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For our print subscribers: Deliveries of mail during the holidays from an overwhelmed US Postal Service have been inordinately slow. Our latest issue—the January 14 issue—was mailed on December 28. We know that some subscribers have still not received their issues and we hope and expect the issues to be delivered to everyone soon. Read the January 14 issue here.

Geoffrey O’Brien

Hitler in Antarctica

A historian of the Third Reich traces the processes by which history is not simply distorted but replaced by a fantastic parallel version.

January 14, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

It’s Not Science Fiction

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.

December 17, 2020 issue

Colin Thubron

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

December 3, 2020 issue

Pankaj Mishra

Grand Illusions of the West

It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.

November 19, 2020 issue

Mike Jay

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560s

Anthony Grafton

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

November 5, 2020 issue

Hari Kunzru

The Wages of Whiteness

Whiteness is a concept that can be made to serve many interests and positions, not all of them compatible.

September 24, 2020 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Defender of Differences

On Franz Boas and his critics

May 28, 2020 issue

The Dark Web

Tom Scocca

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

A tweet by Donald Trump featuring an image of himself as Pepe the Frog, a symbol used by the far right, October 13, 2015

Hari Kunzru

For the Lulz

4chan, Gamergate, and how thwarted, angry young men have reshaped political discourse

March 26, 2020 issue

Claudia Dreifus

‘Social Media Reward Bad Behavior’

The former head of Reddit on how platforms like Facebook have amplified disinformation—and don’t want to stop—because attention equals profit.

October 26, 2020

The Latest

Peter Lowe

A World Without Us: Josef Koudelka’s ‘Ruins’

These photographs of ancient sites, taken around the Mediterranean between 1991 and 2015, are particularly apt in our time of isolation and upheaval.

January 16, 2021

Andrea Pitzer

Mission to the Frozen North

William Barents’s last Arctic voyage was destined to be not a triumph of navigation but a struggle to survive. Four centuries later, his dream of a Northeast Passage is a troubling reality.

January 5, 2021

Pamela Druckerman

The Consolations of Philosophy

My philosopher-therapist thought the ancient Greeks could lead me to the happy state of eudaimonia—literally, having good demons. But would mine play along?

December 31, 2020

Benjamin Moser

Sarajevo Revisited

Retracing my own steps to Bosnia, which were earlier in Susan Sontag’s footprints, I found the city still scarred yet inspiring in its affirmation of human dignity.

December 29, 2020

Lucy McKeon and Matt Seaton

The Best of 2020

The past year’s highlights on nybooks.com.

December 26, 2020

Gavin Francis

Changing Psychiatry’s Mind

Two books investigate the science and pseudoscience of diagnosing mental illness.

January 14, 2021 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble

Robert Shiller argues for the power of stories in shaping economics.

January 14, 2021 issue

James Romm

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

January 14, 2021 issue

Ferdinand Mount

Democracy’s Demagogues

A new history of five heroes of the revolutionary period considers the power and instability of charismatic leadership.

January 14, 2021 issue

Ulf Brunnbauer

The History of Resistance: An Exchange

The Austrian historian of Eastern Europe disputes the Croatian writer’s critique of historical revisionism in the former Yugoslavia and other post-Communist countries.

December 16, 2020