October 19, 2020

The New York Review launched its first website over twenty years ago, in 1997. When we started a blog, some years later, the first post came from the historian Garry Wills—typed on a manual typewriter, and sent to the office via fax machine. In the years since, we’ve published thousands of articles, essays, personal histories, photo portfolios, and more, but have never lost sight of the commitment to critical analysis and clear, accessible writing that has defined us as a magazine.

Today, the Review is launching a newly redesigned website. The new nybooks.com integrates the magazine’s print and online articles while making the archive—everything we have published since the magazine was founded in 1963—more easily accessible. The site is energetic and colorful and, we think, fresh: an announcement of the kind of writing we aim to publish, and a tribute to the bold print covers of the magazine’s earliest issues, designed almost sixty years ago, in a small, paper-strewn, smoke-filled office at 250 West Fifty-Seventh Street.

We have also reorganized our articles into four main categories that we think make the contents easier to browse—Politics, Literature, Arts, Ideas—each with subsections beneath. Our search functionality has, we’re happy to say, improved. And we’ve introduced a metered paywall that we hope will grant you the flexibility to discover the stories that interest you most.

This website relaunch coincides with the publication of our 2020 Election Issue—the 1,200th since the magazine’s founding—in which we’ve published the first part of our quadrennial Election Symposium. To celebrate, we’re dropping our paywall through the election, on November 3, offering free access to the current issue as well as to our full archive of over 20,000 articles. We are also making available a selection of classic New York Review pieces, “Twenty-Five from the Archive,” listed below.

Whether you’re looking for coverage of the electoral circus or anything but—we hope you’ll dive right in.

Happy reading,
Emily Greenhouse and Gabriel Winslow-Yost, co-editors

P.S. Please see the current issue page for our new issue, and you can visit “The Latest” to see all the online-only (formerly NYR Daily) material we publish.

Twenty-Five from the Archive

Ellen Willis
See America First (1970)

Peter Singer
Animal Liberation (1973)

Susan Sontag
Illness as Metaphor (1978)

James Baldwin
A Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis (1971)

Elizabeth Hardwick
Billie Holiday (1976)

Renata Adler
The Perils of Pauline Kael (1980)

Oliver Sacks
The Bull on the Mountain (1984)

Hannah Arendt
Lying in Politics: On The Pentagon Papers (1971)

Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics? (1986)

Zadie Smith
Speaking in Tongues (2009)

Gore Vidal
Remembering Orson Welles (1989)

Joan Didion
Insider Baseball (1988)

Václav Havel
Kicking the Door (1979)

Maya Lin
Making the Memorial (2000)

Tony Judt
On ‘The Plague’ (2001)

Octavio Paz
Food of the Gods (1987)

Hilary Mantel
The Perils of Antoinette (2007)

Isaiah Berlin
The Great Amateur (1968)

Charles Rosen
Aimez-Vous Brahms? (1988)

Mary McCarthy
Saying Good-by to Hannah (1976)

Noam Chomsky
The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)

Hilton Als
Michael Jackson (2009)

J.M. Coetzee
The Marvels of Walter Benjamin (2001)

Alma Guillermoprieto
Fidel in the Evening (1998)

Darryl Pinckney
Sweet Evening Breeze (1984)