Perfection follows Tom and Anna, two “creative professionals” who, in their twenties, circa 2010, depart their unnamed Southern European hometown to join the rapidly growing expat community in Berlin. Their life of gallery visits, late-night raves, and Saturday afternoons lounging in the park — as curated for Instagram — looks picturesque. But as the couple ages through the decade, their social circle shrinks, wealthier West Germans and Americans begin to overtake the city, and the sense of cosmopolitan possibility offered by remote work and the digital nomad lifestyle curdle into something stultifying and claustrophobic. An often acerbic satire written entirely without dialogue, Perfection is a simultaneously breezy and unsettling look at millennial aspiration and aging in the era of globalization and the smartphone.

Empire of AI begins with a blow-by-blow account of the power struggle between Sam Altman and Elon Musk over the future of OpenAI, the company they cofounded. Hao shows how the vision of AI that emerged once the dust settled focused solely on improving the quality of the technology through “scaling,” continuously increasing the amount of data to which companies had access. Cutting through the hype, Hao reveals that AI relies on a vast army of poorly paid “click workers,” predominantly in the Global South, who sort through and categorize millions of images and lines of text to train models. On top of this, the neighborhood-size data centers on which AI companies rely consume massive quantities of water and have caused droughts in the regions where they have been constructed. For anyone unconvinced by the self-serving claims that AI will save humanity, Karen Hao’s book is indispensable.

In 2013, Branko Milanović and his fellow economist Christoph Lakner produced a graph that went viral. The “Elephant Graph” showed that the middle class in East Asia (mainly China) and the global 1 percent were the biggest winners from globalization; the middle class in the developed world, who formed the dip before the elephant’s upturned trunk, were the biggest losers. The Great Global Transformation argues that politics in America, China, and Russia — but also much of the rest of the world — is fundamentally shaped by this pattern. Around the world, politicians from Donald Trump to Xi Jinping are attempting to respond to a deep hostility in their respective countries toward those who have benefited most from globalization. Milanović’s provocative book offers one of the best explanations for why this revolt lies behind the rise of illiberalism and the return of nationalism.

Daring to Be Free is Sudhir Hazareesingh’s second book-length reinterpretation of the politics and history of slavery. While his 2020 Black Spartacus showed how the Haitian revolt and its leader, Toussaint Louverture, drew inspiration from African traditions of revolt against slavery, Daring to Be Free uses this same frame to examine rebellions in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. Hazareesingh doesn’t set out to claim that these revolts were responsible for the abolition of slavery, but rather that they explain the culture and politics that emerged in its wake, in much the same way that the French Resistance shaped postwar France. Almost every page is littered with fascinating facts or new ways of thinking about history and the world.

Ten years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was elected as head of Britain’s Labour Party, making him the most left-wing leader in its history. Paul Holden’s The Fraud sets out to explain, in painstaking detail, how a plot led by the right of the party worked to undermine Corbyn’s leadership and force him from power. For many, Holden’s insights will be maddening. But his book offers lessons to anyone on the Left thinking seriously about state power, because it shows the challenges a socialist project will face if it comes as close to government as Corbyn did.

How did Donald Trump, a figure disdained by much of corporate America, come to dominate the traditional party of business? In Rogue Elephant, Jacobin contributor Paul Heideman argues that the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party was the product of two important developments in the late twentieth-century United States: first, the increasing disorganization of the capitalist class, which found itself less capable of coordinated political action after successfully neutralizing the labor movement in the neoliberal era; and second, the hollowing out of the GOP’s internal organization, which left the party ever more vulnerable to capture by extreme ideological factions and savvy political entrepreneurs. This book is essential reading for all who want to understand what’s happening with the American right.

A thirty-year-old adjunct professor of writing — named, like the author, Sebastian Castillo — has spent the last year under a vow of silence, dedicating himself to sculpting his physique. One of Sebastian’s college professors invites him to a New Year’s Eve party that, he is led to believe, his longtime (and newly single) crush from his undergraduate days will be attending. The invitation provokes Sebastian into nostalgic reminiscence, romantic fantasy, and reflections on the nature of philosophy, literature, and academia — and then, on the night of the party itself, the narrator’s pretensions collide hilariously with reality. Fresh, Green Life is a darkly funny and occasionally poignant novel about the perils of “the life of the mind” that you could read in a couple afternoons.

Keith Michael Barker’s nine-hundred-page biography of Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist turned revolutionary who went on to orchestrate the Terror, is both a fascinating character study and a sweeping history of the period. Barker’s achievement is to show how a combination of resentment, petty grievance, and the radical mood of the cosmopolitan world of the late eighteenth century came together in Marat to form a deeply paranoid, conspiratorial man. Barker’s is a perfect bedside book for anyone wanting to understand the origins of Jacobinism and to make sense of one of its most fascinating figures.

At the Munich Security Conference in May of this year, J. D. Vance warned a group of European heads of state that their refusal to allow right-wing parties to govern threatened the future of the “West.” This outburst prompted soul-searching and led the conference’s chairman to cry onstage — but it wasn’t clear what Vance or his critics even meant by the West. Georgios Varouxakis’s history of the term offers an illuminating answer to this question. Rather than being a byword for a culture of individualism, democracy, and liberalism, the Occident has often been defined exclusively as the “elite of humanity,” or oppositionally in relation to Russia or other Slavic nations. Today, as talk of the West is once again resurgent, Varouxakis’s book offers the best guide to understanding the meaning of this deeply elusive idea.