NYR Online

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

March 15, 2025

‘Trump Gaza Number One’

The AI-generated vision of postwar Gaza that Trump posted on social media was only thirty-three seconds long, but it spoke volumes about how his administration sees the world.

March 2, 2025

Days and Nights in Gaza

Watching TV that first day, we awaited the roar of planes and the rumble of explosions. We didn’t have to wait long. 

February 9, 2025

Israel: Life By the Sword

For fifteen months Israel’s government clung to the fantasy of “total victory” in Gaza—with considerable public support. 

January 25, 2025

Single-Player Politics

Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols.

March 16, 2025

Profiles in Self-Censorship

Under pressure from the Trump administration, many universities are preemptively scaling back their DEI programs—even though no law requires them to.

March 10, 2025

Our Chamberlain?

Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has been even more inept and inexplicable than the appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

March 3, 2025

Scot-Free

We are living through an inflection moment in the distribution of impunity.

March 1, 2025

Authoritarian Blitz

The Republican Party’s attempts to suspend the rule of law can only be stopped if Democratic leaders show the moral clarity and political courage of a normal party of opposition.

February 25, 2025

The Making of Emergencies

For centuries, theorists of liberal governance have worried about how emergencies can unfetter executive power. Trump has given those fears new urgency. 

February 16, 2025

Speed Up the Breakdown

The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins.

February 15, 2025

More Babies!

Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

February 7, 2025

Bidenomics: Farewell to an Idea? 

Joe Biden pursued as transparently assertive an industrial policy as any since the mobilization for World War II. Why did it fail to win over voters?

January 15, 2025

What Labor Could Lose

After four years under Jennifer Abruzzo, who fought to revitalize its mission, the National Labor Relations Board finds itself more threatened than ever.

January 19, 2025

‘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

USAID: Goodbye to All That? 

By gutting USAID, the Trump administration has imperiled the lives of thousands—and threatened the very future of the humanitarian and development industries.  

March 12, 2025

Nothing Gold Can Stay 

Gold is both a vehicle for disguising illicit financial flows and a product of illicit activity itself.

February 1, 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

Patriarchal Bargains

In her long-out-of-print study of conservative gender politics, Andrea Dworkin reflected on how right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them.

February 26, 2025

‘Life, Work, and Architecture’

Elizabeth Mock, whose exhibitions on domestic architecture thrilled midcentury museumgoers, believed that contemporary design should be for everyone.

February 5, 2025

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

Justice for the Rural Poor

When I started fighting for sanitation rights in Alabama, I felt some nostalgia for a time when our government committed to lifting up people who had been beaten down.  

January 28, 2025

A Thornbush in the Desert 

Memories of a Uyghur political prisoner.

January 14, 2025

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

Turkey: The Buried and the Dead

In the aftermath of devastating earthquakes in 2023, survivors looking for the missing have been trapped in a legal and bureaucratic labyrinth.

March 9, 2025

War and Peace in Munich

At the city’s annual international security conference, European leaders vowed to double down on national defense. At what cost?

March 6, 2025

Darfur: A War Within a War

As a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces rages across Sudan, Arab and non-Arab communities are once again fighting in Darfur.

February 2, 2025

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

Smoke, Heat, Flame

California’s recent firestorms may be unprecedented in their intensity and damage, but what seems like a new crisis is just the latest chapter in a longer history of exploitation.

February 15, 2025

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

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

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

‘Routine, Ordinary Care’

The photographs in Carmen Winant’s latest book remind us how unsensational abortion access is, and how necessary. 

March 8, 2025

From Whisper to Shout

The photographer Boris Mikhailov has spent a lifetime seeing through the illusions of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.

February 22, 2025

Edward Gorey in the Basement

Hidden away in the Review’s archives were eleven panels of an unfinished serial comic, Les Mystères de Constantinople.

February 22, 2025

Cherchez les Femmes

An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery retells the history of transnational modernism from the perspective of expatriate American women. 

February 8, 2025

A Human Among Humans

The photographer Larry Fink never saw social events as a disposable theme. For him, they were life itself.

January 31, 2025

A Radioactive Sublime?

An exhibition in Paris suggests that our contemporary sensibility—which combines an awareness of overwhelming manmade power and civilizational fragility—has its origins in the Atomic Age.

January 30, 2025

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

‘Her Own Woman’

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page—and then reimagined the self she had established.

March 13, 2025

Grandfather’s Bible

In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.

February 23, 2025

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

Of Light

Payal Kapadia’s films are defined by the slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions.

March 14, 2025

A Country for Old Monsters

In Nosferatu and Wolf Man, the forces of evil are not so much confronted as fatalistically, inevitably succumbed to. 

February 10, 2025

Sympathy for the Troll

Leos Carax’s ostentatiously intelligent films, full of references to cinematic history, are all in frantic search of a worldview.

January 26, 2025

Tinker Tailor Soldier Sigh

Where we might have expected a show about the state of the nation, the spy series Slow Horses instead examines the state of the office.

January 18, 2025

‘Haunted, Haunted’

The characters in Mike Leigh’s new feature, anchored by a magnificent performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, hardly seem to be living in his usual noisy democracy.

January 16, 2025

‘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

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found 

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life. 

March 19, 2025

An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

‘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

‘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

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

A Constitutional Redline

“It is unprecedented for the federal government to proceed with a challenged action while in a court hearing on whether they can lawfully do so. It is a subversion of the rule of law.”

March 22, 2025

Brass in Pocket

“I wonder if nonfiction somehow taps into my (otherwise largely suppressed) competitive instincts. I never feel competitive when I’m writing fiction.”

March 15, 2025

“I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On”

“I’ve been trying to find some way to engage and comment on what’s been going on in Israel and Palestine, feeling that I couldn’t really sit back as a noncombatant, ducking and covering while this was happening.”

March 8, 2025

Notes from Underground

“Today the Russian government classifies different forms of protest as regular crimes. These prisoners want their actions and their persecution to be recognized as what they are: political.”

March 1, 2025

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

Anemones

A dispatch from the Art Editor

January 15, 2025

Wintry Mix

A dispatch from the Art Editor

December 18, 2024

A New Leaf

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 20, 2024

On the Gray Lakeshore

A dispatch from the Art Editor

October 19, 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