From buzzy novels to literary biographies, Vox’s book critic breaks down the year in reading.
Every year, I recommend the best books out of the hundreds that have crossed my desk in my work as Vox’s book critic. These are the books I can’t stop thinking about months after I’ve read them, the books I’ve pressed on my friends along with demands that they tell me all their thoughts and especially let me know if they burst out laughing/burst into tears/threw the book across the room at that one part.
I’ve already recommended the best books from the first half of the year. These are the books that wowed me in the second half of the year, when publishers rush to release their most exciting novels and buzziest memoirs for the one-two punch of the National Book Awards and the holiday book tables.
In this batch: An action-packed allegory of the failures of America’s prison system. A philosophical literary biography about the paradoxes of marriage. A surprising amount of excellent historical fiction, a trend I’m choosing to blame on Hilary Mantel. Domestic novels and satire and an extended tribute to Nabokov.
Let’s get into it. In no order but alphabetical, here are the 13 best books from the second half of 2023.
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Penguin Random House
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Imagine a version of The Hunger Games with the original’s alchemical combination of scathing social criticism and adrenaline-pumping action. Now fix its biggest flaws by adding to the mix beautiful sentences and coherent racial politics. You have just created a near-perfect book. You have also invented Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars.
Chain-Gang All-Stars takes place in a near-future US where prisoners have the option of leaving jail to fight to the death in nationally televised gladiatorial games. If they live through three years on the circuit, the prisoners are free, sentence served. Almost no one ever lives that long.
Across three acts in this taut novel, Adjei-Brenyah kaleidoscopes into the minds of people at all levels of complicity and victimization from the Chain-Gang All-Stars fights. A white spectator goes from justifying her fascination with the games as cultural anthropology to rooting for the villains to get their throats cut. A prisoner tortured in solitary confinement opts for the circuit over another day at the mercy of his brutal guards. A board member working for a private prison company strategizes the best way to increase audience investment in the games. And two veteran fighters struggle to find love and forgiveness within their brutal, bloody world.
Glossing the text with periodic footnotes, Adjei-Brenyah makes it clear that the atrocities of his world are only slightly removed from the atrocities of our own. His most admirable characters declare that they are opposed not just to the Chain-Gang All-Stars fights but to the whole system: the games, the death penalty, and the prisons themselves. They dare us to ask whether we can be so brave.
Read alongside: The Hunger Games,The New Jim Crow, Are Prisons Obsolete?
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New York Review of Books
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
Loved and Missed, the seventh book by UK author Susie Boyt and her first to be published in the US, is a deceptively simple novel. On a first read through, this tale of a grandmother building a life with her granddaughter is so charming that you almost don’t notice how technically difficult the book is. It is hard to write a book that is warm without being sentimental. Yet Loved and Missed is full of heart but never saccharine; it is warm, and it shows you the effort and strain it takes to become so warm.
Ruth, prone to sardonic observations yet also deeply earnest, is the narrator of this slight book. She’s a part-time schoolteacher and a single mother. At school she is a triumph — her students have been known to call her “Mum” — but her own daughter, Eleanor, ran away from home at 15. As the novel opens, the pair are partially estranged, and Eleanor is addicted to drugs. Ruth, desperate to care for someone who will have to love her back and certain that Eleanor is incapable of caring for anyone, more or less kidnaps Eleanor’s daughter, Lily, to come and live with her.
The domestic routine between Ruth and Lily fills this novel with its pleasing cozy rhythms. “It was so civilized,” Ruth marvels, recounting the ritual of their days. “The evenings settled on us gently and we read our books side by side on the sofa, a saucer of biscuits balanced on a cushion, until six, when we put the television on.” The pleasure of this small-scale household bliss is all the more intense because we know how hard-won it is, and how easily it can be disrupted.
Read accompanied by: very hot toast sliced very thin, butter and marmalade dripping off the sides, and a pot full of good strong tea ready next to it.
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Milkweed Editions
The Last Language by Jennifer duBois
In 2014 and 2015, a startling court case gripped the nation. Anna Stubblefield, a professor of ethics at Rutgers, was accused of raping a nonverbal man named D.J., who had a developmental disability. Stubblefield argued that D.J., who had cerebral palsy, consented to everything that had happened and that they were in love. They had communicated, she explained, through a speech therapy method called facilitated communication, in which she held D.J.’s arm to steady it and he typed on a keyboard.
