- New York Review of Books

In February satellite photographs of a new militarized buffer zone along Egypt’s border with Gaza circulated online. The Egyptian government was silent about the matter for a few days, then said that the area was being prepared so that aid trucks could enter the besieged Palestinian […]

Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker’s review of a recent translation of The Wall, a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: “Why write? Why describe your […]

Around 10:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 2, a handful of volunteer attorneys stood on a small lawn sandwiched between two jails, waiting for protesters arrested within UCLA’s Palestine solidarity encampment to be released from custody. One of the lawyers made a noise of disbelief and held […]

In 2016, near the end of his second term as president, Barack Obama was asked what he planned to do on returning to civilian life. He gave a one-word reply: “Uber.” The joke suggested two changes that had occurred during his presidency. First, Uber had become a verb; the idea of […]

When students set up the tents at Harvard on April 24, I was standing with the police on the steps of the building that houses the president’s office. The NYPD had already made its first round of arrests at Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment, and two days earlier faculty and students […]

It began as a small group: a few dozen travelers drifting towards the border, full of fear and hope, united in the belief that they could change their fates. Well-wishers along the route gathered to bid them good luck, to pray for them, to remind them that they were on a righteous path. The […]

What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, […]

“How do I capture what happened—and what moved me—during a performance that most of my readers will never have a chance to see?”

Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.

Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance.

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.

It was there since the beginning: […]

I was given an idea of the good and I was taken quickly from the same idea, though at first it was as simple as a tree I saw the ground, conserving summer, populate with geese, some deer, the pachysandra. The good was what I had without myself. When I describe it now, the whole

The collected poems of Denise Levertov and Anne Stevenson suggest what a poet can gain by expatriation, in both directions between England and the United States.

New supertall skyscrapers planned for Manhattan will reduce the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the scale of souvenir tchotchkes. With the current glut of unoccupied office space, they may be the last of their kind.

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to "a low-calorie martini."

The UK’s ”second empire” of tax-free jurisdictions around the world persists despite the overwhelming evidence that it enables corruption, drains public budgets, and exacerbates inequality.

In Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a dissatisfied Italian everywoman starts keeping a diary, and eventually her own thoughts become too much to bear.

The novel Divine Days by Leon Forrest, reissued after three decades, is over a thousand pages that elicit from the reader every emotion from awe to exasperation.

Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology.

The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.

The post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans, is asking which way Germany—the most powerful country in the European Union—will go.

Jill Biden is a barrier-breaking national figure. What are we to make of the wholesome, at times bland story she tells about herself?

On April 25 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. United States, on whether a former president enjoys immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. The Court did not need to accept the case; it could easily have passed on former President Donald Trump’s […]

A method of judicial interpretation that looks only to the original meaning of legal texts risks producing a Constitution and laws that no one would want.

On December 24, 2023, the NYR Online published an essay by Nadia Abu El-Haj about the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech at Columbia University and Barnard College, where she holds the Ann Whitney Olin professorship in the anthropology department and codirects the Center for Palestine Studies. […]

On Thursday Ariel Henry formally resigned as prime minister of Haiti. Few were grateful for his service. Over thirty-two months, the longest premiership since 1987, Henry presided over a country where life grew steadily worse. For the past five years armed groups had terrorized the capital, […]

In the fall of 1966, when I was twenty-four, I returned to New York. I was finally completing the journey home I had begun when I left New Orleans in the winter of 1964. My friend, the sculptor Mark di Suvero, lived in a building on the corner of Fulton and Front Streets; I looked

At the start of last October over 200,000 Palestinians worked in Israel. Mostly they labored in construction and, to a lesser extent, in agriculture: leaving their homes in the morning, showing their work permits at checkpoints, building houses and roads, harvesting fruit and vegetables, then […]

“I don’t have any programmatic agenda for art, merely a hope to cut through received patterns of thought.”

In 1988 Vaslav Nijinsky visited the dancer and choreographer Molissa Fenley in her New York City studio. He had been dead for nearly forty years—longer than Fenley had been alive. But as she worked on a wrenching, thirty-five-minute solo called State of Darkness, set to Igor […]

I was born in the spring of 1999 in the village of Khuza’a, east of the city of Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip. My family comes from a village called Salama, near Jaffa on the Palestinian coast, from which they were displaced by Zionist forces in 1948. Khuza’a was a place of green fields

The job of the biographer who sets out to write about a great artist lies in part in resolving the tug-of-war between the life and the work. The two are intimately connected, but a body of work is never fully explained by the experiences, psychology, love affairs, or cultural setting of the person […]

Though exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in Gabriel García Márquez's work, only in his last novel, Until August, is a woman the uncontested protagonist on her own journey of self-discovery.

John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?

Reading John Vaillant's Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell's The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we're no longer thinking straight.

after Ebecho Muslimova The branch grows into my vaginaand exits my mouth.Like sellers of fine carpets, leaves unfoldtheir new colors at my lips.The lovers walk the scrawny pathto visit at their assigned hours.The one who is meanest is the one I most love.He brings me a fish full of needles.I am […]

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

Two recent books of photographs by David Serry and Robert Stothard suggest there is no truth to the notion of a “Jewish race" with any unifying physical characteristics.

The mid-century ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.

In Nicole Eisenman's paintings and sculptures, a system’s impending demise may reveal itself in feverish hilarity.

The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of Black artistic practices and styles.

Seen from a certain perspective, Constance Debré’s recent trilogy of novels—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Nom (Name)—looks ready-made to appeal to audiences hungry for autobiographical tales of female self-emancipation. The books are based on events from Debré’s […]

pace out the terrain bait the line with herring plant kale talk about the weather separate rumor from intelligence phrase against the pulse * bog has suffered damage the drained sites prone to scrub invasion slow the water flow raise the water table rewet cracked peat brash crushing stump flipping […]

If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some unpleasant though obvious facts.

To the Editors: The conditions experienced by foreign journalists in Russia worsened well before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I arrived in Moscow as The Guardian’s bureau chief in 2007, two decades after Jonathan Steele [“The Party Line,” NYR, March 21] […]

On April 25 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments to address what it has identified as the central issue in the case Donald J. Trump v. United States: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to […]

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has sued Luciano Canfora, an eighty-one-year-old historian, philologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Bari, for aggravated defamation (diffamazione aggravata). The preliminary hearing took place yesterday. The case dates back two years, […]

A dispatch from the Art Editor

Tom of Finland’s work has transformed from midcentury gay pornography to twenty-first-century art, but its troubling dimensions, as well as the ways it has creatively shaped the desires of a diverse range of queer people, cannot be ignored.