Ed Simon, Editor-in-Chief:
For readers that are attracted to the sweeping scope and the meticulous detail of an urban studies classic like Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the new group-biography The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990 is a worthy next read. Written by New York Times Magazine reporter Jonathan Mahler, this volume is in many ways a follow-up to his Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning, an account of the apocalyptic 70s in the nation’s largest city, marked by power-outages and serial killers, mass arson and bankruptcy. The Gods of New York focuses on just four years of the decade in which New York regenerated itself, though at tremendous cost to its soul. New York City may be an avatar of American aspirations, the indispensable metropolis, but it’s increasingly also become a massive Chase Manhattan Bank combined with a Sweet Green. This overview of “four of the most convulsive and consequential years in the modern history” of the Big Apple explains how that came to pass.
A portrait of the larger-than life figures that dominated the city during the ascendancy of the “Greed is good” Reaganite ‘80s, Mahler’s book provides interweaving capsule overviews of seminal New Yorkers like the narcissistic mayor Ed Koch, the sometimes-idealistic grifter Rev. Al Sharpton, the cynical District Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani, and a certain Manhattan real estate developer who wanted his name emblazoned on seemingly every surface of the city. So far, I’m only through “1986,” but Maher has masterfully structured hundreds of narratives that cover a massive amount of material which occurred across only 48 months, from the Bensonhurst Riots to the Central Park 5, epidemics of both AIDS and crack, the explosion of homelessness and an attendant explosion of Wall Street wealth. Mahler’s study is as much a history of the late ‘80s as it is an explanation of American Neoliberal excess, where dreams of the common welfare were replaced by the aspirations of greedy individuals.
Shanzeh Afzal, Managing Editor:
I’ve been reading, and re-reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism since it was assigned to me just a few weeks ago for a class that I’ve been taking this semester. It is the kind of book where you learn something new and valuable on every page, and re-reading it always offers even more insight and understanding to concepts that you may have missed.
Being an Indigenous scholar Max conceptualizes non-human others in a way that is very different from modern logic—as relatives. This is one of many insights Max offers in the book that made me reconsider how I’ve always understood certain things, gently reminding me that such ways of thinking often stem from a culture of domination. Focusing on how environmentalism can often reproduce the harms of colonialism, this book looks specifically at how plastic pollution needs to be understood in more depth and with more nuance, through how it reproduces systems of harm that mimic, and are inseparable from colonialism.
Liboiron uses footnotes in ways that I am not accustomed to but am deeply grateful for, almost as journal entries, offering their own thoughts on texts that have shaped their own work. The footnotes section of the book is a world of its own, challenging the conventions of form that is usual in academic work. Liboiron is also a very diligent citer, and if they are citing a text, sometimes they will even acknowledge someone who suggested that text. In that spirit, my Decolonial Ecologies professor and classmates are the ones who have shaped my love for this book, and let this be my acknowledgement of my gratitude for them.
Nathan Pensky, Columnist:
Both Mason and I (my co-host at Third Person Limited) get books sent to us in the mail now, and I have a stack by the spot on the couch where I sit that occasionally falls over with a crash. For the podcast, I just started John Sayles’s really impressive new novel about Henry Ford, titled Crucible. We’ll be interviewing Sayles in February, so watch for that. I also recently finished up Ian McEwan’s really excellent new novel, What We Can Know, which I’ll also be reviewing for PRoB. My book group is right in the middle of Middlemarch, which is a novel I had never read. It’s pretty hard to overstate how great this novel is, though I have to say I was not a fan of this one at first! There’s a whole first section that I thought was pretty trite and too overtly satirical. But once it starts getting good, it gets very good. For my own research, I have also been reading Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s early modern play The Changeling, a really great, funny, and very wild play about moral purity and madness, among other things. There’s other stuff in the mix, too, but like the stack of books by my couch, this list has already gotten too long, so I’ll stop here.
Christopher Shaberg, columnist:
I have been reading my colleague Edward McPherson’s new book Look Out (Astra, October 2025), which is a wonderful collection of insights and observations about, well, insight and observation—or really, sight from afar: “taking the longview,” as the book’s subtitle has it. In this time of cancelled commercial flights, cargo jets falling from the sky, and exponential drone warfare, McPherson’s book offers incisive perspectives and unexpected juxtapositions that query how humans have grasped for the big picture in myriad forms. As AI dominates more and more of our cultural attention (provoking critical stances or through sheer ubiquity), Look Out is a welcome invitation to back up, both in history and geospatially speaking, to reconsider some other technologies and phenomena. These include human flight, the science and boondoggles of space exploration, and remote viewing at all levels—all of which, of course, turn back around into the present, mobius-like, where they end up entangled with AI. McPherson has written a searching book, acutely reflective of this dizzying moment.