Stubblefield said D.J. was brilliant and that facilitated communication had unleashed his true self. Skeptics said facilitated communication wasn’t real, that it was barely more than a Ouija board party game. The court found D.J. legally incapable of either communication or consent and Stubblefield guilty of rape. In the end, she served 22 months in jail.
In The Last Language, Jennifer duBois uses the story of Stubblefield and D.J. as the basis for a fictional, Lolita-inflected story, and the results are sharp enough to cut. Here, Angela is a Harvard-educated linguist who ends up working as a facilitated communication speech therapist out of sheer desperation for a job. She’s in a rough spot: In rapid succession, her husband died by suicide, she was kicked out of her graduate program, and then she miscarried. (This beginning, Angela notes, “casts me as an extremely sympathetic figure.”)
At first it’s enough for Angela that she’s managed to find an employer willing to hire someone with a master’s in linguistics. But then, she meets a patient, Sam, determines that he is a savant, and falls in love with him.
“I see how it all looks,” Angela admits. She’s a crafty and Nabokovian narrator, fond of linguistic games and literary references. As she walks us through what she continues to insist is a love story, it remains a mystery how much of what she’s saying even she believes to be true.
Read if you: are a sucker for an unreliable narrator and have opinions on linguistic determinism.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle
In this richly compelling biography of George Eliot, philosophy professor Clare Carlisle builds her story around the issue that gave Eliot both her life and her scandal: marriage. It’s a surprisingly effective organizing principle.
Eliot famously spent most of her life living with George Henry Lewes, a man she called her husband but to whom she was not legally married. (Lewes’s first wife was still alive.) Their partnership scandalized polite Victorian society and cost Eliot some of her dearest friendships. Eliot demanded to be known socially as Mrs. Lewes; her acquaintances only sometimes acquiesced.
Meanwhile, Eliot’s books are haunted by the specter of marriage gone wrong. The most devastating portrait arrives in Middlemarch, in which blazingly idealistic teenager Dorothea marries herself off to dry, dull, middle-aged Casaubon under the mistaken apprehension that he is a great man. It’s an awful moment to read, which is why Middlemarch is a great book.
Carlisle argues that marriage is one of the great philosophical problems of modern life: “that leap into the open-endedness of another human being.” For her, Eliot is a brilliant investigator of that problem, one who “pursued her marriage question with the tenacity of a great philosopher, as well as the delicacy of a great artist.”
Eliot sacrificed her reputation for a marriage. She publicly performed her scandalous marriage as a union of near-religious bliss. She wrote great novels of marriage as a destroyer of dreams. This lovely, rigorous biography explores all Eliot’s contradictions to bring her to life, both in her cramped, anxious human mind and in her expansive literary genius.
Read alongside: Middlemarch, of course. It’s always a good time to read Middlemarch.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner
Somewhere between a memoir and a commonplace book, The Upstairs Delicatessen is a sweet and witty ode to two of life’s great pleasures. (Three, if you consider reading while eating to be sensually distinct from reading and eating on their own.) New York Times book critic Dwight Garner is in full raconteur mode as he talks through his life in food and books, liberally salt-and-peppering the pages with his favorite quotes about food.
Garner describes himself as a kind of omnivore of both food and words from his earliest days. Every day after school, he writes, he would “gather an armload of newspapers and magazines and library books and paperback novels,” then pile a plate with sandwiches and potato chips and pretzels and cookies, not neglecting a glass of cold red juice (from powder) and a glass of milk for the cookies. He’d fling the reading material onto the living room floor and read on his stomach. “I’d tattoo the pages with greasy fingerprints,” Garner writes. Don’t you want to flop down on the floor yourself with a big snacking plate and an absorbing book and join him?
Read accompanied by: a dry martini and richly buttered anchovy toast.
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MCD
Menewood by Nicola Griffith
A friend recommended Nicola Griffith’s Hild trilogy, about the life of seventh-century British St. Hilda of Whitby, as being a cross between Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna quartet. She’s entirely right: The Hild books marry the detailed historical past of Wolf Hall, all smelly wool and oiled knife blades, with the joyous feminine coming of age of the Alanna books.
Menewood, this fall’s release, is the second in a planned trilogy; the first volume, Hild, came out in 2013. Both follow Hild, our heroine, a political operator in the body of a very young girl. In volume one, Hild’s mother presents her to the king as a seer, and Hild, drawing on her ability to read people and animals in ways others cannot, pulls off the scam. She’s 3 as the book opens and 7 years old when she makes her debut in the royal court. Over the next 11 years, she develops into a fearsome kingmaker within the political landscape of early Britain.
