- New York Review of Books

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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

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.

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 […]

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

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.

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.

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.

In August 2023 dead elephant seals washed ashore on beaches in Argentina. First a handful appeared outside Rio Grande, a coastal city on the eastern side of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The next day there were more. Then the sightings moved up the seaboard, from Rio Gallegos to the Chubut […]

For nearly two decades, Jerome Groopman has been writing for The New York Review of Books about all matters medical. In our latest issue, he reviews Andrew Leland’s memoir, which recounts the writer’s experiences as his eyesight declined. “The history of blindness […]

I. Andrew Katzenstein in Mason, TexasII. Willa Glickman in Rochester, New YorkIII. Daniel Drake in Warren, VermontIV. Lucy Jakub in the Rangeley Lakes, Maine […]

In December 2016 I was sitting in The Village Voice’s fluorescently lit office in New York City’s Financial District, waiting to interview for a job. There was a strange flutter in the air; big news had just arrived. My phone had buzzed on the elevator ride up with a push alert bearing […]

Jo Livingstone and I first met at the Oxford Wine Café, a dingy spot just outside Oxford’s city center, in 2018. We had the most engrossing conversation two people have probably ever had about the medieval English mystic Margery Kempe, and how a critic can make old works of literature […]

In the early morning hours of March 26, emergency workers in Baltimore received a mayday call from the Dali, a 985-foot container ship. Shortly after setting sail from the city’s port, the vessel had lost power, and with it control over its engine and navigation instruments. It was on course […]

In June, when Mexico holds its fifth federal election since the end of one-party rule, Claudia Sheinbaum is almost certain to be elected president. An environmental scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum is affiliated with the incumbent Movement for National Regeneration, or Morena. […]

The Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong loads her canvases with about as much potential energy as they can bear. The paintings in her “Billiards” series induce mild vertigo, so outlandish are their perspectives, so distorted their angles, so broad their crashing planes of color. Wrists […]

“When students ask me today how they can find their style, I propose they put their computers and digital drawings pads aside and discover what happens with their own hands and bodies, with all the attendant mistakes, flaws, and shortcomings.”

Every time a foreign friend asks me about elections in Russia, I go through a familiar cycle: first awkwardness, then confusion, then shame. I freeze inside. Now I will have to tell them. I smile stupidly and choose my words: “We don’t exactly have elections in Russia.”  We […]

In the days that followed Hamas’s heinous October 7 attack on military bases, kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova music festival, several high-ranking Israeli officials announced that they intended to deprive Gaza’s civilian population of its most basic needs. At the time, over 80 […]

“Prabowo’s victory opens a window onto how the depredations, violence, and corruption of the Suharto era unevenly influence the present.”