Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever

Recommended Books for February 2026

Author

Josh Cook
February 19, 2026

Hello Readers,

I think one of the reasons we’re in this mess is that political journalism completely abandoned criticism. Rather than putting world events in historic context, making connections that reveal the motives and intents of powerful people, building and rewarding curiosity and intellectual investment, and helping their readers pose questions that do not have easy answers, political journalists (in the big corporate channels at least) have reduced themselves to opinion poll watchers and data explainers in service to a very limited (I’d say totally unrealistic) definition of “objectivity” and an even more detached from reality version of “fairness.” They fundamentally preference facts over wisdom in such way that often neither is communicated. So voters go to the poll armed with mostly vibes to help them decide who to vote for, if they bother to go at all.

I honestly don’t know if the disappearance of criticism in political journalism is related to the disappearance of cultural criticism (though I bet it is!) or if they just happen to share the same cause; consolidation and corporatizing of media. Nor do I know if this is really an attack on criticism or whether criticism is collateral damage in the private equity war on anyone else making a decent fucking living (though if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s a bit of both). But I do know that we are in a moment of potential, where we could see a resurgence of independent media and with it a resurgence of cultural criticism.

So, here are four books of criticism and/or criticism allied or adjacent thinking, both because they are good books filled with interesting ideas and in the hopes of inspiring the creation and publication of more in 2026.

Josh

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YESTERDAY

Is There God After Prince: Dispatches in the Age of Lost Things by Peter Coviello

Peter and I appeared in conversation at the Twin Cities Book Festival in 2023. We’d never met before, but I made sure to read at least some of his essays beforehand and he clearly read my book as well. We just happened to bump into each other at the opening mixer, which was honestly a godsend for me because I find it extremely difficult to break into social events where I don’t already know anyone and can often just inject awkwardness into moments just because of how I awkward I feel. We got dinner and had a great conversation.

We were actually the first event of the day and from an event planning standpoint it was a great choice. As a conversation between a bookseller and a cultural critic about books and culture is a perfect way to set context and establish a tone for a book festival and I have to believe that the people who saw our conversation carried some of the ideas from it with them for the rest of the day. As an author who wanted to sell a bunch of books and recoup the pretty significant cost Biblioasis had fronted for this trip…I would’ve rather put on that show after more people had shown up.

What was clear to me, from his essays, from our conversation over dinner, from our conversation at the festival, is that Coviello cares about what he’s writing about. I know that seems, like, like why would you write about something you don’t care about, but there are ways to write that obscure or at least try to obscure the writer’s emotional connection to the topic. I can see there being a role for that type of distanced or at-one-remove writing, I guess, but I think that stance is more likely to be…I don’t know…covering your ass than anything that helps get at truth. In some ways, the fundamental role of a critic is to help you care about something, both by convincing you to care about it in the first place AND by giving you tools so you are able to care about that book, movie, music, food, work of art, whatever in ways that are rewarding to you. And I think you’ll find that in Coviello’s work.

TODAY

Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2019-2025 by A. S. Hamrah

Hamrah is the film critic for n+1 and he reviews films pretty much exactly how you would expect the film critic for n+1 to review films. (Complimentary.) Though one could describe critics as educators (I certainly essentially do that above) it might be more accurate to think of them as moderators; along with giving people a reason to care about a work of art and some of the skills to enact that caring, critics also provide substance for conversation. In other words, a good critic will give people something to talk about by expressing interesting, even if they are not convincing, ideas.

I don’t think Hamrah is particularly concerned with getting people to agree with his specific take or assessment on a movie, so much has he is concerned with driving a general conversation about film. Perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that is fundamental goal in his reviews is to show people how interesting watching films in theaters really is if they put a little bit of effort into it. I think that specific type of disregard actually drives his aesthetics as his sentences are always interesting, even when he doesn’t believe the movie he’s reviewing is BUT without being one of those mean-spirited take-downs that used to masquerade as criticism.

