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Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

October 17, 2024 issue

Beatrice Radden Keefe

Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Thirteen hundred years ago, the monks on the German lake island of Reichenau tended a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. An exhibit celebrating the anniversary chronicles the monastery’s history and art.

October 17, 2024 issue

Simon Callow

Under the Spotlight

Richard Sennett’s new book, The Performer, ranges beyond acting to musical, political, social, and pictorial performance.

October 17, 2024 issue

Aryeh Neier

Torture in Israel’s Prisons

Recent reports on the conditions in Israeli detention facilities describe them as sites of systematic abuse.

October 17, 2024 issue

Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

A screen at a New York watch party broadcasting the vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, October 1, 2024

“A dynamic, newsworthy, grassroots-aligned movement has been replaced by a meat-and-potatoes campaign founded on the belief that chattering about pocketbook themes will not just win over undecided or unmotivated voters but win them over in numbers that will compensate for the loss of grassroots energy.”

— Joseph O’Neill: Bring Back the Fight!

October 17, 2024

Current Issue

Linda Colley

A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

Despite the absence of a single codified document, there is a long tradition of writing about the United Kingdom’s constitutional history.

October 17, 2024 issue

Julius Taranto

The Father-Daughter Dance

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is fundamentally a social novel, revolving around debates that occupy the public sphere: gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill.

October 17, 2024 issue

Hannah Gold

‘Deviations and Catastrophes’

The characters in Kathleen Alcott’s stories struggle with whether to let their attachment to the past derail them in the present.

October 17, 2024 issue

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Nate Wooley

Eastern Sounds

Ahmed Abdul-Malik recorded six overlooked albums combining jazz and North African folk music. A new European quartet has revived his legacy to create a new music of their own.

October 6, 2024

Carolina A. Miranda

Mythic Chaps

Two recent exhibitions in Denver reveal how many legends and surprising realities coexist in the idea of the American cowboy.

October 17, 2024 issue

Samuel Earle

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue

Christopher Tayler

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

October 17, 2024 issue

Colin Thubron

The Artificiality of Nations

Two recent books advance compassionate cases against the cruelty of closed borders.

October 17, 2024 issue

Gary Younge

Scapegoating the Immigrant

In the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots this summer, the British government has refused to confront the root cause of the violence and cracked down on immigration instead.

October 17, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Speaking the Unspeakable

The Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah asks what it would mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide.

October 17, 2024 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

October 17, 2024 issue

Jessica T. Mathews

The Race That Can’t Be Won

A new nuclear arms race is beginning. It will be far more dangerous than the last one.

October 17, 2024 issue

New Poems

Frances Leviston

Slip

October 17, 2024 issue

Caleb Crain

Lifer

October 17, 2024 issue

Forrest Gander

from Mojave Ghost

October 3, 2024 issue

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Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Gabriel Winant

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

Ikhtisad Ahmed

A New Chapter for Bangladesh?

When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.

September 28, 2024

Suzanne Schneider

What the New Right Wants

The Heritage Foundation has reinvented itself to include a new generation of conservatives at odds with their elders. Project 2025 lays bare the contradictions.

September 22, 2024

Upcoming Events

October 16, 2024, 6:30pm

The Climate Election: Fighting for a Greener Future

Join renowned climate researchers Rhiana Gunn-Wright and Bill McKibben for a conversation about environmental issues on the ballot.

October 17, 2024, 1pm

Mirror Issues: How the President Reflects the State of the Nation

Join New York Review contributors Patricia Williams, Hari Kunzru, and Jacqueline Rose for a conversation about the issues of race, sex, immigration, and how the identity of the next president reflects who we are as a nation.

October 21–November 25

“What Will She Do?”: Merve Emre on Middlemarch

Join Merve Emre for a six-session webinar on George Eliot’s Middlemarch beginning Monday, October 21, 2024 at 5 pm EDT.

More Events

Election 2024

Fintan O’Toole

Kamala’s Moment

Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?

September 19, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

September 19, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Trump’s Old News

The debate showed that the former president faces a new danger: not that his lies are outlandish but that they are getting stale.

