NYR Online

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

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

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

Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown

Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists. 

June 5, 2024

Heeeere’s Tim!

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

August 13, 2024

Kamala Harris’s Big-Business Choice

As president, Harris could take further steps toward a fair and free economy—or roll back her predecessor’s antitrust gains. 

August 4, 2024

Kamalapalooza

The liberal grassroots coalition has transformed Kamala Harris’s fortunes. How can she harness its power?

August 3, 2024

Trump’s Oath of Denial

He tried to overthrow an election once—why not expect him to do so again?

August 2, 2024

Late to the Party

In the aftermath of this summer’s scramble to replace Joe Biden, Democrats will need to confront why they had such trouble thinking and acting as a party—even when it mattered most. 

July 30, 2024

Savior Complex

Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to feel that he alone can rescue America.

July 2, 2024

The Immunity Con

For the first time in American history, the supreme judicial authority is parsing how much criminality to permit the chief executive. 

May 1, 2024

Death and Detention on the Texas Border 

As Joe Biden and Greg Abbott escalate their standoff over border enforcement, migrants find themselves caught in the middle.

May 5, 2024

Three Kinds of Sun

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun.

August 24, 2024

The Pitch of Passion

James Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence.

August 2, 2024

A Portrait on the Wall

It had not really occurred to me until many years after her death that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

July 14, 2024

‘The Small Girl’s Proust’

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle tends to be read as a romance novel. But beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit. 

July 13, 2024

‘This Head, These Limbs’

After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law.

June 25, 2024

Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

June 19, 2024

Harmony

You can practice a song a thousand times and still its first note sends you into the unknown.

June 11, 2024

Nowhere But Up

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life. 

June 8, 2024

‘Make Europe Great Again’

Viktor Orbán’s program has found less support among European politicians than it has among far-right ideologues in the United States, who consider his regime a model for a second Trump administration.

August 20, 2024

Misjudging Labor

The Supreme Court’s recent Starbucks decision is the latest episode in a long history of judicial hostility toward labor.

August 10, 2024

Macronism in Retreat

In France’s parliamentary elections, the left and center made a brief nonaggression pact—then resumed their mutual rancor. How, in the long term, can the country hold off the right?

July 27, 2024

Planet TikTok

The app’s young user base, fragmented content, and amped-up algorithm helped it spread around the world. If the US bans it, what would be lost?

July 9, 2024

Sudan Starves

As its civil war rages on, Sudan is facing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years. 

June 23, 2024

The Hollowing of the Eighth Amendment

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment. 

June 18, 2024

What Is a Supermarket?

If the FTC blocks the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons, will bigger giants of food retailing like Walmart come out as winners?

June 14, 2024

The CUNY Experiment

The City University of New York has long stood at once for meritocratic uplift and for civil disobedience. 

May 23, 2024

Kashmir: Crackdowns and Plunder

By revoking Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, India has launched a settler-colonial project. 

July 21, 2024

Uzbek Uncertainties

Uzbekistan is divided between nostalgia for the Soviet past and patriotic hope for an independent future.

July 18, 2024

Nîmes and Other Destinations

When we travel, we sometimes find ourselves in places—destinations of memory or the imagination—not found on any maps.

June 16, 2024

Georgia Erupts

Protestors in Georgia are opposing a “foreign agents” law and defending a liberal-democratic vision for their country.

May 15, 2024

The Next Mass Extinction?

As avian influenza spreads to the farthest reaches of the planet, scientists have expressed both urgency and fatalism.

April 14, 2024

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

April 12, 2024

Shipping’s Shadow World

The shipping industry, which moves more than 80 percent of global trade, is poorly regulated, environmentally dangerous, and rife with labor violations.

April 9, 2024

‘Every Molecule of Hydrocarbon Will Come Out’

Gulf States are increasingly shaping global climate policy, even as they plan to accelerate fossil fuel production. 

February 21, 2024

Pitiless, Restless Brecht

A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress.

August 22, 2024

Lights, Camera, Royals!

Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

August 18, 2024

‘We Took Care of the Network’

The Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles imagined an asylum that could cure not only individual patients but society itself.

August 17, 2024

Worldly van Eyck

Was the Netherlandish master a painter of visionary experience or of life here on earth?

August 14, 2024

Refusing the Eye

In Simone Leigh’s sculptures, strange and contingent details redirect the viewer’s gaze.

August 8, 2024

Frozen

For centuries explorers risked their lives seeking passage through the Arctic. A recent exhibition and book juxtapose the region’s mythologized past with its uncertain future.

July 20, 2024

The Sculptor of Flight

With deep respect for his subjects—from birds to borders—Constantin Brâncuși got to the essence of their movement.

July 16, 2024

The Real Thing

The energy in Chaïm Soutine’s portraits, landscapes, and still lifes is evident to even the most casual viewer.

July 10, 2024

Be Yourself

In her debut film, Janet Planet, the playwright Annie Baker tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard. 

August 11, 2024

Order 1, Chaos 0

Football is a crazed bid for compensation, for escape, for some transcendent atavistic loyalty.

June 29, 2024

Polish Compassion

Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history. 

June 20, 2024

More Real Than Life

In Jane Schoenbrun’s films, personal metamorphosis happens on both sides of the screen. 

May 4, 2024

Color Me Country

Cowboy Carter is both a country album and a Beyoncé album—the genres aren’t mutually exclusive, nor should they be. 

August 7, 2024

Take Eight 

The saxophonist Jon De Lucia brings Dave Brubeck’s overlooked octet back to life.

August 6, 2024

Circles ’Neath Your Eyes

The men and women in Lucinda Williams’s songs struggle to turn their injuries into something they can live with. 

July 11, 2024

All That Floats and Drifts

André 3000’s flute album mines an overlooked tradition of Black ambient and exotica music.

June 12, 2024

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024

Dancing Laser Beams

George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.

July 17, 2024

Taking the Performance Apart

A retrospective of the artist Joan Jonas displays her will of steel, her porosity before the world, and her ways of playing with perception.

June 30, 2024

Second Hand News

In David Adjmi’s new play, a fictional Seventies rock band struggles with life and art.

May 18, 2024

Son of the Thin Man

“I suspect a lot of writers develop their style to offset qualities they otherwise find lacking in themselves.”

September 7, 2024

Gregor Samsa in Mexico

“Truth—open, public truth—is under attack both by organized crime and by the state itself.”

August 31, 2024

Taking the Joke Further

“What makes for a good piece of written humor is another of the mysteries of art.”

August 24, 2024

Caribbean Voices

“There’s a kind of earnestness, a kind of humor that is very particular to the Caribbean and its tradition of picong—bold, verbal jousting.”

August 17, 2024

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

Over Donner Pass

A dispatch from the Art Editor

July 17, 2024

After a Fashion

A dispatch from the Art Editor

June 19, 2024

Best in Show

A dispatch from the Art Editor

May 15, 2024

Tulips!

A dispatch from the Art Editor

April 17, 2024

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014