, Carrère befriends a French family whose little girl drowned in the waves. But just as Carrère pulls us into this grieving family’s emotional upheaval, his mind drifts. He returns from Sri Lanka to Paris and shifts his attention to his girlfriend’s sister, Juliette, a judge who has just died of cancer; he then carries out an investigation of sorts about the life she lived and the loved ones she left behind. The two strands don’t obviously connect—but they also make perfect sense next to each other. Each one fundamentally shakes Carrère, forcing him to ponder death, love, and how a meaningful existence comes together.  — G.B.

Tentacleby Rita Indiana, translated by Achy Obejas

Tentacle may be a bit of a spooky read for this summer: In its world, initially set a few years into the future, the island of Hispaniola was devastated by a tidal wave in 2024 that wiped away coral reefs and food stands. But as you read on, the story asks you to let go of your attachments to chronology, flitting among three time periods: a post-storm island that is livable only for the ultrarich; an early-2000s milieu of beach-town artists; and a colonial-era past centered on a band of buccaneers. The book was originally written in Dominican Spanish and sprinkled with Yoruba and French, and the English translation retains a fiery love for the dynamic Earth. In one of the timelines, “an enormous school of surgeonfish” shoots out of a coral reef like “an electric-blue stream.” In another, the same sea is described as “a dark and putrid stew.” Holding voltaic awe in one hand and profound grief in the other, Indiana helps us see how the years behind us have led to our present climate crisis, and ignites a desire to fight for all we can still save.  — V.T.

Dive Into Someone Else’s Mind

Among the Thugsby Bill Buford

Every time I come across footage of January 6, I think of this book, the greatest study of mob violence ever written. Since its publication in 1990, English police have largely eliminated what was once euphemistically called “hooliganism” from the soccer stadium, but Buford’s first-person account of embedding with the Inter-City Jibbers, a group of pugilistic Manchester United fans, remains as readable and relevant as ever. He unforgettably recounts the experience of being pummeled by Italian police in Sardinia—and he describes the human capacity for brutality with terrible candor and compelling empathy. The violence he experiences is addictive, adrenaline-induced euphoria, as is his technicolor, emotionally vibrant account of it.  — F.F.

Broughtupsyby Christina Cooke

By the time that 20-year-old Akúa travels back to Jamaica to see her estranged sister, she’s spent half her life in the United States and Canada. Before Akúa even arrives at her sister’s house, she begins to realize how difficult the transition to her birthplace will be. In the cramped taxi ride from the Kingston airport, other passengers joke with one another in patois, “their words flying hot and quick.” Akúa’s inability to join their banter leaves her feeling like she’s “listening through water,” one of many such indignities detailed by her evocative, searching narration. But language isn’t the only thing that weighs heavily on her relationship with the island; she also has to confront the grief and familial resentment that have unmoored her in the years since her mother’s death. Cooke’s vibrant debut novel is a queer coming-of-age story and a chronicle of diasporic rediscovery: Akúa makes new memories with her sister—and with rebellious strangers whose lives challenge the religious conservatism around them all. Along the way, Akúa’s loneliness starts to lift, and the island’s misfits help make Jamaica feel like home again.  — Hannah Giorgis

Mina’s Matchboxby Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen B. Snyder

In 1972, a young Japanese girl named Tomoko is sent by her mother to live with her aunt’s family in the seaside town of Ashiya. Things are a bit odd in their house: Her wealthy, half-German uncle disappears for long stretches; her sickly cousin, Mina, spends much of her time hidden away indoors, but rides a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko to school; her aunt searches for typos in books and pamphlets, obsessively identifying these “jewels glittering in a sea of sand.” Most enchanting are Mina’s many matchboxes, hidden underneath her bed, each of them featuring an intricate, beautiful picture. Mina collects them like talismans and writes devastating stories about the characters that appear on their illustrated labels. Everything, from the eerie events that happen at home to the bigger, global events such as the terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is filtered through a child’s perspective—curious but lacking adult judgment. Tomoko’s narration is subtle, almost detached, but the reader is immersed in her ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.  — M.C.

