Our June 22 issue—the University Press Issue—is online now, with Fara Dabhoiwala on the ingenious index, Ingrid D. Rowland on Guido Reni’s questing soul, Rachel Donadio on Nathalie Sarraute’s sensual eviscerations, Steve Coll on the Taliban’s second emirate, Jessica Riskin on the poisoning of Jane Stanford, Ruth Franklin on Ken Burns’s The US and the Holocaust, Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy’s conversion, Ed Vulliamy on the Native Americans of California, Linda Greenhouse on judging the Rosenbergs, Gregory Hays on our feline friends, poems by Shane McCrae and Fernando Pessoa, and much more.

Gregory Hays
Meow!

Cats refute the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, by living it.

Steve Coll
Who Are the Taliban Now?

Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions.

Catherine Nicholson
Right Busy with Sticks and Spales

The historian Nicholas Orme lets us glimpse what the sixteenth century was like for children.

Rachel Donadio
Escaping Biography

Nathalie Sarraute sought to free the novel from old narrative conventions and refused to admit the relevance of her own experience—as a woman, as a Jew—to her writing.

More to read at nybooks.com

Abby Seiff and Sokummono Khan
How Microloans Betrayed Cambodians

Originally pitched as a way to lift the rural poor out of poverty, microfinance is driving many borrowers deeper into debt.

Free from the Archives

Brigham Young, who, as the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, led the Mormons from Illinois to Salt Lake City in 1847, was born 222 years ago today. In the Review’s November 21, 2002, issue, Caroline Fraser wrote about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, “one of the worst mass murders of civilians in US history,” in which a group of local Mormon leaders and militiamen in south Utah disguised themselves as Paiute Indians and slaughtered more than 120 emigrants in a wagon train traveling from Arkansas to California. “The central question is,” Fraser writes, “what did Brigham Young know, and when did he know it?”

Caroline Fraser
The Mormon Murder Case

“Over the years…, Young told the federal government that Indians committed it, refusing to divulge information about the culpability of those involved. In what [Utah historian Will] Bagley calls an ‘audacious fraud,’ Young, acting as superintendent of the Indians, billed the government for the cost of the emigrants’ looted goods that were distributed to the Paiutes; he protected the killers, delaying their arrest and trial for fifteen years.”