- New York Review of Books

We closed our annual Fall Books issue while I was in Canada during the final leg of my daughter’s school vacation. We hadn’t been to the Canadian National Exhibition, Canada’s annual swan song to summer—a festival of sugared donuts, Whack-A-Mole, and rickety […]

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York. Somewhere between minimalist meditation and impassioned slow jam, “Harvest Time” features a tenor saxophonist improvising over a spare, […]

On July 17, after a lengthy trial and some six weeks of deliberation, Panama’s former president Ricardo Martinelli was found guilty of laundering public funds while in office. He faces a fine of $19.2 million and over a decade in prison. The prosecution charged that in 2010, a year into his […]

This past May Brazilian police officers and officials from the Ministry of Labor rescued a sixty-three-year-old woman from the private home where she had worked, without pay, benefits, or vacation time, for forty-seven years. The woman, who had cooked and cleaned for three successive generations of […]

In the Review’s September 21, 2023, issue, Ben Tarnoff reviews two recent books on the history of Silicon Valley, where “money begets money with an ease that would make Andrew Carnegie weep.” His essay ends with a reflection on the “neurotic character” of most of the […]

In 1848 revolutions began exploding across Europe like strings of firecrackers. From Paris to Bucharest and from Palermo to Copenhagen, people marched on the citadels of authority and demanded a greater say in their government. Crowds confronted soldiers, violence often ensued, rulers wavered, and […]

If there’s a star in the climate-driven energy transition, it’s certainly the electric vehicle (EV). The heat pump—the efficient replacement for both furnace and air conditioner—is generally squat and beige; the electric cooktop—the efficient replacement for the gas […]

The central conundrum in Brazil’s struggle to construct a cultural identity of its own has remained remarkably constant since the first Portuguese explorers arrived in 1500 and encountered Tupi-speaking peoples: To what extent should the European components of the country’s heritage be […]

What do John Constable’s seductive paintings—those cunningly constructed scenes of English rural life set among majestic trees and canopied by clouds—mean to us today? A possible answer was offered by a pair of environmental activists from Just Stop Oil who entered London’s […]

but that is water, and I the unsure, un-believable sense, to see asthough my eyes were changedby the taking off ofhabit, that habit of waking upmyself at blue day’sstart, at whistle, was rapt insuch turquoise consequenceto see, as solidity dropped from matter, becomingbelow me all […]

One of the main corporate participants in Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar crash program to create and produce a Covid-19 vaccine, was Moderna. The federal government gave Moderna, which in 2019 was a small, unprofitable pharmaceutical firm, some $2.48 […]

for Robert Adamson, 1943–2022 First words, last words—mostly they’re inaudible, like the mimicry of bowerbirds or a radio through cotton wool with fuzz around the frequency. You guess at what the words might be but no guess seems quite plausible. First words, last words, the open […]

On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In […]

Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” […]

New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced its 2023–2024 season last February, and there is much to be excited about. There will be four Met premieres of provocative contemporary works: Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (on opening night, September 26), Anthony Davis’s X: The Life […]

In just a little over a year, the Supreme Court has gutted the right to abortion, outlawed affirmative action in higher education, and thrown out the entire body of doctrine protecting the separation of church and state. These decisions—as well as others concerning free speech, the free […]

The year 2021 was meant to be a big one for commemorations in Greece: it marked the bicentennial of the start of the Greek War of Independence and—depending on your arithmetic—the 2,500-year anniversary of the storied Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. Though Covid lockdowns muted some […]

He who can pay every day for a dinner fit for a hundred persons, is often satisfied after having eaten the thigh of a chicken. –Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste If you are a bird, odds are that you are a chicken. Since the sixteenth century the global bird population has […]

Steiner Studios, at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, was quiet when I visited on a hot morning at the end of May. The Writers Guild of America, which has about 11,000 members, was in the fourth week of a national strike, and though most of the trouble was brewing in Los Angeles, the union had

To the Editors: In his review of my novel The Fraud [NYR, September 21], Michael Gorra finds that “as nearly as [he] can tell” the link between William Harrison Ainsworth and the Tichborne Claimant is invented. But as the novel itself makes clear, the young Irish poet Edward […]

To the Editors: Like many law professors, I read Laurence H. Tribe’s “Constrain the Court—Without Crippling It” [NYR, August 17] with great interest. My first book, Constitutional Faith (1988), analogized classic responses to the Constitution, and in particular to the […]

From a ruined gas station on a hill in the village of Preobrazhenka, in Ukraine’s southeast, you can hear the sound of outgoing artillery and see plumes of smoke rising in the distance. Armored demining equipment, tanks, and SUVs packed with soldiers rumble or speed past. Six miles south, on […]

Alain Pilon is a French-Canadian illustrator and artist based in Montreal. I’ve been working with him for twenty-five years, but our first meeting was a social occasion on a freezing winter night in Montreal in 1999. Over a bag of chips and a […]

History repeats itself, the first time as hope, the second time as dread. In a preface to the 2002 reissue of her classic work on the fear of bodily pollution, first published in 1966, the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote: When I was writing Purity and Danger I had no idea that soon the fear of

Two years ago, a production company posted an ad on Craigslist seeking subjects for a documentary about jury duty. One of the thousands of people who responded was a thirty-year-old solar panel contractor named Ronald Gladden. He showed up at a Los Angeles courthouse, was chosen for the jury, and […]

