NYR Online

Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

September 23, 2024

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

What the New Right Wants

The Heritage Foundation has reinvented itself to include a new generation of conservatives at odds with their elders. Project 2025 lays bare the contradictions.  

September 22, 2024

Trump’s Old News

The debate showed that the former president faces a new danger: not that his lies are outlandish but that they are getting stale.

September 13, 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 Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

The Women She Left Behind

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

September 18, 2024

Desert Visions

The flamingos were listening to and watching me and I was listening to and watching them. We were reading one another.

September 4, 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

Betraying Iraqi Girls

If Iraq legalizes child marriage, it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression.

September 15, 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

Voting for Their Jobs

Georgia’s capital might lean toward the opposition in next month’s elections—but in smaller towns dissent is weaker and critics still more embattled.

September 19, 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

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

Ahead of the Diminishing World

Most of the bohemians Alice Neel painted were far from my own queer milieu in downtown New York—but when she turned to that world she captured it with energy and defiance. 

September 8, 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

‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’

Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators. 

August 25, 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

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 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

‘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

Vegetative States

“Just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that qualities like intelligence and sentience are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom.”

September 28, 2024

Accounts of the Struggle

“The work for Palestinians today is to explore how we can reclaim our revolutionary legacy and extend it into the twenty-first century.”

September 21, 2024

Ways of Seeing

“My work always follows one rule: make images that remind the viewer they are images.”

September 14, 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

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