Menewood, which picks up shortly after the queasy, unsettling ending of Hild, is a more compressed and more traumatic novel. It covers a bare four years of Hild’s life, with a war at either end. Most compelling, though, is the central third of the novel, which Griffith gives over to the process of restoration. Hild’s unindustrialized country must rebuild itself and its infrastructure after the massive destruction of war, and she must rebuild herself after enormous personal tragedy. The results are redemptive, absorbing, and deeply satisfying.
Read equipped with: a notepad and pen to help you keep track of the many identical-sounding medieval names, so you can tell Oswald from Osric.
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Riverhead Books
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
There’s a stark purity to The Vaster Wilds that makes it stand out from the other books I’ve read this year, a viciousness and a precision of language that isn’t quite like anything in the other books on this list.
The Vaster Wilds tells the story of an unnamed girl fleeing the Jamestown colony in the midst of the Starving Time. Outside the walls of the settlement is winter wilderness, but the girl, who possesses a scrappy survivor’s cunning, has determined that her odds are better outside than in. The result is a girl-versus-nature story that’s all the more compelling for being so unforgiving.
Read if you: still think you could probably survive in a hollow tree trunk for a few years à la My Side of the Mountain.
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Riverhead Books
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a shaggy-dog tale, a deeply charming yarn of a book that ambles its way slowly from tales of two-bit vaudeville theaters to horrific murders. At its core, it’s a novel of solidarity between the Black and Jewish communities of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s.
Moshe Ludlow owns the local dance hall, which mostly plays Black musical acts because they’re the most popular. His wife, Chona, runs the titular Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. The dance hall more or less subsidizes the store, which keeps losing money because Chona lets poor neighbors shop on credit and never collects. At their neighbors’ behest, the pair agree to take in and hide an orphaned deaf Black child named Dodo, whom the state has threatened to place in a dangerous mental asylum.
The great pleasure of this book is watching McBride swing between the patterns of Jewish American and Black American speech with an easy, virtuosic rhythm. This is a voicey novel in the truest sense of the term, and a pure joy from start to finish.
Read alongside: Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century.
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Henry Holt & Company
The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
Hanna Pylväinen’s The End of Drum-Time deals with a 19th-century preacher’s daughter who ruins her reputation because she is in love with an animal herder, like something out of a lost Hardy novel. But this preacher’s daughter lives in the tiny village of Garasavvon, along the borders of Finland and the federated powers of Sweden and Norway, and the man she is in love with is a Samí reindeer herder.
The Samí are the native people of Sápmi, historically known in English as Lapland. Their economy and social structures are all built around reindeer: keeping them, tending them, following their migrations. Yet as the nationalist powers of Scandinavia keep redrawing their political boundaries, the reindeer migration is becoming an ever-more perilous expedition — as that heartsore preacher’s daughter is soon to learn.
Pylväinen’s prose is rich with physical detail. You can smell the grass with which the Samí stuff their reindeer-hide shoes and see the ghostly twilight of a land where the sun never quite sets in the summer. Most of all, her sparse, precise sentences are as beautiful and merciless as the snow itself.
Read somewhere close to: a sauna and cold plunge, so you can warm up and cool down with the Samí.
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Penguin Press
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
In this year of historical novels, Zadie Smith has written a historical novel about why books in this genre are so often very bad. The Fraud takes place primarily in the house of one William Ainsworth, a Victorian author who spends most of his career writing sentimental romances in tin-eared dialect.
Early in his career, Ainsworth attempts a contemporary novel. When it is pronounced morally corrupting, he flees, ”off into the distant, storied past — where he felt safest — or up and away into the ether, the supernatural, where nothing is real and nothing matters.” The novels that result are torpid and dull, but they also make a great deal of money.
It’s the money that’s of chief importance to Smith’s protagonist, Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth’s cousin and housekeeper. Touchet watches Ainsworth work with a sardonic eye, quietly convinced that all novels are morally suspect. She , meanwhile, becomes enmeshed in a tabloid case of the era and the racial politics that have set Victorian London ablaze. Smith’s historical novel, it’s clear, takes place in a world where a great deal is real, and all of it matters today.
Read accompanied by: a cappuccino and a scone that you can eat slowly, mouthful by mouthful, crunching the sugar grains on top of the pastry between your teeth, over the course of an hour as you read.