September 13, 2024

Ian Frazier

Heeeere’s Tim!

Governor and Mrs. Walz break the Democrats’ pattern of seeming to prefer the coasts.

August 13, 2024

Free from the Archives

William Dalrymple: Murder in Karachi

“One is a book of love, a simply written but very moving tribute to a murdered husband by a bereaved and grieving wife. The other is a book of hate, a passionate denunciation of a city and a country by a man who regards Karachi as a living hell, and Pakistan as a country of pure evil. Both books are of great interest; though the second is unsound on matters of fact and riddled with errors.”

Get Thee to a Nunnery!

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

June 20, 2024 issue

‘Joy’; from the Lombardy edition of the Taqwim as-Sihha, an eleventh-century medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad, circa 1390

Clair Wills

Love in Plague Time

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

January 16, 2020 issue

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Francine du Plessix Gray

Harrisburg: The Politics of Salvation

By 1970 Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a devout nun in the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and an art history teacher at Marymount College, had been transformed by the recent revolution in the Church and the political turbulence of the 1960s. Then in 1970, she was arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

June 1, 1972 issue

The North Star State

Aida Alami

Somali and American, a Minnesotan Community

Established by European settlers in the nineteenth century, it was once referred to as “White Cloud.” But today, this town of 68,000 inhabitants has seen a growing number of Somali refugees arrive in the last two decades to work in meat factories or to attend the local campus of the state university.

July 2, 2019

David Treuer

The Power Brokers

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

December 3, 2020 issue

Garry Wills

The People’s Choice

When Jesse Ventura revealed that he does not wear underwear, Fruit of the Loom sent him 12,000 pairs of undershorts. He donated them to two charities. Even boorishness, in the alchemy of this moment, became a benefaction. The citizens of Minnesota treat Ventura as a sly practical joke they are playing on themselves.

August 12, 1999 issue

Alison Lurie

The Frog Prince

One of Garrison Keillor’s greatest gifts is his ability to modulate from realism to fantasy, or from low farce to high comedy.

November 24, 1988 issue

The Democrats

Russell Baker

The Heights of Charm

“Though all FDR’s medical advice indicated the job might kill him, he had grown into it. It was what he did and who he was. His love for it was so obvious that millions would have cried out in disbelief if told that he was quitting.”

September 29, 2016 issue

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Ages of Jackson

“If the frontier was the force driving the Jacksonian upheaval, how to account for the preoccupation in the pamphlet literature by Jackson’s supporters with problems of a commercial society—with monopoly, with banking, with the business cycle, with the unequal distribution of the fruits of labor, with workingmen, with trade unions, with class conflict?”

December 7, 1989 issue

Garry Wills

The Party Isn’t Over

“Carter is criticized for his Georgia mafia, his personal righteousness, his remaining an ‘outsider’ even while in office. But all of these are necessary if he is to retain some claim upon the South. Denied the easy appeal of Wallace and Nixon to repression and veiled racism, he must cling to the distinctive style that links him to the South.”

June 15, 1978 issue

Irvin Ehrenpreis

Buchanan Redux

“James Buchanan’s great accomplishment as president was to relieve Lincoln of the burden of provoking the Civil War.”

August 8, 1974 issue

Our Warming World

Aaron Matz

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

Sophie Pinkham

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

Jonathan Mingle

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

More on Climate Change

Israel and Gaza

Loubna El Amine

Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

September 23, 2024

Tareq Baconi

Killing Their Way to Peace

Israel’s targeted assassinations have never succeeded at dismantling Palestinian resistance movements. Now they threaten to set off a regional war.

August 15, 2024

Joshua Leifer

A ‘Moral, Strategic, and Diplomatic Abyss’

In the latest round of disputes within Israel’s ruling coalition, the eliminationist, messianic far right seems poised to triumph.

July 2, 2024

Isabella Hammad

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

Brief Encounters

Elizabeth Kolbert, interviewed by Willa Glickman

Vegetative States

“Just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that qualities like intelligence and sentience are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom.”

September 28, 2024