There is an essential arbitrariness to borders. Whether enforced by walls and fences or through less material means—visa requirements, travel bans—they are always at least partly abstract: imaginary lines. Kapka Kassabova’s travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe explores the spiritual, psychological, and emotional qualities of the area around the shared frontiers of Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, roaming this “back door to Europe” in an effort to find out, up close, what borders do to people, and vice versa. Her book is a deconstruction of the looming, nonspecific anxiety that comes

The most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the “making of millennials,” does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all. “When history teachers talk about government policy decisions, they tend to use the progressive frame: The government improves things over time,” he writes.

While liberals think conservatives slow down or rewind progress, and conservatives are only willing to accept government policy forty or fifty years after its implementation (at which point they want an equal share of the

It’s April 16, and Turkey is voting on a constitutional referendum that may allow its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to drastically increase his powers. It’s the most significant day in the modern history of my country, and I’m watching events unfold on my phone screen in Zagreb, Croatia, where I now live. (Rather than deal with the constant threat of imprisonment or of having my passport confiscated, I chose to get out a few months ago.) In Turkey, the streets are full: People know that this is, in effect, the last chance to prevent a dictatorship.

Already, anyone critical of Erdoğan risks

While reading Trita Parsi’s history of the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, it’s hard not to wonder with horror—at every complicated twist and turn of the proceedings—how Donald Trump would manage a similar ordeal. The sometimes excruciating detail of Parsi’s book reminds us of all the tiny acts of diplomacy—and anti-diplomacy—happening right this very second behind closed doors, ones that could, in the case of Iran, be leading to unnecessary war.

One of the many eye-opening passages in Losing an Enemy comes midway through the book, when the Americans and the Iranians are still floundering for

For most of us, money seems like the realest thing there is. It dictates what we eat, where we live, and how long we stay alive at all. Worse still, it seems there’s never enough of it to go around. But what is money, exactly? Where does it come from, and who controls how it’s made, spent, lent, disbursed, and denominated?

In The Production of Money, political economist Ann Pettifor sets out to answer these questions and to examine how politics and class interests contribute to widely held assumptions about how money works. She emphasizes an obvious but frequently overlooked point: Money is