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Little, Brown and Company
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto
Helen, the narrator of Julius Taranto’s witty and provocative new novel How I Won a Nobel Prize, doesn’t consider herself a natural for the Rubin Institute Plymouth, also known as RIP, also known as Cancel U, also known as Rape Island. Built on a fictional island off the coast of New Haven, the Rubin Institute is a university that specializes in hiring the canceled. Helen’s just a physics grad student who wants to solve climate change.
All the professors at Rubin were fired from their home institutions for sexual harassment, except for the ones that were fired for racism. R. Kelly shows up for soirees where the caterers serve “ostentatiously problematic meat: foie gras, roast suckling pig, octopus, horse.” The whole thing is funded by an anti-woke billionaire who’s committed to giving the students free tuition, as long as they sign a detailed waiver.
Helen finds herself stuck there after her adviser, the only person alive who can understand her research, accepts a job on the faculty. She’s sure that if she just keeps her head down and focuses on her research, she’ll be fine, but things don’t quite work out that easily. Some of Taranto’s most insightful passages come as we see Helen finding herself drawn toward a Philip Roth–like canceled author. Taranto understands the appeal of bad-man geniuses, and he understands their dangers, too. Not for nothing: This book is funny as heck.
Read if you: are tired of reading Woody Allen think pieces.
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Harry N. Abrams
Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas
Idlewild is about one of those high school friendships that is all-consuming, that takes over your whole personality and sense of self. Faye and Nell are theater kids at a tony Quaker school in Manhattan in 2002. Nell is the only out lesbian at school; Faye spends her English classes pointing out homosexual subtext in the assigned reading.
They write torrid fanfiction together over AOL Instant Messenger and speculate over which of their classmates is secretly gay. Both of them consider Faye to be the boss, partially because Nell is in unrequited love with her. Faye herself is only interested in the prospect of beautiful evil gay men, but not, exactly, because she wants to have sex with them.
In 2002, Faye and Nell call themselves “we, the F&N unit,” and narrate their days in the second person plural. In 2018, they recall their friendship from separate perspectives as though they’re looking back on a murder. In a way, they are: They’re telling us the story of how they killed their friendship.
Author James Frankie Thomas has said that he sees Idlewild as a novel in conversation with The Secret History and The Talented Mr. Ripley and A Little Life: novels that are widely read by writers “with an attraction to trans masculinity and gay trans masculinity in particular.” The connection is there. Idlewild has a similar aesthetic sensibility to those novels, a nostalgia for a past that was always corrupted, a kind of lushness to the atmosphere that is heavy with unspoken yearnings. When Thomas at last allows his characters to speak those yearnings aloud, the results will break your heart.
Read accompanied by: the most luscious slice of cheesecake you can find.
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W. W. Norton & Company
This Is Salvaged: Stories by Vauhini Vara
Vauhini Vara was a Pulitzer finalist for her first novel, The Immortal King Rao. In This Is Salvaged, a short story collection, she returns to the themes of grief and alienation that made that book sing.
Vara’s characters are mourning: the loss of a sister, a brother, a pregnancy, a mother, a job, a marriage. In the title story, an artist running out on his marriage attempts to build a replica of Noah’s Ark, with unhoused men doing the labor. Another story sees a teen girl mourning her brother’s death trying to get a job at a phone sex line. In another, a disgraced alcoholic lawyer tries to hide a pile of vomit from her visiting family.
What’s perhaps most compelling in this book is how physical grief is — it smells. These characters keep finding forgotten egg rolls and apple cores lost in their homes, or building balls of dead skin out of their frustration and rage. You can smell the rot in them. Always, though, there is a possibility of redemption, a glimpse of something human and warm to air out the stale air that grief has brought.
Read if you like: complicated endings, characters with bad habits, stories with some spike.
In Central Mexico’s forests, armed community members defend an iconic butterfly from cartel-backed logging.
This story is part of a Vox series examining how the climate crisis is impacting communities around the world, as the 28th annual United Nations conference on climate change (COP28) unfolds.
Every winter, northwest of Mexico City, the branches of the Oyamel fir trees ignite in orange, colored by the wings of monarch butterflies that have made the epic journey south from Canada and the United States.
The forest is home to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, created by presidential decree in 1986 and designated as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2008. The reserve shelters nearly 90 percent of the region’s over-wintering monarch butterfly population.
