Our 10/22 issue is now online, with @gavinfranc on musclemen, @carolinefraser on hobos, Ben Tarnoff on AI oligarchs, Alan Hollinghurst on Peter Hujar, @aucoincomposer on Philip Glass, Catherine Nicholson on ye olde VDs, a poem by Ben Lerner, and much more. go.nybooks.com/4yJ283z

“Wallace Shawn’s characters have become more and more adept—stunningly casual in their ability to make explicit what is usually never explicit, with an unbearable clarity about hidden motives.” —Adam Thirlwell go.nybooks.com/48ar5cd

Amur tigers are “so elusive that even humans living in their territory may go all their lives without glimpsing more than a trail of pugmarks in the snow.” —Colin Thubron go.nybooks.com/4zQeV3Z

“When it comes down to it,” Silicon Valley has “always been motivated by the desire to amass as much money as possible; democracy is just an impediment.” —Sue Halpern go.nybooks.com/4Bl9vzG

“If Thomas Bernhard perfected, in his novels, the obsessive redundancy of human consciousness, Claire-Louise Bennett captures this circularity at its most comically banal.” —Meghan O’Gieblyn go.nybooks.com/4BagNpL

On Tuesday, join Ben Rhodes (@brhodes), Astra Taylor (@astradisastra), and Fintan O’Toole (@fotoole) for the first of a two-part online series on the midterm elections. Registration is pay-what-you-wish and open to the public. go.nybooks.com/47Kg2GD

“The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is perhaps the greatest chronicler of that era of scale, which stretched across the long twentieth century and only now shows the first signs of receding.” —@billmckibben go.nybooks.com/4eRVtvJ

“New York City, as photographed by Baldwin Lee in the latter half of the 1970s, looks as immemorially still as cities do in photographs made over a century earlier.” —Joel Smit go.nybooks.com/4idQEh5

“The easy pleasure of [Emily Mae Smith’s] fantastical scenes may get you in the door, but the real point is in the way they’re rendered—the depth, the tones, the shimmer.” —Will Heinrich go.nybooks.com/47u5Jq3

A century apart, socialists in America struggle to answer the same question: “How can working Americans be persuaded to express solidarity with their fellow toilers in the US and around the world?” —Michael Kazin go.nybooks.com/4z0dLmQ

“Making China’s irreversible subordination the goal [of American-led AI regulations] gives Beijing every reason to suspect that any offer of restraint is a demand for surrender.” —Julian Gewirtz go.nybooks.com/4yqosOa

“The siege is now the lengthiest in modern history: more than twenty times longer than Stalingrad’s, three times longer than Sarajevo’s, longer than even the siege of Troy by more than a year.” —Nicolas Niarchos go.nybooks.com/4ioflsu

“Signally missing from these portraits of George Sand, the biographies as well as the biopics, is much sense of her significance as one of the most critically influential and commercially successful writers of the nineteenth century.” —Kathryn Hughes go.nybooks.com/4stYxUE

Colin Thubron on the vanishing great cats go.nybooks.com/4zc6u3o

Adam Thirlwell on Wallace Shawn’s guilty pleasures go.nybooks.com/4i46tIF

“The magic of Vermeer resides in the paintings—their peculiar way of being at once sociable and silent, of making the fall of light feel both transcendent and palpable.” —Susan Tallman go.nybooks.com/4dZ3QFA

“The stories aren’t meant merely as excuses to relive that heady moment or as exercises in historical revisionism but rather as new vantage points from which to see our post–cold war world.” —Ian Johnson on a play about 1989 around the world go.nybooks.com/4i51KVQ

La Bola Negra is “hardly what we expect in a film about the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It says more, perhaps, about the period in which it was made than it does about the past.” —Colm Tóibín go.nybooks.com/4s79hI6

“The rollback of child labor protections in Arkansas,” writes Alice Driver, “reflected a broader, increasingly politicized national campaign to...redefine the limits of hazardous and dangerous work for children.” go.nybooks.com/4zxm2OF