Jessica Manack, Engagement Editor:
Art Work: On the Creative Life (Abrams, 2025) By Sally Mann: After enjoying photographer Sally Mann’s 2015 memoir Hold Still, which dealt heavily with her family history, I was excited to hear that a new volume would give further insight into her creative process. Drawing on decades of letters and meticulously-kept Daytimers, Mann looks back on how she was able to create a memorable body of work, while also juggling making a living, tending land, raising children, and grappling with self-doubt. Heavily peppered with photos of the handwritten and typed source material, as well as a number of photographs, this book allows one to indulge their tendency for nebbiness (Pittsburghese for being nosy) while driving home the point that, just like eating your vegetables, the best advice to artists is often to maintain the unsexy routines, to schedule the time for making, and remember that you’ll only rarely strike gold. As a fervent reader of artists’ letters, I lament the fact, that, after the advent of digital communications, such candid deep dives will likely become more and more rare.
Holly Wang, Associate Editor for Excerpts:
Unfortunately, I have not been reading as much as I hoped to. Recently, I have been reading Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, as my “book of rest and relaxation.” Eileen follows a young woman working at a juvenile corrections facility in 1960s New England, living with her alcoholic father and suffocating in the tedium of her hometown. I am still early in the novel, but I’m enjoying the visceral reactions I’ve felt while reading. Moshfegh knows how to make readers feel the movements of their stomach while keeping them unable to look away from the page. I appreciate how all of her characters are somewhat misfits, loners, or outsiders. I think there is charm and wit in all, and characters need not be victims of their world. I also like how autobiographical her novels can be. I recently read a letter Ottessa wrote to President Trump, and in it, she talks about her own life. I can see shadows of her characters in it. Reading her fiction feels like getting a glimpse into her mental landscape. As cliché as it sounds, voyeurism is a motivation for me to read more. I keep feeling like authors are lying to me if the stories are not at least somewhat derived from their own lives. I’m trying to finish Eileen by Thanksgiving!
Asia Thompson, Associate Editor for Interviews:
I’m currently reading Assata Shakur’s work, Assata: An Autobiography. I had heard about her death late last month and remembered that I had a copy of her work sitting on my bookshelf for some time. I’m still reading it, but it’s a profoundly personal autobiography of her time in the 1960s as an activist and as a Black woman. Learning about historical events, especially those as influential and transformative as the 1960s and 70s Civil Rights movements, is essential for understanding them through historical and personal narratives. It can often tell of movements or emotions held by individuals in the present and in the past. Hopefully, after finishing this book, I will start reading other works and autobiographies from the period, from figures like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mason Stockstill, Columnist:
Quan Barry’s 2022 novel When I’m Gone, Look for me in the East had me googling “novels about Buddhism” in an effort to replicate the numinous wonder it brought on while reading, so I rushed to pick up her latest, The Unveiling, upon its publication last month. The subject matter is different, as is the jaded, worldly protagonist, and this time Barry deploys a few more tricks that both delight and confound, to the point that one can’t describe with certainty what it’s actually about. Antarctic tourists surviving the potential end of the world? A pointed satire on 21st century racism? The increasingly unsettling travelogue of a nautical cruise beset by foul spirits? Or an unmedicated schizophrenic’s delirious vision? These narrative frames jostle for purchase, each offering an equally valid window into the plot’s darkening gyre. I don’t know if the last 50 pages will give me an answer, nor if I want them to.
Shelly Shi, Associate Editor for Reviews:
What makes Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness Ohio State University Press important from a rhetorical perspective is how Rand treats language as something that does real work in the world. She demonstrates that rhetorical figuration doesn’t just describe childhood but actually creates vulnerability, limits what young people can do, and supports policies that control their identities and access to information. By focusing on race, she exposes how the idealized image of innocent white childhood relies on dehumanizing youth of color. The book brings together rhetorical studies, queer theory, childhood studies, and critical race studies, showing how analyzing public discourse can reveal the harm hiding in language that claims to be protective. Rand pushes us to see that words don’t just reflect reality—they actively shape the conditions young people live under.
Deya Liao, Multimedia Editor
Recently, I read a book called The Lost Daughters of China by Karin Evans. Bought second-hand off the Chinese history shelf of Amazing Books & Records located in Shadyside, this book immediately piqued my interest as someone who’s interested in Chinese culture, history, and media. Through the years, I’ve heard a lot about China’s one child policy and its disastrous effects in a society predisposed to prefer boys––a preference honed over thousands of years of traditional Confucian values. Evan’s book illustrates her own perspective going through the adoption process to adopt one of these abandoned girls who were unfortunately victim to this policy. Deeply personal and memoir-like, I not only got to read about a mother’s love for her adopted children, but learned so much more about the social phenomenon of why so many families abandoned their daughters at birth.