Despite the fact that the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve is internationally protected, decades of degradation of the forest have posed an existential threat to this fragile ecosystem. Over the past four decades, the number of winter roosting sites for the butterflies in the reserve has fallen by over 50 percent, driven in part by illegal logging.
After researchers found that 10 percent of total canopy cover had been lost between 2001 and 2012, the Mexican government ramped up enforcement of laws prohibiting logging. Government raids on illegal sawmills in the reserve sharply reduced logging. Yet according to an analysis by the World Wildlife Fund, the rate of forest degradation in the reserve tripled in 2022.
To protect these forests — one of the few remaining wintering refuges for migrating monarchs — the local Mazahua Indigenous community in Crescencio Morales has established its own security force.
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Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Guardia comunales, or communal security units, historically operate independently from the state and federal governments, which the community says fail to prevent illegal logging in the reserve. These forces are made up of regular members of the community. Earlier this year, I visited a new base the community was building, alongside rows of high-performance pickup trucks used to navigate the difficult forest terrain, where illegal loggers often hide. Guardia comunal fighters wore military fatigues and carried lightweight semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles.
As these self-described forest defenders from Crescensio Morales fight to protect the monarch butterfly’s refuge, Indigenous leaders took the global stage at the United Nations annual climate change summit in Dubai to wage this battle on a second front: to convince world leaders to recognize the dangers environmental land defenders, particularly in Latin America, face and to build stronger mechanisms to support them.
During the COP28 summit in Dubai this month, María José Andrade Cerda, an Indigenous young woman from the Kichwa community of Serena in Ecuador, spoke. She is a member of the Yuturi Warmi, the first Indigenous and female-led land-defense group in the Napo province in the Ecuadorian Amazon. “As Indigenous Peoples, we call on COP28 and on each and every one of you to do your bit (or as we say, contribute your grain of corn) toward the sustainable use and management, and conservation of natural and cultural resources,” said Cerda. “We call on world leaders to recognize and respect our rights and our territories — to guarantee the full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples in ongoing negotiations, and direct access to adequate financial resources.”
Around the world, environmental activists face increasing violence
As their weapons indicate, the world’s environmental defenders need defending. Every day, the councils of Crescencio Morales’ guardia comunales work in shifts, patrolling their community as well as the boundary of the Monarch Biosphere Reserve. They say they are threatened by sicarios, cartel hitmen, who also benefit from the illegal trade, and are allied with clandestine loggers who camp in the surrounding forests. The guardia comunales run well-armed patrols through their territories to prevent the sicarios from expanding their territories and cutting down the precious Oyamel fir trees.
These conflicts put environmental activists at great risk. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promised to stop such violence, but the country remains among the world’s deadliest for those defending its pristine ecosystems. In January 2020, the body of the anti-logging activist and monarch butterfly defender Homero Gómez Gonzalez was found in a community near Crescencio. Activists suspect his death was connected to illegal logging disputes, the Guardian reported.
The pressures that Mexico’s Indigenous activists face are emblematic of similar conflicts arising globally. Communities like Crescencio Morales are on the front lines of a battle to protect their local environment from a mounting scramble for natural resources, amplified by corruption.
Members of Crescencio Morales’s community told me that in addition to fighting the illegal loggers, they also protect their forested mountains from mining companies seeking to extract gold, silver, and copper — minerals now in high demand as the world transitions to clean energy technologies.
Land defenders around the world — in countries including Mexico, Brazil, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Philippines — face increasing violence as they defend their territories, according to Global Witness, an accountability nonprofit that studies the link between natural resources, conflict, and corruption. A 2023 investigation by the organization found that nearly 2,000 activists have been killed over the last decade for their efforts to protect the planet, many of them from Indigenous communities trying to preserve their ecological heritage.
The majority of recorded killings of land defenders in 2022 took place in Latin America, making the continent perhaps the most dangerous place for environmental defense.
Indigenous lands include some of the planet’s most threatened landscapes
The Mexican constitution protects the right of Indigenous communities’ self-determination — which, among other forms of sovereignty, allows them to govern their land communally. In 2023, more than 50 percent of Mexico’s land fell under these legal regimes, termed tierra comunal or tierra ejidal — which roughly translates to communal land. This, according to a study by the Rights and Resources Initiative, is the highest percentage of land collectively owned by Indigenous and local communities of any country in the Americas.
