NYR Online

Essays Dispatches Gallery

Tariq Mir

Kashmir: Crackdowns and Plunder

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

July 21, 2024

James Romm

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

Ada Wordsworth

Uzbek Uncertainties

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

July 18, 2024

Dilara O’Neil

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

Robert Chandler

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

On Israel and Gaza

Joshua Leifer

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

Isabella Hammad

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

Neve Gordon and Penny Green

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

Yasmin El-Rifae

A View from Cairo

The Egyptian government’s repression of its citizens and the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine are inextricably linked.

May 12, 2024

Essays

Rachel Eisendrath

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

Anna Leszkiewicz

‘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

Yi-Ling Liu

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

Patricia J. Williams

‘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

Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan

Forever Elsewhere

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

June 19, 2024

Karen Solie

Harmony

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

June 11, 2024

Nikil Saval

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

Kathryn Hughes

Written by Paw

In novels and magazines from the turn of the last century, cats started speaking their minds. What if they were talking about us?

June 4, 2024

Politics

David Cole

The Supreme Court’s Power Grab

In a series of disturbing decisions this term, the Supreme Court drastically weakened the power of the executive agencies that govern financial markets, agriculture, health care, energy, the airwaves, the environment, the workplace, and so much else.

August 15, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Savior Complex

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

July 2, 2024

Joshua Craze, Kholood Khair, and Raga Makawi

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

Duncan Hosie

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

Marc Levinson

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

Kim Phillips-Fein

The CUNY Experiment

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

May 23, 2024

Katie J. Wells, Declan Cullen, and Kafui Attoh

Inside Uber’s Political Machine

By spending vast sums on political lobbying, Uber has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the regulatory state.

May 9, 2024

Gaby Del Valle

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

Dispatches

Christopher Benfey

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

Christian Caryl

Georgia Erupts

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

May 15, 2024

Piper French

UCLA: Whose Violence?

For two days, UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment was a site of violent aggression—committed not by the students but against them.

May 11, 2024

Walter Johnson

In Harvard Yard

Civil discourse and critical inquiry are not abstract concepts in the encampment. They are active principles.

May 8, 2024

Climate

Oliver Whang

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

Andrew Katzenstein, Willa Glickman, Daniel Drake, and Lucy Jakub

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

April 12, 2024

Vanessa Ogle

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

Adam Hanieh

‘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

Art & Photography

Celeste Marcus

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

Jennifer Krasinski

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

Martin Filler

A Long Exposure

The pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard has lived in the shadows of his more famous peers. A new exhibition brings him into the light.

June 22, 2024

Lucy Scholes

Entwined for Life

For decades, the painter Dorothy Hepworth and her partner Patricia Preece carried out an elaborate artistic deception.

May 26, 2024

Film & TV

Michael Hofmann

Order 1, Chaos 0

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

June 29, 2024

J. Hoberman

Polish Compassion

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

June 20, 2024

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

More Real Than Life

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

May 4, 2024

Lauren Michele Jackson

Tired of Pink

The original Mean Girls documented a widespread angst about the perils of “Girl World.” What happens when we keep bringing it back?

February 10, 2024

Music, Dance, Theater

Sam Huber

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

David Toop

All That Floats and Drifts

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

June 12, 2024

Hannah Gold

Second Hand News

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

May 18, 2024

Erica Getto

The Company She Keeps

Molissa Fenley’s kinetic dances emerge from the tension between the lone artist and the collective: her group works resemble kaleidoscopic solos, while her solos feel like duets with a ghost.

April 20, 2024

Brief Encounters

Iris de Moüy, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

La Parisienne

“The best way to learn to draw is to look at the world with an endless curiosity.”

July 13, 2024

Francine Prose, interviewed by Sam Needleman

In a Good Way

“The contemporary novel is not only alive and well but healthier than ever: as brave, as accomplished, certainly more diverse.”

July 6, 2024

Jonathan Lethem, interviewed by Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Cross-Country Tripping

“Even before I ever drove, I was in some sense connected to this resonance with road-tripping by proxy, through the archetypes in literature and cinema, just as I’d become interested in the desert west before I ever got there.”

June 29, 2024

Karen Solie, interviewed by Jana Prikryl

The Mechanic

“Ideally, a poem should happen to the reader.”

June 22, 2024

The Critic and Her Publics

Christine Smallwood, interviewed by Merve Emre

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

Carina del Valle Schorske, interviewed by Merve Emre

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

Maggie Doherty, interviewed by Merve Emre

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Doreen St. Félix, interviewed by Merve Emre

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

From the Editors

written and illustrated by Leanne Shapton

Over Donner Pass

A dispatch from the Art Editor

July 17, 2024

written and illustrated by Leanne Shapton

After a Fashion

A dispatch from the Art Editor

June 19, 2024

written and illustrated by Leanne Shapton

Best in Show

A dispatch from the Art Editor

May 15, 2024

written and illustrated by Leanne Shapton

Tulips!

A dispatch from the Art Editor

April 17, 2024

From the Archive: Palestine

Tareq Baconi

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