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

John J. Lennon

Peddling Darkness

True crime stories, like Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel, make for suspenseful reading. But do they exploit the criminal, and deepen a thirst for punishment?

March 9, 2023 issue

Jake Nevins

‘Hit the Line Hard’

During the cold war, football’s violence became precisely its point.

February 12, 2023

Kaya Genç

Cries from the Rubble

After last week’s earthquakes, many thousands were trapped under ruins in Erdoğan’s “New Turkey.”

February 15, 2023

T.H. Breen

Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

February 23, 2023 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

February 23, 2023 issue

Tim Flannery

Monotreme Dreams

Australia’s egg-laying monotremes and pouch-carrying marsupials may seem to be outliers, but they’re as well suited to their environment as any other mammal.

February 23, 2023 issue

Vanessa Barbara

Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

February 23, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

February 23, 2023 issue

Frances Wilson

Very Free and Indirect

The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.

February 23, 2023 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Rape and Resistance in Egypt

A new book recounts the heroics of activists who organized to protect women from sexual violence during the Egyptian revolution and to assert their right to participate in the country’s political life.

February 23, 2023 issue

Hermione Lee

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

February 23, 2023 issue

Marina Warner

Nothing More Wondrous

A recent comparative study of medieval Christian and Islamic culture suggests that marvels offer common ground; wonder is a shared delight, a shared motive.

February 23, 2023 issue

Andrew Butterfield

A ‘Magic Mirror’ of Venice

The first-ever exhibition outside Italy of the works of Vittore Carpaccio is a bracing introduction to the artist who best captured the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of early-sixteenth-century Venice.

February 23, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Ukraine in Our Future

Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity.

February 23, 2023 issue

New York Movie; painting by Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper: New York Movie, 1939

“‘I just never cared for the vertical,’ Hopper once remarked.”

— Christopher Benfey: Buildings Come to Life

February 23, 2023

Current Issue

NYR Online

Liza Batkin

The Empty Words of the Religious Right

The legal group Alliance Defending Freedom has perfected a tactic for twisting the First Amendment: casting discriminators as visionaries persecuted by despotic laws.

February 10, 2023

Maya Binyam

Hiding in Plain Sight

The filmmaker Garrett Bradley uses archival material—home movies, fragments of early black cinema—to reimagine the present.

February 13, 2023

Hannah Appel

Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

February 8, 2023

Khaled Mattawa and Jérôme Tubiana

The River

Four weeks on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

February 6, 2023

New Poems

Alan Felsenthal

Self-Portrait

February 23, 2023 issue

Farnoosh Fathi

from ‘Twenty Collars’

February 23, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Found Poem

February 23, 2023 issue

On Canvas

Jed Perl

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

July 22, 2021 issue

Florine Stettheimer: Asbury Park South, 1920

Christopher Benfey

The Bruegel of Bendel’s

The antic Jazz Age canvases of the painter, poet, and theatrical designer Florine Stettheimer can give the impression, at first glance, of a never-ending party.

May 16, 2017

Jean Strouse

Sargent & His People

An artist who was “at home everywhere, and belonged nowhere.”

October 8, 2015 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Irresistible El Greco

Throughout his career, in different materials, different styles, and different media, El Greco played two artistic traditions and two moods against each other: heavenly calm against earthly agitation as well as West against East.

June 19, 2014 issue

Free from the Archives

Mordecai Richler: A Hero of Our Time

“If the profits to be made out of sports are immense, just possibly immorally high, then club owners differ from the tycoons in other industries by asking for our hearts as well as our money.”

Brief Encounters

Austin Gilkeson, interviewed by Daniel Drake

Make It Old

“The Lord of the Rings isn’t a puzzle, its meaning is clear, but it invites you back in, over and over again, to rifle through its cabinets and drawers.”

February 11, 2023

Sam Huber, interviewed by Max Nelson

A Second Look at the Second Wave

“Feminism, to my mind, names the richest, most sustained body of thought we have about gender as both a constraining imposition and an uncontestably personal language.”

February 4, 2023