“Soundies”—the three-minute musical films made for a bare six years in the 1940s and shown in bars, taverns, and bus stations—are relics of relics. On the one hand, they belong to the century-plus process by which motion pictures traveled from big to little screens and from […]

Fifty years ago this month, Augusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, led a US-backed military coup to overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist president of Chile who had been elected just three years earlier. Among Allende’s staffers who fled from La Moneda, […]

The high-speed train from Naples to Rome takes a little over an hour and costs about ten euros; you can run up for a breakfast meeting and still make it back in time to pick the kids up from school. In Domenico Starnone’s novels, though, that journey has overtones of danger and myth. Naples, […]

In a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Sussex in 1963, the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced undergraduates who were demanding to be taught the history of Africa. “Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach,” he said. […]

The Sienese political theorist Francesco Patrizi wrote in 1471 that a republic’s strength was in its numbers: a popular government can “see with many eyes, work with many hands, and stride with almost numberless feet.” But whose eyes, whose hands, whose feet were to be involved in […]

The sculpture of David Smith is dramatic, impassioned. Smith was willing to try just about anything in a career that extended from the 1930s to his death in a car crash in 1965. He welded, carved, and cast. He applied color to metal surfaces and was fascinated by found objects, among them old […]

In the late 1990s, sitting at my computer in New Delhi, using a sputtering dial-up connection, I discovered rollingstone.com, NME.com, pitchforkmedia.com, and the now-defunct wallofsound.go.com. Much of the music discussed on these sites wasn’t available in Indian music stores, which were in […]

“In all my films, there is a suicide,” the French director Jean Eustache claimed upon discovering that his former girlfriend had killed herself shortly after attending a private screening of a rough cut of his film La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973). Eustache had […]

You are afraid to be touched becauseand that’s a reasonable fear, a woman oncebrushed past me in the aisleor stairs, I’ve repressed the encounterin amber, she said, and I was destroyedAnd in the second dream she was holding the dogback from a mourning dove and over usthe sky had what I […]

Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years. In 2021 Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet was reissued by New York Review Books, while her designs for a tarot deck were published in not one but two handsome volumes. In […]

In March 2007 some wildlife biologists drove out to a cave near Albany, New York, to count bats. New York is home to six species of Chiroptera that overwinter in the state; the animals cope with the cold by hibernating, usually underground, in caves or abandoned mine shafts. Dangling from the […]

I don’t remember much about our day at Stowe, whether it was rainy or dry, where we parked, what the road from Oxford was like. The house was closed, that much I know, but we’d come for the gardens, and today a few keystrokes give me some images I recognize: a footbridge we crossed, a

This past spring a science museum in Amsterdam unveiled an unusual exhibit: a giant meatball created with DNA from the woolly mammoth. The work of an Australian cultured-meat company called Vow, it may be the most whimsical of several mammoth revival ventures now underway, most in the US or Russia. […]

In 1987 lawyers for a Black inmate on Georgia’s death row presented the Supreme Court with evidence of the extreme racial disparity in the state’s administration of the death penalty. Their client, Warren McCleskey, had been convicted of killing a white police officer. In Georgia, Black […]

It would be easy, if you were a person who read women often but spoke to them rarely, to imagine that contemporary women hate men. Scholars write books and essays about how tragic heterosexuality is; queer writers in and out of the academy pity straight girls, who, in turn, bemoan their fate on […]

the tidal forest is the wholepresent tense—the first winter fullmoon in october gossamer overcastthe wind catches—one tree & then the next—a tide that reaches the sky— a desire path—a splitinfinitive—intertidal fricative * form is content—content is […]

On September 4, 1973, an enormous multitude of Chileans—I was one of them—poured into the streets of Santiago to back the besieged government of Salvador Allende. Ever since he had won the presidency three years earlier with 36.6 percent of the vote in a three-way race, forces from […]

Music and literature give shape to young people’s identities as they begin to build libraries of their interests. In the late 1970s in the UK, cultural preferences seemed binary: Did you prefer Joni Mitchell or Joan Armatrading? James Baldwin or Jack Kerouac? There was no consensus, but among […]

In Familiar Stranger, Stuart Hall’s memoir (written in conversation with Bill Schwarz), which was published in 2017, three years after he died, Hall recalls a crucial sight on a London street in 1951, shortly after he had left Jamaica for Britain to take his place as a Rhodes scholar at […]

Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a […]

It is no secret that the news media are in crisis, with troubling implications for American democracy. Jobs for reporters are scarce, partly because local newspapers are fast disappearing; in many communities local government proceeds with no journalistic oversight at all. News has largely migrated […]

Before California was a place, it was an idea. A rocky island, inhabited by Black women, filled with gold—this was the first California, as imagined in Las Sergas de Esplandián, a popular Spanish novel published in 1510. Some years later, Spanish settlers gave the same name to a […]

In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex. Phanigiri, “the snake-hooded hill,” had clearly been one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in India. All around were found […]

To the Editors: In “The Millions We Failed to Save” [NYR, June 22], Ruth Franklin’s otherwise excellent review of the documentary The US and the Holocaust, the author neglected to mention the American government’s official response to the Holocaust: the War Refugee Board […]

To the Editors: If I read Catherine Nicholson correctly [“Right Busy with Sticks and Spales,” NYR, June 22], she lists “conkers” among the “otherwise unrecoverable” dialect of games. In 1970 I went to the Mayfair School in Cambridge, England, and I learned to […]