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Michelle Nijhuis

Must We Grow?

New books argue that life in a slower economy isn’t necessarily painful, and is likely to be healthier and more secure in many ways.

June 9, 2022 issue

Magda Teter

Rehearsal for Genocide

Three recent books conclude that the anti-Jewish pogroms following World War I help to explain what would take place a generation later.

June 9, 2022 issue

Rahmane Idrissa

Potent Policies of Empire

The contest in Mali between the West and Russia is less a front in a new cold war than part of a scramble for Africa’s resources.

May 25, 2022

Cathleen Schine

Subjects of Considerable Gossip

Greta Garbo craved protection, and one such guardian was Salka Viertel, a nearly forgotten screenwriter who nurtured a community of fellow émigrés in postwar Hollywood.

June 9, 2022 issue

Ginia Bellafante

Mothers Under Pressure

The culture of contemporary child-rearing brings anxiety and guilt without relief. Does Emily Oster’s call for more relaxed parenting offer the solution?

June 9, 2022 issue

Yuri Slezkine

‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’

The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s most memorably inconspicuous leader, finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body.”

June 9, 2022 issue

Ethan Zuckerman

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Sarah Chihaya

‘The Ultimate Asian Woman’

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university.

June 9, 2022 issue

Mark Ford

A Style of Revolt

A poet of great wit and style, Thom Gunn was also a lyrical portraitist, which is especially evident in his recently collected letters.

June 9, 2022 issue

Adam Kirsch

Benjamin’s Rival Tempters

The correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem reveals that despite their intellectual differences, their shared mission to preserve Walter Benjamin’s work led to a genuine fondness between them.

June 9, 2022 issue

Garry Wills

Our Moloch

We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily.

December 15, 2012

Nathaniel Rich

The Monsters in Cabinet 13

Un-su Kim’s novels take on the capricious drudgery of modern professional life and the crazed whimsy and sociopathic violence it can inspire.

June 9, 2022 issue

Kathryn Paige Harden, M.W. Feldman, Jessica Riskin, et al.

‘Why Biology Is Not Destiny’: An Exchange

June 9, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

A Game of Low Stakes

In Sam Riviere’s satire of the publishing world, literary competitiveness poisons intimate relations.

June 9, 2022 issue

Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem

“‘I urgently implore you to write me,’ Adorno concluded his letter. ‘I simply do not know how things can go on after Walter’s death, and communication from you would be infinitely important.’”

— Adam Kirsch: Benjamin’s Rival Tempters

June 9, 2022

Current Issue

NYR Online

Sam Huber

The Boundaries of Kinship

In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions.

May 17, 2022

Julian Lucas

The Yeehaw Papyrus

In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt.

May 15, 2022

Jeet Heer

The Racing Brain of Martin Vaughn-James

In the 1970s Canadian comics scene, The Projector made dizzying leaps in the development of the graphic novel form.

April 29, 2022

The End of ‘Roe’?

Melissa Gira Grant

Policing Womanhood

For groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the erosion of abortion rights and trans rights are complementary pathways to building a Christian nation.

May 15, 2022

Elizabeth A. Reese

Unsteady Ground

Native people have known for a long time that in this country, rights—whether to remain, to pray, to vote, or even to live—are impermanent and fickle things, subject to revision by those in power.

May 14, 2022

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Our Lives in Their Hands

If state governments truly cared about the lives of poor women or our children, they wouldn’t poison our water and pollute our air. They can’t be trusted with our bodies.

May 13, 2022

Sherrilyn Ifill

Stealing the Crown Jewels

Justice Alito purports to place the future of abortion in the hands of women voters—despite abetting the disenfranchisement of Black and Latina women.

May 12, 2022

New Poems

Robert Pinsky

Cataract

June 9, 2022 issue

Lindsay Turner

November with Animals

June 9, 2022 issue

Dan Chiasson

The Forest of Crickets

May 26, 2022 issue

Free from the Archives

John Gregory Dunne: The War that Won’t Go Away

“The average age of the infantryman in World War II was twenty-six; in Vietnam it was nineteen…. In another platoon there was a lance corporal who was twenty-four. He was called Pops.”

Brief Encounters

Liza Batkin, interviewed by Daniel Drake

A Critic in the Court

“The justices on the Supreme Court and the scholars and writers who study it ask us to read legal opinions the way Barthes read books: without peeking behind the page at the author’s identity.”

May 21, 2022

Christopher Benfey, interviewed by Andrew Katzenstein

Provocation from Another Soul

“Stanley Cavell was a dazzling teacher. You felt that he was opening his private studio to you, showing you how philosophy gets done rather than simply reporting his findings after the fact.”

April 30, 2022

Carson Ellis, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

Nature Doing Its Thing

“I’ve always been drawn to the microcosmic worlds of bugs and tiny creatures; the scenes you discover when you turn over a log or look into a tide pool.”

April 23, 2022