NYR Online

Essays Dispatches Gallery

Anahid Nersessian

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

Piper French

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

Hannah Gold

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

James A. Goldston and Aryeh Neier

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

Martin Filler

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

The Return of Trump

Ben Tarnoff, Zephyr Teachout, Bill McKibben, Michael Hofmann, Linda Greenhouse, and Garry Wills

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

Rozina Ali, Christopher Benfey, Quinn Slobodian, Walter M. Shaub Jr., Bridget Read, and Jon Allsop

The Return of Trump—II

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

November 9, 2024

Christine Henneberg, John Washington, Suzanne Schneider, Aryeh Neier, E. Tammy Kim, and Andrew O’Hagan

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

Paisley Currah, Trevor Jackson, Kim Phillips-Fein, Ian Frazier, Adam Gaffney, and Madeleine Schwartz

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

Astra Taylor, Michael Greenberg, Coco Fusco, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Thomas Powers, and Anne Enright

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

Yuri Slezkine, Wesley Lowery, Carolina A. Miranda, Nitin K. Ahuja, and Susan Neiman

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

Dahlia Krutkovich, Omer Bartov, Catherine Coleman Flowers, and Joshua Craze

The Return of Trump—VII

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

November 17, 2024

On Israel and Gaza

Andrew Arsan

‘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

Sari Bashi

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

Joost Hiltermann

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

Loubna El Amine

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

On the Election

Walter M. Shaub Jr.

‘Acts of Submission’

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

November 22, 2024

David Cole

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

Jonathan Mingle

Planet 2025

Donald Trump’s war on what he calls the “deep state” and his broader war on climate science are neatly aligned.

October 30, 2024

Suzanne Schneider

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

Essays

James Gleick

Bad Readers

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

November 23, 2024

Jack Hanson

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

Scott W. Stern

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

Forrest Gander

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

David Levi Strauss

Three Kinds of Sun

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

August 24, 2024

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

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

Politics

Olivia Paschal

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

Tisaranee Gunasekara

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

Gabriel Winant

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

Ikhtisad Ahmed

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

Dunya Mikhail

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

Jan-Werner Müller

‘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

Shaun Richman

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

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

Dispatches

S. C. Cornell

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

William Neuman

One Door at a Time

Canvassing for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania, I came to feel that face-to-face contact was no match for social media, online influencers, and Fox News.

November 12, 2024

John Washington

‘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

Mark Gevisser

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

Climate

Adam Hanieh

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

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

Art & Photography

Adrian Nathan West

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

Peter Cole

‘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

Anahid Nersessian

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

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

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

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Sarah Schulman

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

Victoria Baena

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

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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

Fiction & Poetry

Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

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

October 5, 2024

Julia Kornberg

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

Colm Tóibín

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

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

Film & TV

Beatrice Loayza

‘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

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

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

Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller

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

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Music

Sam Huber

‘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

Nate Wooley

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

Andrew Katzenstein

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

Nicole Sealey

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

Theater & Dance

Brian Seibert

‘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

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

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

Hannah Gold

Second Hand News

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

May 18, 2024

Brief Encounters

Olivia Paschal, interviewed by Willa Glickman

‘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

Jorie Graham, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

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

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, interviewed by Sam Needleman

The Pen and the Brush

“Style is what finally draws me most profoundly to writers and artists.”

November 16, 2024

Joseph O’Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake

All Bets Are Off

“The Democrats must do everything in their power and influence to oppose, slow down, and attach political costs to the Trump agenda.”

November 9, 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