This unique aspect of Mexican Indigenous heritage means that broad swaths of land in Mexico remain protected. Yet mounting effects from climate change as well as political and economic pressures mean that some of Mexico’s Indigenous communities have been forced to block highways in protest and appeal for help to protect themselves, their communities, their ecosystems, and their way of life.
Mexico’s unique legal regime is especially important for Crescencio Morales because it offers communities in the area, with deep historical and cultural ties to the monarch butterflies, the legal authority to protect the reserve. But the law can only do so much to protect the refuge and its migrating butterflies from illegal logging pressure.
To prevent destruction of the Monarch Biosphere Reserve, Indigenous activists have taken their security and that of the butterflies’ precious trees into their own hands. When I visited Crescencio Morales earlier this year, I walked with a community policeman named Aurelio during an armed patrol along his community’s border. (We are withholding his identity and using a pseudonym to protect him from being targeted by local violence.) At the summit of one of the hills surrounding the community, Aurelio told me Crescencio Morales had been forced to arm itself to protect its people, butterflies, and forests.
The security situation in towns such as Crescencio Morales is complex. According to other community leaders I spoke with this year, who wished to remain anonymous due to security risks, the locals did not trust the army or the state police, which they often suspected of cutting business deals with the cartels. Armed security volunteers who protected the community from taladores, the illegal loggers, patrolled their town in pickup trucks.
These hyperlocal battles — on highways and in open warfare by the guardias comunales — have larger stakes: Mexican Indigenous environmental activists are defending landscapes that have implications for global biodiversity. Without their efforts, environmentalists fear systemic deforestation from illegal logging, which would not only destroy habitat for vulnerable species but also increase the greenhouse gas emissions that further drive climate change. And without the preservation of the Crescencio Morales Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, an important chain in a migration that connects ecosystems from Canada to Mexico would be severed.
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Carlos Tischler/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Indigenous leaders call for direct financial support at UN climate summit
Much of the planet depends on the protection provided by these Indigenous groups. Eighty percent of Earth’s biodiversity lies within Indigenous lands, which includes nearly 40 percent of the world’s remaining, intact forests. Yet Indigenous people and local communities receive less than 1 percent of global funding for climate and biodiversity and often lack direct access to funding.
As reported by Inside Climate News, the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) delegation at the UN climate summit this month argued that climate agreements should support Indigenous peoples and local communities financially so they can better preserve ecosystems.
Such an agreement would support local conservation work by Indigenous communities and, in the case of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, help local communities boost their defense against illegal loggers.
During the UN summit in Dubai, world nations also made non-binding pledges to a loss and damage fund, ostensibly to compensate communities for adverse effects of climate change such as forest loss, soil degradation, and damage from increasingly intense hurricanes. But many of Mexico’s Indigenous communities worry these international funds will take too long to get to the communities that need them most or that they will be misappropriated by the government or international organizations.
Global conservationists, however, recognize that Indigenous people are a priority. “Nature is central to our collective humanity, our various cultures, identity, and futures as human beings,” said Sushil Raj, executive director of rights and communities for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “[Indigenous peoples] are the best guardians of nature.”
Until they receive more international and national support, activists such as the Indigenous defenders in Crescencio Morales feel they are on their own. A council leader in Crescencio, Silvestre Chávez, told me that the government had done little to protect his community from the illegal loggers and sicarios who still threatened his forest.
He said he still waits for justice for the death of Homero Gómez González, who was known locally as the “Guardian of the Monarch.” “We cleaned up our community on our own,” Chávez said. “At least in our part of the forest, we can now say that people and butterflies are safer.”
New York’s survivors laws have helped spur a reckoning in music — one that some say is long overdue.
Especially in the 1990s and 2000s, Diddy was a figure of enormous power, not just in hip-hop but in the business and entertainment worlds writ large. In the past two months, however, four women have sued him, saying he used that influence and wealth to sexually victimize them and avoid any consequences for decades.
Their lawsuits, several of which include brutal and disturbing details, state that Diddy, whose birth name is Sean Combs and who has also publicly gone by Puff Daddy, Puffy, and Love, raped them and, in some cases, trafficked them by coercing them to engage in sex with other men. Together, the cases have redirected public attention toward longstanding allegations of violence against Combs, leading some brands to cut ties with him and Hulu to scrap his upcoming reality show in recent days.
