Books Newsletter Plus, inside a Black Panther family album, predatory art-world relationships, and the unknown Qing Dynasty trade portraitists. April 20, 2026 — 2 min read “How long can you silence the very thing that makes you human?” asks our Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara in his review of Ai Weiwei’s new book On Censorship. The dissident Chinese artist’s “small but mighty” book draws on a lifetime of fighting state control and packs in ever timely reflections on the harms of censorship — not just in authoritarian regimes, but also in the so-called enlightened West. Also in this edition: a sojourn inside a Black Panther family album, a peek into the lives of the now-anonymous painters in the Qing dynasty Canton trade system, and a semi-autobiographical novel about a predatory art teacher.…