Yasmine El Rashidi

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

Stories Adrift

The crux of Netflix’s melodrama The Swimmers, a biopic of two Syrian refugees who pursued Olympic stardom, is everything it leaves unsaid. 

#FreeAlaa

Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s imprisonment has never been about what he did but rather who he is, what he represents.

Looking Back on Revolution

“It seems vital to look beyond my everyday life and consider experiences contrary, different, more representative than my own.”

Pharaonic Ambition in Ferro-Concrete

This makeover of Egypt’s capital is not just heedless of its heritage, but wantonly destructive of old neighborhoods—all in service of a self-aggrandizing nationalist mythology.

Egypt: Lost Possibilities

What the revolution opened up in our lives—beyond activism—and then eventually took away.

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Growing Up in Hell

The Refugee Crisis Center-Stage

The Jungle, a play by two British writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, grapples with the two sides of life in the camp near Calais, France, in equal measure harsh and hopeful. After some months working there as volunteers, they created this drama—originally performed in the camp by its refugee inhabitants.

Writing as Fast as Reality

A master craftsperson, Ali Smith seems to be completely liberated from ideas of what a novelist should be or do.

Toughing It Out in Cairo

Can we find meaning in being engaged again?

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Caught Between Worlds

Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Exit West’

Cairo Without End

Floating between fiction and autobiography, Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said’s first film, In the Last Days of the City, captures the continuities between the decades preceding the 2011 revolution, and the stark reality that has emerged since.

Egypt, 41 Months Later

It has been almost four years since Uncle died. Forty-one months since the revolution. Like all my friends I find it hard to sleep through the night.

Egypt: Face to Face

Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s “Our House Is On Fire,” a new series of works about Egyptians since the revolution, captures a reality that has been all but overlooked in the continuing story of the Arab uprisings.

What We Learned in Tahrir

Jehane Noujaim’s documentary about the Egyptian uprising, The Square, shows how a minority of exceedingly righteous idealists, somewhat privileged, are now fighting a growing majority who increasingly opt for stability over the more ambitious political goals to which the revolution first aspired.

Misunderstood Egypt

Violence in Cairo

A series of videos reveals a more complex reality of what happened in the August 14, 2013 crackdown on protesters in Cairo.

Misunderstood Egypt