The first suit, filed in November by the singer Cassie, who dated Combs and was signed to his label, alleged that he urged her to have sex with male sex workers while he filmed, and later, that he raped her. In the most recent complaint, a woman identified only as Jane Doe says that in 2003, when she was 17, Combs had her flown on a private jet to New York, where he and two other men gave her drugs and alcohol and gang-raped her. The women have come forward because two New York laws — one of which paved the way for E. Jean Carroll’s successful lawsuit against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation — opened limited windows of time in which people can file civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse, even if the statute of limitations has passed. One of those windows closed in late November, explaining the flurry of recent complaints.
Combs has denied the allegations, saying in a statement, “I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.” A spokesperson for Brafman & Associates, the law firm representing the rapper in the suits, declined Vox’s request for comment.
The cases have captured the public’s attention in part because Combs was such an influential executive and gatekeeper in music and fashion — yet one who had long been the subject of allegations of violence, including arrests. They are among the first major allegations in years against a major figure in the music industry, which many feel has failed to reckon with abuses of power, even at the height of the Me Too movement. Combs is just one of many powerful men who have evaded scrutiny, but whose alleged past conduct is being revisited now with fresh and more critical eyes, in some cases thanks to the landmark New York laws.
Indeed, Combs is now drawing comparisons to R. Kelly, with frequent critic 50 Cent announcing that he will produce a series about Combs in the style of the bombshell docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, with the proceeds going to assault survivors.
Dream Hampton, producer of Surviving R. Kelly, told the Times that an accounting was arriving for the Bad Boy founder. “Puff is done,” she said.
The suits against Combs also show that despite recent backlash, the Me Too movement and the legal and cultural changes that came with it have had an enduring impact. Even if allegations of sexual assault and harassment do not make daily headlines the way they did in 2017, the reckoning is ongoing — and no industry is likely to remain immune forever.
Diddy built an empire across multiple businesses
Combs is a producer and rapper who rose to become an influential figure across music, media, and fashion. He started Bad Boy Records in New York in 1993, when he was in his early 20s, and soon signed Notorious B.I.G., whose two albums helped define New York hip-hop in that era. Bad Boy would grow into a multimillion-dollar business, and Combs would produce iconic ’90s acts from Jodeci to Mary J. Blige. When Biggie was killed in 1997, Combs released a Grammy-winning tribute, “I’ll Be Missing You,” that “helped inaugurate a commercial boom in hip-hop that lasted until the end of the nineties,” according to Michael Specter of the New Yorker.
Combs was also one of the first to blend the worlds of hip-hop, business, and luxury. His fashion label, Sean John, founded in 1998, became known for high-end menswear. He promoted brands of vodka and tequila and hosted exclusive white parties in the Hamptons with guests like Martha Stewart. Though no longer as central a figure as he was in the ’90s, Combs remains a rich and well-connected celebrity: In recent months, he’s held a joint album release and birthday party attended by stars such as Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson, performed for a sold-out crowd in London, and appeared at the homecoming celebration for his alma mater, Howard University, where he made a surprise $1 million donation.
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Samir Hussein/Getty Images for Sean “Diddy” Combs
As Combs built his empire, however, he was also accused of multiple acts of violence. In 1999, he was arrested for beating another executive with a chair, a phone, and a champagne bottle (he had to pay a fine and take an anger management class, according to the New Yorker). The same year, he was involved in a shooting at a club in Manhattan, where he was attending a party with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez; witnesses said they saw him with a gun, but he was ultimately acquitted after a public, much-watched trial.
He has also been accused of threats and violence against women. In a 2019 interview, for example, his ex-girlfriend Gina Huynh said he had thrown a shoe at her and dragged her by the hair. But these reports have not received mainstream public attention — until now.
Singer Cassie filed suit against Diddy in November
In November, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, sued Combs, alleging sexual assault and sex trafficking. In the suit, first reported by the New York Times, Ventura said she had experienced years of abuse from Combs, starting soon after she met him in 2005, when she was 19. She said he beat her repeatedly, at one point kicking her in the face, and said that later, in 2018, he raped her. She also said he trafficked her by coercing her to have sex with sex workers in different cities while he filmed and masturbated. She would try to delete the photos and videos afterward, but Combs retained access, she said in the suit, and at one point made her watch a video she thought she had deleted.
Ventura’s suit also said that Combs and his associates used his power and wealth to intimidate her into silence and compliance, with his employees threatening to damage her music career if she spoke out against him. In one particularly shocking detail, Ventura said Combs threatened to blow up the rapper Kid Cudi’s car because Cudi and Ventura were dating; the car later exploded. “This is all true,” a spokesperson for Kid Cudi told the Times of the car exploding.