This Is Salvagedby Vauhini Vara

The physical experience of being a human is pretty weird, with our little flappy arms and occasional runny noses. To read Vara’s short stories is to briefly inhabit a mind attuned to the fumbling and freedom of having a body. One character draws our attention to “a crust clinging in the tiny bulbed corner” of an eye. Another pronounces that we don’t “talk enough about labial sweat.” Even flowers are not immune to the indecency of physicality: “Blooming seemed too formal for what the flowers were doing on their stems. They were doing something obscene: spurting; spilling.” Vara injects that same irreverence into all of her characters’ situations: Two girls work as phone-sex operators after the death of one of their siblings. One woman transforms into a buffalo. “I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul,” says another character. These stories, similarly, reveal the leaky boundaries between our bodies and the universe, and bare what’s vulnerable, and beautiful, underneath.  — V.T.

Indulge in a Breezy Beach Read

Glossyby Marisa Meltzer

There was a brief moment in 2017 when The Atlantic’s London bureau shared a WeWork floor with the U.K. marketing team for Glossier, and this was when I first became fascinated with the cult beauty brand, its playful tubes of color, and its virtuoso Instagram presence. Meltzer’s 2023 book, Glossy, is a rich, gossipy history of the company’s rise. But it’s also a fairly succinct examination of womanhood in the 2010s: the cursed girlboss ethos, the growth of social media, the aesthetic nature of aspiration in a moment when feminism was a trend more than a movement. Meltzer thoroughly examines how Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, ascended seamlessly from her supporting role on The Hills to blogging to founding a billion-dollar brand; the book delivers thrilling details and structural analysis along the way. (Beauty is a business with extremely high profit margins, which explains a lot about its ubiquity in our culture when you think about it.) Mostly, the book left me marveling at how selling a business in this environment was as much about selling yourself as any particular product.  — Sophie Gilbert

The Coinby Yasmin Zaher

“Woman unravels in New York City” is hardly an innovative storyline for a novel. Yet The Coin, the Palestinian journalist Zaher’s debut—which is, yes, about a woman unraveling in New York City—feels arrestingly new. Its unnamed protagonist, a Palestinian multimillionaire who teaches at a middle school for gifted, underprivileged boys, is a neat freak, a misanthrope, a dirty-minded isolate who dislikes the United States profoundly but lives there because “I wanted a certain life for myself … Wearing heels was important to me.” Her narration is spiky and honest, her choices gleefully, consciously bad. The pleasure she takes in making those decisions and then recounting them is what makes The Coin both unusual and compelling. Our protagonist denies herself nothing she wants, and she denies her audience no detail. The combination renders the book tough to put down.  — Lily Meyer

The English Understand Woolby Helen DeWitt

My copy of The English Understand Wool came with a little silver sticker on the front proclaiming it actually funny. Perspicacious sticker: This book is funny in the sense that it will make you laugh—for real, out loud, more than once—but also in the sense that it’s a little off-kilter and unlike anything else. Its narrator is Marguerite, a 17-year-old who has been taught by her elegant, commanding maman to play piano and bridge, spot fine tailoring from a distance, and live a life unmarred by mauvais ton: “bad taste.” On a trip to London from their home in Marrakech, Marguerite learns something that elevates the novella from a charming comedy of manners to a truly divine combination of psychological thriller, caper, tender coming-of-age story, and barbed publishing-industry satire. It also does all of this in just over 60 pages, making this a book you can actually finish over a single drink from your beach cooler—though once you do, you may well return to the beginning to try to figure out how DeWitt pulled it off.  — E.C.

The Birthday Partyby Laurent Mauvignier

Despite its title, The Birthday Party isn’t … fun, per se. It’s violent and exceedingly dark; when it was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the judges said, “It is a very scary book.” And it’s not a quick read—following a couple, their young daughter, and that family’s lone neighbor as they’re visited by three menacing men, the plot is unspooled detail by minute detail over the course of roughly 500 pages. Single sentences stretch on so long that by the end of one, you might have forgotten its beginning. But the novel, in its own way, is breezy: Mauvignier drifts gently as a leaf in the wind among characters’ perspectives, swirling acrobatically through their interior worlds and sketching their psyches finely before he plunges them into terror. The first explicitly frightening event happens about 100 pages in; by that point, I’d come to care about these people a great deal, and my jaw hurt from anxious clenching, knowing something bad was on the way. The action is made more suspenseful because it explodes in slow motion—gripping enough to make you forget about the sand in your teeth and the seagull circling your sandwich. That’s my kind of beach read.  — F.H.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning. Trump flaunts his corruption. Who really has brain worms?

The Art of the Check

The newsletter you’re reading right now was reviewed by a fact-checker named Sam. Sam spent about an hour this afternoon scrutinizing my words and sentences, and making sure the quotes from my interviews match my recordings. You know what probably didn’t get that kind of review? The book on your nightstand. Or, as it happens, Noem’s new memoir.