Honestly, the intro is worth the price of admission. Using how the film industry is changing in response to its executives fantasies rather than what actual movie watchers want, Hamrah hits on a ton of the broader problems with corporate/capitalist culture, expressing ideas that are relevant and applicable to publishing at the very least, but probably all creative industries.

And the book just feels really nice. Like, it’s a really nice object to hold. Which counts for something because we also read with our bodies.

TOMORROW

The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann

Why is it so easy for some people to get away with crime? Why is it so easy for so many of us to accept some crimes and vilify others? How do we change things when the supports for crime and corruptions include…social vibes? Like, how do we argue against, “This man was personally charming to me when we interacted so I did what he wanted me to,” because, like, there is no idea there, no ideology, no argument. (Pausing this construction to note just how many emails were sent to Epstein AFTER he was a convicted sex offender!) What if we could just blame the humidity, how slow it makes us move, how slow it makes us think? Would that be better or worse?

Forty years ago Lemann wasn’t writing about Epstein or Trump, but Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, accused of corruption over contracts for building new hospitals. There are a ton of different ways a journalist could approach an assignment like this, and though Vanity Fair probably had something else in mind, Lemann focused on the social vibes, the personalities, the weather, the atmosphere, all the things that grease the wheels of basically every human system and institution but that are (intentionally or unintentionally) rarely written about. There are facts from the case in the book and Lemann does report from the courtroom, but the overall feel of the book is more about place than events more about atmosphere than actions.

I don’t know if Lemann offers any kind of solution to the problem she is describing, for the myriad ways that power can insinuate itself into the cracks of mundane exchanges, for how our social and communal drives can be weaponized against us, for how hot it can get in New Orleans. I honestly don’t know if there is a “solution” to this problem beyond inoculate yourself against bullshit, but that, of course, is another role of the critic. They use the expertise they’ve developed in their particular field of criticism to let us know when something is complete and total bullshit. Probably another reason why the corporate overloads have tried to erase them.

FOREVER

Slow Technology Reader: A Tool for Shaping Divergent Futures edited by Carolyn F. Strauss

Oh look! More thinking about thinking! Just like I warned you about. I don’t know if this is an American thing, or capitalist thing, or Western thing, or perhaps even masculine/misogynist thing, but there seem to be moments or movements in our scientific and intellectual history defined by an outright rejection of whatever was happening before. So instead of asking why people used this folk remedy for centuries and seeing how the answer to that question might inform new study with new tools and new developments, we just…threw it all out. (Tristram Shandy has a couple of incredible scenes that explore this idea, but that’s for another time.) Of course, I believe we should build new things, find new solutions, seek new answers to old questions and old problems, experiment, take risks, get weird, but I also believe we can do that without acting like everyone who came before was totally fucking ignorant. That relationship to past knowledge helps create the contemporary definition of “innovation,” a restricted and restricting, fetishization of a specific type of invention that actually hinders our ability to make life better for people.

There are hundreds of books that push, pull, and tear against this type of thinking, drawn from a wide array of disciplines and philosophies (Mushroom at the End of the World and Dawn of Everything spring immediately to mind) and approaching the problem from a number of different angles. (Anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism spring immediately to mind). So there are lots of entry points and places to explore.

The Slow Technology Reader, like any good anthology, is trying to collect and arrange that wide scope of ideas into something that can act like a guide. The essays feature big, academic terms, of course, but also explore gardening, annotating as you read, tea, dance and music. Some of the pieces will resonate, some of the them won’t, and odds are you probably won’t read all of them. As you know from where this is in my newsletter, I’m certainly not expecting to. And that might actually fit relatively well into the idea of “slow” at the heart of the anthology anyway. We need to break our…fetishization of accomplishment, our obsession with producing, the binary of success and failure. We need to remember that a book you didn’t finish isn’t always a book that failed you.