New Yorker Briefly Noted: Andersen's Satire, White's Dublin Debut, Beatley on Feminism, Kirsch on Aliens

The New Yorker's Briefly Noted section reviews four recent books. Kurt Andersen's comic novel 'The Breakup' (Random House) is set in 2045, imagining a US split by civil war between liberals and a MAGA-like rebel group, resulting in the Free American Republic and the remaining US. The story follows separated couple Natalie and Asher as they tour colleges with their child Logan in both territories, with their disunion mirroring the country's ideological divide. Djamel White's debut novel 'All Them Dogs' (Riverhead) follows Tony Ward, a Dublin man returning after five years on the run for killing a rival gang member, now seeking protection with another outfit while battling internal conflicts. Meaghan Beatley's 'Sex and Dissent' (Penguin) is a reported work on feminist movements in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, profiling women protesting abortion restrictions, sexual assault, and femicide, and examining how cultural contexts, including influences from twentieth-century military dictatorships, shape their organizing. Adam Kirsch's 'We Want to Believe' (Columbia Global Reports) argues that the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life decreases the probability of finding it, suggesting that public belief in aliens parallels the decline of traditional religious vocabularies, framing our search as 'humanity's evolving self-portrait.'