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Fred Kaplan

Putin’s Miscalculation

After two decades of reforming its armed forces, Russia expected a lightning victory in Ukraine, but the ill-starred invasion has revealed their deficiencies.

February 9, 2023 issue

Alec Wilkinson

Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’

A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.

February 9, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Reckoning with Silence

Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.

February 9, 2023 issue

Sam Huber

Risk, Originality, Commitment

For Andrea Dworkin, literature and social change were always entwined.

January 26, 2023

Jed Perl

Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

February 9, 2023 issue

Joan Silber

Friends: A Love Story

Jean Chen Ho’s main characters like each other plenty, with all the trouble that comes with that.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ben Fountain

White Fright

A. M. Homes’s new novel might be a satire of American politics, but should we be mainly amused, or mainly horrified?

February 9, 2023 issue

Christine Smallwood

Misreading the Cues

The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ian Frazier

Grim Reapers

Mega-agriculture is destroying the Corn Belt and the Central Valley, which the country’s food system depends on. Can midsize farms survive to save it?

February 9, 2023 issue

Francesca Wade

‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’

A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.

February 9, 2023 issue

Neal Ascherson

Sonnets for the State

A new book recounts the history of the Circle of Writing Chekists, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of State Security who wrote poetry as a weapon in the class struggle.

February 9, 2023 issue

Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

February 9, 2023 issue

Coco Fusco

The Other Cuba

An exhibition of Cuban art from the past decade charts the emergence of a group of artists who have broken the state’s monopoly on public discourse.

February 9, 2023 issue

Gary Shteyngart

Beyond the Pale

After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.

February 9, 2023 issue

Billy Graham leading a prayer at the Republican National Convention, 1968; Richard Nixon is at right

Billy Graham leading a prayer at the Republican National Convention, Miami, Florida, August 1968; Richard Nixon is at right

“For religious conservatives, the ultimate privacy claim became a claim of individual conscience, deployed to justify exemption from a legal or civic duty. Pluralism, once deemed a threat to Christian dominance, became useful when joined with privacy.”

— Linda Greenhouse: Victimhood and Vengeance

February 9, 2023

Current Issue

NYR Online

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Max Rivlin-Nadler

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Eric Adams’s involuntary hospitalization plan was the culmination of a year spent demonizing those on the lowest rung of New York City’s ladder.

January 18, 2023

Felicia Kornbluh

The Grassroots of ‘Roe’

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

January 16, 2023

Regina Marler

Behind the Mask

After rejecting the gendered fixations of the Surrealist movement, Meret Oppenheim embraced an androgynous art of the unconscious.

January 14, 2023

New Poems

Marianne Boruch

ICE

February 9, 2023 issue

Caleb Crain

Sallies

February 9, 2023 issue

Karl Kirchwey

Luminaria

January 19, 2023 issue

Tim Judah Reports from Ukraine

Tim Judah

Ukraine’s Volunteers

Even more impressive than Ukraine’s will to fight is the vast network of citizens who are supporting the armed forces and helping those in need of food and supplies.

January 19, 2023 issue

Tim Judah

In Kherson

The retreat of Russian troops from Kherson, leaving the city without power, water, or cell service, closed a long chapter in the war in Ukraine.

November 19, 2022

Tim Judah

The Russian Terror

As Russian forces have retreated from some parts of Ukraine, more and more evidence has emerged of summary executions, looting, and destruction.

May 26, 2022 issue

Tim Judah

Holding On in Irpin

For the moment, the Ukrainians are winning by simply not losing.

April 7, 2022 issue

Tim Judah

Kyiv Under Siege

As I write, the siren begins to sound again and the app on my phone sends me a red alert.

March 3, 2022

Tim Judah

Ukraine on the Brink

It is quite normal to refuse to believe that you are about to be engulfed by a cataclysm.

March 24, 2022 issue

Free from the Archives

Sergei Kovalev: Putin’s War

“The only way Putin could manage a political victory over his Moscow competitors was to achieve a military triumph.”

Brief Encounters

Martin Filler, interviewed by Noel Stevens

Beauty and Utility

“A well-executed building or inviting public space can bring people together in ways that strengthen our communal values and at the same time make us more aware of our individuality.”

January 21, 2023

Alexander Burns, interviewed by Willa Glickman

Man About the House

“It would be good for voters’ confidence in democracy if there were a clearer connection between what people vote for in an election and what a governing party is able to do once it wins power.”

January 14, 2023