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Leon Bennett/Getty Images
Through his lawyer, Ben Brafman, Combs had accused Ventura of blackmail. “For the past six months, Mr. Combs has been subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship,” Brafman said in a statement. “Despite withdrawing her initial threat, Ms. Ventura has now resorted to filing a lawsuit riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.” Ventura’s lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said Combs had actually offered Ventura money for her silence, which she had declined.
Ventura’s suit was settled for an undisclosed amount within a single day, with the singer stating that she had “decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control.”
But Ventura’s decision to come forward publicly opened the floodgates, and more reports of assault and abuse began pouring out.
Three other women say Diddy harmed them
Three other women have filed suit against Combs. In the second suit, Joi Dickerson-Neal says he drugged and raped her in 1991. In the third, Liza Gardner says that in 1990, he coerced her into sex and choked her, causing her to lose consciousness. Jonathan Davis, a lawyer for Combs, said in a statement to the Times that Combs denied these allegations as well: “Because of Mr. Combs’s fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who attempt to smear him.”
In the most recent suit, the woman identified as Jane Doe says she was a junior in high school when she met then-Bad Boy president Harve Pierre and another Combs associate in Detroit. They convinced her to fly on their jet to New York, the suit says, where they and the rapper gave her drugs and alcohol and then violently raped her.
“Ms. Doe has lived with her memories of this fateful night for 20 years, during which time she has suffered extreme emotional distress that has impacted nearly every aspect of her life and personal relationships,” the suit says. “Given the brave women who have come forward against Ms. Combs and Mr. Pierre in recent weeks, Ms. Doe is doing the same.”
In response to that suit, Combs released a statement denying all reports of violence, calling them “sickening allegations” made “by individuals looking for a quick payday.” Pierre has also denied the allegations, saying in a statement to TMZ that “I have never participated in, witnessed, nor heard of anything like this, ever.”
Is this the music industry’s Me Too moment?
The growing number of reports, and their chilling details, have led companies and influential people in media and business to distance themselves from the rapper. Diageo, the beverage brand with which Combs partnered on vodka and tequila, removed his image from its website. Capital Preparatory Schools, a New York charter school network Combs helped expand, posted a statement on the school’s website saying it was cutting ties with him (though the statement was later removed). Combs also stepped aside as chair of Revolt, a TV network he helped start in 2013.
The cases against Combs are coming to light against a backdrop of other accusations against major figures in music. In November, a woman sued Neil Portnow, former head of the Grammy Awards, saying he had drugged and raped her in 2018. The same month, a former employee sued music executive L.A. “Babyface” Reid, saying he sexually assaulted and harassed her, leading to irrevocable damage to her career in the music industry.
They also occur at a time when Ye, a music and fashion mogul whose career has parallels with Diddy’s, has lost many of his brand partnerships after public antisemitic and racist statements as well as what many say was a years-long pattern of verbal abuse and harassment, which may have been kept quiet in part because his partnership was so lucrative for brands.
While the Me Too movement forced reckonings around sexual assault and harassment in industries from film to media to restaurants in 2017 and 2018, many in the music business felt that its biggest players were relatively unscathed. R. Kelly, for example, faced few consequences until Hampton’s widely watched 2019 docuseries Surviving R. Kelly drew renewed attention to the accusations, despite repeated allegations that he had sex with underage girls, several lawsuits, and even a 2008 criminal trial over child sexual abuse material. Many argued that the reason Kelly was given a pass for so long was that the women coming forward to report abuse by him were Black. In 2021, he was convicted of sex trafficking and sentenced to 30 years in prison; a second, 20-year sentence was added the following year (with all but one year to be served concurrently with the first sentence).
Three women stated publicly in 2017 that another influential music industry figure, Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, had raped them. Like Kelly, he was the subject of a documentary focusing on the allegations, though he has not faced charges.
Now, Ventura and the other women filing suit are reporting violent rape, intimidation, and abuse by one of the biggest names in music, someone who symbolized the movement of hip-hop into both mainstream and high-end culture. Diddy in his heyday was an icon of power and influence in music, fashion, and business, and the lawsuits filed against him represent a new willingness to call that power to account.
They also serve as a reminder that the Me Too movement has made enduring changes, including influencing law and policy and creating a road map for survivors of assault to come forward and share their stories.