Book publishers don’t employ fact-checking teams, and they don’t require a full fact-check before publication. Instead, a book is usually reviewed only by editors and copy editors—people who shape the story’s structure, word choice, and grammar. An editor might catch something incorrect in the process, and a lawyer might examine some claims in the book to ensure that the publisher won’t be sued for defamation. But that’s it. University presses typically use a peer-review process that helps screen for any factual errors. But in publishing more broadly, no one checks every date, quote, or description. It works this way at all of the Big Five publishers, which include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Macmillan. (None of these publishers responded to my requests for comment.)

Whaaat?! you might be thinking, spitting that Thursday glass of merlot all over your screen as every book you’ve ever read flashes before your eyes. Was it all a lie? The answer is no. But books absolutely do go out into the world containing factual errors. For most books, and especially for memoirs, “it’s up to the author to turn in a manuscript that is accurate,” Jane Friedman, a publishing-industry reporter, told me.

A few writers will go out and pay for their own fact-checker. Many don’t—including, evidently, Noem, who, as you may have heard by now, shot her dog in a gravel pit. That incident, which the South Dakota governor wrote about in her memoir, No Going Back, seems to be true. But a passage about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is probably not. In the book, Noem claims to have met Kim during a congressional trip where he “underestimated” her. At least one former congressional staffer has said that that meeting never happened. And after being questioned about it, Noem’s office said it would be correcting a few errors in the book.

A simple fact-check could have prevented this particular embarrassment for Noem: A checker would have called others who were part of the delegation to verify whether the meeting had taken place. So why don’t publishers fact-check, to avoid this problem in the first place? From the publisher’s perspective, hiring a team of checkers is “a huge expense,” Friedman said—it would “destroy the profitability” of some books. And there are logistical challenges: Fact-checking memoirs, for example, can be difficult, because you’re dealing with people’s memories. But magazines do it all the time.

If authors want their work checked, they generally have to pay for it themselves. Many of my Atlantic colleagues have hired fact-checkers to review their books. But the process is cumbersome and expensive—the editorial equivalent of an “intensive colonoscopy,” as one colleague described it to me recently. The checker pores over every word and sentence of the book, using multiple sources to back up each fact. She listens to all of the author’s audio, reviews transcripts, and calls people to verify quotes. The whole process can take several weeks. One fact-checker I spoke with charges $5,000 to $8,000 for a standard nonfiction book. Others charge more. It makes sense, then, that, as Friedman said, the number of authors who opt for independent fact-checking “is minuscule.”

So what of Noem’s book? Her publisher, Center Street, which is a conservative imprint of Hachette, had a decision to make when the error was discovered: It could conduct an emergency recall of Noem’s books, pulling all of them back from bookstores and Amazon warehouses around the country, and print new, accurate copies, Kathleen Schmidt, a public-relations professional who writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential, explained to me. But that would have been incredibly difficult, she said, given the logistics and extreme expense of both shipping and paper. Center Street issued a statement saying it would remove the Kim anecdote from the audio and ebook versions of No Going Back, as well as from any future reprints. (Noem’s team did not reply to a request for comment about her fact-checking process.)

This means that, for now, Noem’s book, which was officially released on Tuesday, will exist in the world as is. Many people will buy it, read it, and accept as fact that Noem once met—and was underestimated by—Kim Jong Un.

Books have always had a certain heft to them—sometimes literally, but also metaphorically. We tend to believe a book’s contents by virtue of their vessel. “People might be a little less likely to do that if they understood that the publisher is basically just publishing whatever the author said was correct,” Friedman told me.

Maybe this latest incident will spark a change in the publishing industry—but it probably won’t. For now, people should think critically about everything they read, remembering, Friedman said, “that [books] are fallible—as fallible as anything else.”

Related:

The blurb problem keeps getting worse. The wrath of Goodreads

Today’s News

Last night, President Joe Biden said that if Israel launches a large-scale invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, the U.S. would stop supplying Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells. House Democrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in rejecting Representative Majorie Taylor Greene’s motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son, was selected to be a Florida delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he will participate in nominating his father for president.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: 50 years ago, the architect Peter Blake questioned everything he thought he knew about modern building, Sam Fentress writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic

A Fundamental Stage of Human Reproduction Is Shifting

By Katherine J. Wu

In recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.

Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What you need to know about making a good impression Watch Apple trash-compact human culture. The biggest way that elections have consequences

Culture Break

The Atlantic

Listen. The trailer for How to Know What’s Real, a new season of the How To podcast series (out on Monday). Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore deepfakes, illusions, misinformation, and more.

Read. The writer dream hampton thinks hip-hop is broken. But she can’t stop trying to fix it, Spencer Kornhaber wrote last year.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A ton of inbreeding is required to produce purebred dogs—and it’s causing serious health problems for them, according to a recent New York Times column by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist. Your Frenchie’s parents are likely more closely related than half-siblings! Your golden retriever might have parents that are genetically as close as siblings! Such inbreeding has consequences: A pug’s skull shape makes breathing difficult. German shepherds are prone to hip dysplasia. “As a species, we are so attached to the idea that we should be able to buy a dog who looks however we like—flat of face or fancy of coat—that we are willing to overlook the consequences” for them, Horowitz writes.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.

Perhaps this tradition helps explain what’s been so satisfying about watching two of the 21st century’s most important musicians, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, try to destroy each other. The rap feud that has engulfed public attention in recent weeks has been litigated in breathtaking, twisty-turny songs packed with very 2020s references—to Ozempic, disinformation, AI, Taylor Swift, and elite pedophile rings. These two superstars have leveled accusations so nasty that cancellation, today’s standard punishment for celebrity wrongdoing, hardly seems sufficient. Thus far, the consensus is that Lamar has “won” the war—but in that case, Drake’s defeat is really what’s significant. We’re witnessing the modern implementation of an ancient rite, the desecration of an individual for the moral cleansing of the masses.

The conflict was sparked by what now seems like a quaint dispute: Who’s the greatest rapper? A verse by J. Cole on a Drake song last fall postulated himself, Drake, and Lamar as hip-hop’s “big three.” Earlier this year, Lamar replied with a correction: “It’s just big me,” he rapped in a tone of seething hostility. Cole issued and quickly retracted a reply, but Drake took Lamar’s bait, and the two men began volleying diss tracks. Over eight songs—plus one interlude!—in less than a month, the question of who’s a better rapper has given way to a more profound debate about hip-hop, masculinity, and nothing less than the nature of evil.

Beef is older than rap, but this showdown is new in its scale and velocity. When Jay-Z and Nas scrapped in the early 2000s, they did so at a time when rap was not quite yet synonymous with pop. But in today’s fractured musical ecosystem, the 37-year-old Drake, who has had 13 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the 36-year-old Lamar, the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer, have achieved a rare level of name recognition. The most consequential rap beef ever, between Biggie and Tupac, simmered for months and unfolded via physical releases, local radio, and in-person dustups. By contrast, Drake and Lamar are using fast-twitch digital technologies to record tracks at whim, circulate them around the planet instantly, and feed a teeming ecosystem of commentators, remixers, fans, haters, and voyeurs.

This global audience has long been primed for the showdown. Since the early 2010s, Drake and Lamar have reigned as the yin and yang of popular rap: the entertainer and the artist, the hedonist and the monk. Drake has flooded the marketplace with hits, collaborations, and tie-in products. His sound is chameleonic, borrowing unapologetically from far-flung subgenres and scenes, and his lyrical outlook is pettily, proudly self-interested. Lamar, by contrast, expresses himself in carefully honed albums exploring how to live ethically in a fallen world. The Compton native’s music, for all its experimental edge, roots itself in the bounce and attitude of West Coast hip-hop. These two men have long been in a cold war, trading covert lyrical insults that fit with the ideological and aesthetic clash they both seem to represent.

So when Lamar rapped, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress” on last week’s diss track “Euphoria,” he was harvesting from richly tilled soil. The hatred he spoke of was both visceral and intellectual; the song argued that the mixed-race Drake was insufficiently Black, or at least exploitative and cringey in his performance of Blackness. “It’s not just me,” Lamar rapped, referring to his distaste for Drake and the people he surrounds himself with. “I’m what the culture feelin’.” He was, by this logic, unleashing the pent-up resentment of true rap fans against a man he later labeled a “colonizer.”

Others can debate Lamar’s racial claims, but on some level the attack represents a desperate wish: for Drake, along with all he represents, to be cleanly excised from modern hip-hop culture. The maddening truth for Drake’s critics is that he, in a fundamental way, is modern hip-hop culture—the genre’s sound and social cachet over the past 15 years are inextricable from his success. On the diss track “Not Like Us,” Lamar rapped a list of well-respected artists such as 21 Savage and Young Thug who have lent Drake “false street cred.” This attack cut Drake, but it also called attention to how many rappers have mingled their brands with his. Even for Lamar, the relationship between realness and commercialism isn’t neat: As Drake pointed out in his own diss tracks, Lamar has worked with Maroon 5, Swift, and Drake himself.

