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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

James Gleick

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

April 29, 2021 issue

Gary Younge

‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series presents Black Britons not as objects but as protagonists, not as heroes but as humans.

April 29, 2021 issue

Ankush Khardori

Who Will Answer for This Cruelty?

Trump officials who enforced the family separation policy have so far had a pass. This can’t be a repeat of the failed accountability over Bush-era torture.

April 9, 2021

Elaine Blair

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

April 29, 2021 issue

Natalie de Souza

Editing Humanity’s Future

With CRISPR, our species can turn its inexorable will to control nature back onto itself. Eventually, we could guide human evolution. Does this mean that we should?

April 29, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

No More Mother-Saviors

Recent collections of poetry by Russian women offer a glimpse of how perceptions of feminism are changing in post-communist Slavic countries.

April 29, 2021 issue

Andrew O’Hagan

In the Act of Living

Hermione Lee, in her new biography of Tom Stoppard, has given shape to his quest for meaning, consciousness, history, and goodness.

April 29, 2021 issue

Walton Muyumba

Floating in Time with John Edgar Wideman

In a new collection of stories, the author invites readers to sit alongside him, listening and reading in multiple directions simultaneously.

April 6, 2021

Robert Kuttner

Dividends of a Just Economy

What is keeping the government from acting on behalf of its citizens?

April 29, 2021 issue

Colin Thubron

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

April 29, 2021 issue

Jenny Erpenbeck, Berlin, 2014

“The grandeur of Jenny Erpenbeck’s preoccupations and the glacial detachment of her tone make you curious as to just who this author is and how she came to write like this.”

— Daniel Mendelsohn: Words and Other Violence

April 29, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

Jamieson Webster

On Breathing

From first moments to last rites, the air around us is not only essential to life but also carries our speech. So being silenced can feel like death.

April 2, 2021

Rich Cohen

The Lure of the White Sands

If I could understand why the desert affects me so profoundly, maybe I’d know the reason for my obsession. Maybe I’d know everything.

March 29, 2021

Tim Parks

The Visible Translator

The task of rendering a writer’s work in a different language used to be a vocation largely requiring self-effacement in favor of the text. That is changing.

March 31, 2021

Namwali Serpell

Black Hole

Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet.

March 26, 2021

Remembering Oliver Sacks

The physician and author, subject of a new PBS documentary airing this week, was a contributor to The New York Review for over three decades.

Oliver Sacks

Speak, Memory

February 21, 2013 issue

Oliver Sacks

First Love

October 18, 2001 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Autist Artist

April 25, 1985 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Feeling of Disorder

April 23, 2015 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

April 24, 2014 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Bull on the Mountain

June 28, 1984 issue

Brief Encounters

Howard W. French, interviewed by Pooka Paik and Lyndon Thompson

A Dispatch from Our Correspondent

“The US must learn to discover the sense of purpose that comes from achieving things of virtue, things that have an objective social need.”

April 10, 2021

David Cole, interviewed by Matt Seaton

Armed with Arguments

“Today, the NRA is on the defensive, and the gun control movement is stronger. That political fight will more likely determine gun regulation than the Supreme Court.”

April 3, 2021

Namwali Serpell, interviewed by Lucy McKeon

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021

Nathan Thrall, interviewed by Matt Seaton

The Endless Occupation, a New Understanding

“Today’s reality in Israel-Palestine is at odds with everything the United States claims to stand for.”

March 20, 2021

Marshall Sahlins

Culture as Protein and Profit

Marvin Harris’s theory is that the customs of mankind come and go according to their profitability. He tells us that human sacrifice among the Aztecs had a sound scientific basis in nutrition.

November 23, 1978 issue

New Poems

Mary Jo Bang

The Problem of the Present

a poem

April 29, 2021 issue

Paul Muldoon

Coywolves

a poem

April 29, 2021 issue

More Poetry