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Our May 25 issue is online now, with Michael Hofmann on Goethe’s last years, Jerome Groopman on the business of biotech, Joan Acocella on Balanchine, Jed S. Rakoff on William O. Douglas’s environmentalism, Adam Hochschild on 1619 and 1776, Willa Glickman on grassroots labor unions, Brenda Wineapple on Susanna Moore, Ian Johnson on art looters, Jenny Uglow on Samuel Pepys and the wreck of the HMS Gloucester, Nicholas Guyatt on financing the Civil War, Elaine Blair on how we talk about sexual assault, poems by Eugene Ostashevsky, D. Nurske, and Ama Codjoe, and much more.

Jerome Groopman
Saving Lives and
Making a Killing

A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.

Daisy Hildyard
Seeing Through It All

In Sara Baume’s novel Seven Steeples, two people and two dogs retreat to a rural cottage while the novel itself experiments with a nonhuman narrative voice.

Ian Johnson
Loot Under the Lindens

The museums in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum fall short in their efforts to explain that many of the objects on display were plundered.

Jenny Uglow
Shifting Sands

Who was responsible for the wrecking of the Royal Navy warship Gloucester in 1682, and why did it provoke so much political controversy?

More to read at nybooks.com

Andrew Martin
Every Man His Own Hipster

A new production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window retains the play’s sense of imperfect community and teeming life.

Free from the Archives

Forty years ago, President Ronald Reagan announced a plan to develop an elaborate defense system—consisting of lasers, satellites, particle beams, and a variety of sensors—to protect the United States from ballistic strategic nuclear weapons. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” as it came to be known after Ted Kennedy scorned Reagan’s “reckless Star Wars schemes,” was met with more than a little skepticism from the scientific community. In 1984 a panel from the Union of Concerned Scientists—including Carl Sagan and Hans A. Bethe, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics—published an extensive report, excerpted in The New York Review of Books’s April 26 issue, calling for Star Wars to be canceled.

The Union of Concerned Scientists
Reagan’s Star Wars

“If we get through this hazardous passage, will we have reached the promised land where nuclear weapons are ‘impotent and obsolete’? Obviously not. We would then have a defense of stupefying complexity, under the total control of a computer program whose proportions defy description, and whose performance will remain a deep mystery until the tragic moment when it would be called into action.”