[Read: How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, according to a juror]

As the feud between the men escalated, a more explosive issue came to the fore: Which of these men is worse to women and children? Lamar’s attacks were blunt, labeling Drake a deadbeat father and a “predator.” He addressed pitying verses to Drake’s young son (whose existence was first publicized in a 2018 diss track by Drake’s rival Pusha T) and to an 11-year-old daughter, whom Drake allegedly has been keeping secret. He also said that Drake leads a crew of “certified pedophiles” that is systematically luring “victims all inside of they home.” Drake, meanwhile, has called attention to rumors that Lamar beat the mother of his child.

None of these claims is verifiable. Drake has denied Lamar’s accusations: “Just for clarity, I feel disgusted, I’m too respected / If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested,” he rapped on “The Heart Part 6.” He also claimed that his camp intentionally leaked the lie that Drake was hiding a daughter in order to cause confusion. As for the claim that Lamar committed domestic violence, the rapper denied it years ago in a radio interview—and, in his recent diss tracks, repeatedly (albeit vaguely) said that Drake is lying about Lamar’s family.

Truth, however, doesn’t really matter in this battle. The PR narrative is clear-cut, classic, and irresistible. People like Drake are “not like us,” as Lamar put it in a track that will have listeners singing along and dancing to lyrics about child trafficking all summer. Lamar has spun a populist narrative in which cultural elites are vampiric abusers from whom regular folks need to hide their daughters. The power of that kind of rhetoric has been well demonstrated in national politics—and has crowd-pleasing appeal at a time when hip-hop titans such as Diddy are facing legal trouble in connection with alleged sex crimes (allegations that he denies). It is easier to say “not like us” than to dwell on the reality that predation happens everywhere in American life, in unfamous communities, workplaces, and homes.

Drake has turned in some of the best rapping of his career over the past few weeks, but the substance of his disses isn’t landing. Many of his attacks draw from Lamar’s own catalog—which is all about how society’s moral corruption is perpetuated not by far-off villains but by our own selves. Lamar’s most recent album, 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, told of his own infidelity, brutality, misogyny, pride, and a bucket of other sins. Drake’s lyrics have invoked those admissions to show that Lamar isn’t a saint, but the problem with this logic is not simply that Lamar has already confessed. It’s that Drake, the more popular artist, is just a more appealing vessel upon which to project communal shame.

Indeed, Drake’s shunning has been a group activity. The feud really kicked off in March when Drake’s frequent collaborators Future and Metro Boomin released two albums full of Drake disses. (The first album featured Lamar’s “it’s just big me” verse.) Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye West have jumped in with their own digs. Each of these figures has his own reasons for beef, but the gist of their attacks has been tonally similar, laced with disgust. Most hilariously—and tellingly—Metro Boomin made a beat with a sped-up chorus about Drake’s alleged plastic surgery, and invited anyone to remix it. Amateurs on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms have used that beat to recap the very same talking points that Lamar has been using.

“This shit was some good exercise,” Drake muttered, resignedly, in his most recent salvo. If he now retreats from the spotlight for a period, what has been accomplished? Lamar has proved himself to be an even savvier operator than once thought, and the breakneck rudeness of “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” and Drake’s “Family Matters” are going to remain a guilty thrill to listen to—but the meat of the dispute between these rappers has hardly been addressed. Surely misogyny and abuse will not disappear from society. Hip-hop probably won’t revert to some purer, more righteous form of itself. Some people may even use this war of words to try to perpetuate the bloodiest tendencies of the genre’s history; yesterday, a drive-by shooter injured one of Drake’s bodyguards, for as-yet-unknown reasons.

The most likely legacy of this battle will be in accelerating the record industry’s strategic use of gossip and metanarrative. Music was once a social, local art form that fostered cultural cohesion; now it’s an on-demand utility that insulates people in their headphones. Commanding mass attention in this era is a difficult task, but the artists who are able to do so—Drake and Lamar, yes, as well as storytellers such as Swift and Olivia Rodrigo—make the internet feel like a village from our distant past. We can send strangers into the desert and feel some absolution, whether we’ve earned it or not.