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

Robert Kuttner

Dividends of a Just Economy

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

April 29, 2021 issue

Makenna Goodman

Whose ‘Good Life’?

As back-to-the-land pioneers, Scott and Helen Nearing were gurus of a social movement enjoying renewed interest. But it’s an equivocal legacy.

April 17, 2021

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

A Praise House of Many Mansions

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

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

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

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

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

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

Sheila Heti

Clarice Lispector and Love’s Apprentice

Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked?

April 15, 2021

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

Lillian Hellman

Dashiell Hammett: A Memoir

For years we made jokes about the day I would write about him.

November 25, 1965 issue

Malachi Kirby as activist Darcus Howe, on trial with the other members of the Mangrove Nine; from Small Axe: Mangrove

Malachi Kirby (far left) as the activist Darcus Howe, on trial with the other members of the Mangrove Nine; from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: Mangrove

“The power of Small Axe is that it stands as proposer, seconder, and resounding voice vote for the inclusion of stories, events, and experiences too long absent from the record of British history.”

— Gary Younge: ‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

April 29, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

Tamsin Shaw

Flacking for Facebook

How perfect that a failed Liberal Democrat should be leading the PR effort to persuade us that liberal democracy is safe with the social media giant.

April 13, 2021

Devika Girish

What Next, After Protest?: An Interview with Ephraim Asili

The Inheritance, a hybrid mockumentary about a Black Marxist collective, studies the everyday to imagine a new future.

April 11, 2021

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

Nathan Thrall

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Poets on Poets

Marianne Moore

On Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a consummate refutation of the impression that life must be frantic.

June 25, 1964 issue

John Ashbery

The Book that No One Knows

David Schubert’s poetry is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it.

October 5, 2000 issue

Dan Chiasson

Crossing the Invisible Line

The astonishing work of poet Eileen Myles set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.

March 24, 2016 issue

Ange Mlinko

Acts of Extreme Attention

Karen Solie, the consummate poet of the Trans-Canadian Highway, has taken an evolutionary leap with her recent poetry, trading comedy for sublime beauty.

November 21, 2019 issue

John Berryman

Auden’s Prose

Maybe W.H. Auden was not a professional critic. Splendid: he is an amateur in the good sense of that sad word. He loves. He reports his love.

February 1, 1963 issue

Charles Simic

The Consolations of Strangeness

Jana Prikryl’s poetry shows a probing intellect alert to the strangeness of our lives, as well as our own estrangement from ourselves.

August 18, 2016 issue

Joseph Brodsky and Charles Simic

On Mark Strand (1934–2014)

Mark Strand was a gentle poet; his opening lines invite you in until you gradually realize how many fathoms are there underneath, how far you are from any shore.

January 8, 2015 issue