NYR Online

The Return of Trump—I

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences. 

November 8, 2024

The Return of Trump—II

On Gaza, trade, con men, sinking feelings, the federal workforce, and “Brexit plus plus plus.”

November 9, 2024

The Return of Trump—III

On abortion, labor, NatCon, the rise of authoritarianism, the darkroom of propaganda, and the threat of mass deportation. 

November 10, 2024

The Return of Trump—IV

On burnout, hell, billionaires, health care, the specter of the limousine liberal, and the anti-trans agenda.

November 11, 2024

The Return of Trump—V

On tantrums, dominion, the Southern Strategy, fearmongering ads, New York’s haves and have-nots, and Candidate Fain. 

November 13, 2024

The Return of Trump—VI

On rage, fluoride, the task of the journalist, the Garden of American Heroes, and the Buffs and the Blues. 

November 15, 2024

The Return of Trump—VII

On veterans, fascism, Africa abandoned, and “less-than-kosher activities.”

November 17, 2024

The ICC: Myths and Realities

The most prominent arguments against the court’s recent arrest warrants for Israeli leaders fall apart under scrutiny.

December 6, 2024

‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Israel’s assault on Lebanon threatens to render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration.

November 2, 2024

North Gaza: Between Death and Displacement

As it escalates its attacks on north Gaza, the Israeli army has ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate—and cut off food aid to all who remain. 

October 17, 2024

The Path to Regional War

For more than nine months, Israel and the Iran-led axis of resistance maintained a precarious balance of mutual deterrence. Now that balance has collapsed.

October 11, 2024

‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

For a range of far-right activists, Trump’s second term will be a chance to discipline public schools—and ultimately defund them.

January 11, 2025

The Reunited

The Biden administration has spent years reunifying families separated during Trump’s first term—but as his second approaches, they find themselves vulnerable again. 

December 11, 2024

‘Acts of Submission’

An open letter to the director of the Office of Government Ethics.

November 22, 2024

What Could Stop Him?

Our Constitution includes multiple guardrails against Trump-like presidents. But those checks and balances only work when citizens resist.

November 18, 2024

On Leverett Pond

For decades I have thought back to a moment of terror I felt one Christmas Eve nearly fifty years ago. 

December 24, 2024

A Microcosm of the World

The complete, unaired 1976 BBC interview

December 21, 2024

Bad Readers

AI chatbots have been trained on trillions of words—but all in the service of plausibility over truth.

November 23, 2024

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 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

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

Free Speech for TikTok?

As the Supreme Court decides whether to let the US ban a hugely popular social media platform, it can either learn from its earlier mistakes or repeat them.

January 8, 2025

Syria: The Prison Gates Thrown Open

The Assad regime’s prisons were some of the worst in the world: sites of isolation, humiliation, torture, starvation, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale.  

December 22, 2024

‘Destruction Through Inclusion’ 

The far right’s ambiguous triumph in recent Austrian elections holds lessons for Europe as a whole. 

December 19, 2024

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land in Appalachia. In western North Carolina, those questions have everything to do with the booming tourist economy.

November 3, 2024

An Inflection Point in Sri Lanka

In the aftermath of a protracted economic crisis and a historic popular struggle, a left-wing party has come to power. Can it address the country’s deep-rooted structural issues? 

October 28, 2024

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

A New Chapter for Bangladesh?

When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.

September 28, 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

At the Gates of Fortress Europe

The story of Sajjad Mohammedhasan, who sought asylum but received a year in Lithuania’s border prisons.     

December 17, 2024

Death in Nogales

An unarmed Mexican migrant was shot dead on an Arizona ranch. The response revealed widespread support for violence at the border.

November 16, 2024

‘We Got Kidnapped Again’

Migrants are facing unprecedented dangers traveling to—and waiting at—the US–Mexico border, but the Democratic Party has yet to rethink its immigration policy.

October 25, 2024

Fragile Unity in South Africa

Short of a majority for the first time in three decades, the African National Congress now has to govern with its longtime rival. Will the alliance hold?

October 23, 2024

The Climate Finance Racket

By investing in climate finance while accelerating fossil fuel production, the Gulf states are playing all sides of the energy market.

November 11, 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

Risky, Ephemeral, Revolutionary Prints

A survey of Mexican printmaking shows how enduringly the country’s illustrators blurred the boundary between art and the world of the working poor.

January 1, 2025

‘Wonderful and Vicious Things’

In his constant urge to renew himself, the photographer Sohrab Hura comes across as an artist committed to tilling hard ground.

December 18, 2024

Acts of Self-Erasure

A new exhibition of the conceptual artist Christine Kozlov shows how she worked by concealing her own tracks.

December 13, 2024

A Cowboy in Winter

The artist Bruce Nauman’s latest exhibition reconfirms that he doesn’t believe in letting his viewers off easy.

December 3, 2024

Under the Spanish Volcano

A recent exhibition at the Prado showcased artists engaging with the ferment and conflict of turn-of-the-century Spain.

November 24, 2024

‘A Window to the Word’

Joel Shapiro’s sculptures and works on paper pitch the viewer into a quietly sublime and kinesthetic experience.

November 16, 2024

A Living Requiem

In her new installation, the sculptor Nour Mobarak transforms the hymns of the powerful into the complaints of the weak.

October 25, 2024

A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

In the first decade of his career, the artist CF seemed to be reinventing comics from first principles, assembling strange new worlds only to smash them into pieces.

October 24, 2024

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 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 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

‘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

‘Let Them Eat War’

Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator draws on a long history of nostalgia for an idealized republican Rome.

December 15, 2024

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general. 

November 3, 2024

Anora’s Honor

The title character in Sean Baker’s new film is sharp-tongued and invulnerable—until a marriage plot catches up with her.

November 1, 2024

‘Every Carnival Has Its End’

A recent performance by the Santa Fe Opera of Don Giovanni showed what is gained—and what is lost—in demystifying its demon protagonist.

January 12, 2025

Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

December 28, 2024

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

Eastern Sounds 

Ahmed Abdul-Malik recorded six overlooked albums combining jazz and North African folk music. A new European quartet has revived his legacy to create a new music of their own.

October 6, 2024

Mama Tried

In Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, newly revived with Adam Driver, a country star looks back on his wasted years. 

December 8, 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

What Happened

“We must allow the past to speak on its own terms, even when asking questions that are pertinent to the present.”

January 11, 2025

Eyes on the Border

“People living in unlivable circumstances will do what they can to seek a better life, whatever is being said about them in the American media.”

December 14, 2024

‘An Internal Colony’

“What makes the Ozarks unique is that the richest family in the world lives in what is historically one of the poorest regions in the country.”

December 7, 2024

The Appall

“When we see images of the desperate people under the rubble—or starving—or worse, much worse—it’s imperative to keep in mind they live, and lived, profound interior lives in which they imagined, explored, invented, and dreamed.”

November 30, 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