Our February issue is online: with Barrett Swanson sober at Bonnaroo; @caitdoherty on the last days of Davos; Justin Nobel in search of his publisher’s radioactive oil waste; @joekloc on the Collatz conjecture; Sam Sacks on John McGahern; a story by @Liamjsm, and more.

“Motherhood is one of this novel’s obsessions, though that’s too overheated a word for it, and ‘themes’ too cold. Call it an entrancing preoccupation, along with language itself.” Dan Piepenbring on Michelle de Kretser’s novel Theory & Practice.

“Were people here really so nonchalant about the presence of world leaders at Eurodisco ski-chalet parties, or did he lack the star power of a middle-aged Arizonan called Stan, around whom all the guests seemed to orbit?” —@caitdoherty

From David Samuels’ 1999 essay “Rock Is Dead,” a personal account of the riot at Woodstock ‘99.

“We were standing in the early morning, the air already thickening with mist, some of which seemed to be rising off the back of the horse.” From Ali Smith’s novel Gliff, which was published this month by Pantheon (@PantheonBooks).

“It is almost as if finding a way to stay alive inside the turnstiles were a dress rehearsal for the burdens of everyday existence.” Barrett Swanson on transcendence and sobriety at Bonnaroo.

From Caitlín Doherty's (@caitdoherty) report on the World Economic Forum.

“Little, Brown has given Waste Wars a bright cover, maybe to telegraph the abundant humor and humanity of Clapp’s prose.” Dan Piepenbring on @alexander_clapp’s Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash (@littlebrown).

“The only premise that most of the headline speakers could agree upon was that the world the WEF had been born into was gone.” Caitlín Doherty (@caitdoherty) on the World Economic Forum.

“Jesse Lombardi, the former bank robber, wondered if KKR had purchased Simon & Schuster simply to kill my book. It was flattering that he would think so.” Justin Nobel’s search for Simon & Schuster’s radioactive oil waste.

“at the end of my chain there are two flightless birds / at the end of the anguished birdcall there is a dying / country at the end of the bullet on my young boy’s chain / I resemble the unkillable” —Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad)

From Barrett Swanson’s essay on attending Bonnaroo, the four-day music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, alongside other sober festival-goers.

I ate too much, drank too much, exercised too much, worked too much—­trying to perfect the self, trying to fill some yawning pit of need.” —@juliebuntin

“The glories of tradition were burdened with sentimentality and nationalism, and McGahern instead proclaimed an affinity for Samuel Beckett, who had emigrated and wrote in French.” Sam Sacks on the beauty of John McGahern’s prose.

“Unlike other notorious, unsolved math problems—­whose solutions could transform everything from online banking to quantum physics—­the Collatz conjecture has no obvious computational or scientific implications.” —Joe Kloc (@joekloc)

From the February Harper’s Index.

“The Democrats today recall the Whigs lacerated by Marx in nineteenth-­century Britain, another liberal party tied to an arrogant economic elite.” —Matthew Karp (@karpmj)

“This kind of disconnection between question and answer, context and content, or simply words and meaning, was one of the most unsettling parts of the Davos experience.” Caitlín Doherty (@caitdoherty) on the World Economic Forum.

“After half a century of class dealignment, it was not exactly a surprise to see another wave of workers abandon the Democratic Party.” —Matthew Karp (@karpmj)

“Theory & Practice is both flinty and sinuous, and it accommodates many messes.” Dan Piepenbring on Michelle de Kretser’s novel Theory & Practice (@CatapultStory).

Reservations, 2024, a painting by Jack Penny, whose work was on view in December at Dan Yoshii, in New York City. © The artist. Courtesy Dan Yoshii, New York City