Nathaniel Rich

American Humbug

“It is very amusing,” P.T. Barnum said, to see how easily people “deceive themselves by being too incredulous.”

Pandemic Journal, April 6–12

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham, Hugh Eakin in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dalia Hatuqa in Amman, and more.

Swiveling Man

Downhill Racing

Philip Roth (1933–2018)

Though two generations separated us, I felt that he spoke directly to me or, in some mystical, incoherent sense, spoke from somewhere inside my brain.

Roth Agonistes

Philip Roth’s ‘Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013’

Rushdie’s New York Bubble

Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Golden House’

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Southern Despair

A defense of rural America

Mixed-Up Kids

Paul Auster’s ‘4 3 2 1’

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Joan Didion in the Deep South

Inside the Sacrifice Zone

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s ‘Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right’

The Adventures of George Plimpton

A reader can’t help but be impressed by his accomplishments, despite his efforts to undermine them

Arthur Kern's Creatures

“Arthur Kern: The Surreal World of a Reclusive Sculptor” is at the same time a debut and a retrospective. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s emphasis on Kern’s unusual personal story seems misplaced when one is confronted with his work, which is strange enough to survive any creation myth.

In DeLillo’s Icy Future

In Zero K Don DeLillo has found the perfect physical repository for his oracular visions

To the Lighthouse

James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation

His observations about race in America feel as relevant and cutting as ever

Amazonian Ambivalence

Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent features the familiar fever-addled explorers and indigenous tribesmen imparting portentous wisdom, but the film is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty.

A Most Dangerous Occupation