Writing in 1998, fifty years after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer called his younger self an “amateur,” by which he intended something between self-...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/a-hell-of-a-performance-norman-mailer/
A writer narrating his increasing loss of vision asks fundamental questions about sight and cognition.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/seeing-the-power-in-blindness-andrew-leland/
Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/stifled-rage-a-strange-life-louisa-may-alcott/
Digital technologies are likely to worsen environmental problems, but they can also assist in the protection and restoration of ecosystems —and strengthen our relationships with them.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-digital-planet-environmentalism-from-below/
Despite the gravity of subjects in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which include addiction and an obsession with the metaphysical, what makes the novel feel light is its bravado, buoyancy, and innovativ...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/poem-prayer-martyr-kaveh-akbar/
Donald Trump’s plans to destroy civil service protections if reelected is more than an employees’ rights issue. What’s at stake is democracy itself.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-corruption-playbook-trump-walter-shaub/
Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Crook Manifesto, depicts its characters’ perilous navigation of race, class, and crime in 1970s Harlem.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-jeopardy-is-the-juice-crook-manifesto-whitehead/
“Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can…. I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found. At the moment I don’t even k...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/staying-alive-the-wall-marlen-haushofer/
Two years after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian morale has plummeted.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/gloom-in-ukraine-tim-judah/
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall reveals that every parent’s marriage plot is her child’s Bildung.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/as-long-as-you-both-shall-live-anatomy-of-a-fall/
Belief in UFOs sits uneasily between science and theology.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/ufologists-unite-american-cosmic-d-w-pasulka/
In her new novel, Adelle Waldman gambles that it’s possible to draw out the interiority of her characters mainly by sketching their working conditions.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/human-resources-help-wanted-adelle-waldman/
about Hong Kong I know nothingcarrying an underground book for the tripland at Kai Tak Airport coral reef shimmersstrangers look for the coordinates of lightsthe skyline’s n...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/sidetracks-xxxiv-bei-dao/
For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-volcano-lovers-mount-vesuvius/
Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/furious-stasis-la-forza-del-destino/
Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus is a biography of the very private man at the center of one of the greatest public controversies of modern times.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-unwilling-celebrity-alfred-dreyfus/
Jonathan Blitzer's new book deftly explains the impact of decades of US foreign policy on Central America, but fails to move beyond the troubled terrain of our immigration policy "crisis."
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-truths-of-our-american-empire-jonathan-blitzer/
Martin MacInnes’s novel In Ascension reveals the technical sophistication of the newest genre fiction.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/18/the-long-view-in-ascension-martin-macinnes/
“Is the monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation?” asked Hilary Mantel in “Royal Bodies,” an incendiary 2013 essay for the London Review of Books. “We are happy to allow mo...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/27/kate-middleton-two-bodies/
Moira Donegan joins us from Stanford University, where she is a writer in residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Although Moira and I have corresponded about feminism and feminis...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/26/a-gender-emergency-moira-donegan/
My oldest friends, Tal and Nate, lived in Clinton Hill for fifteen years. When they moved there in 2005, virtually everyone around them rented; only a few families seemed to have very high income...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/26/musical-chairs-nyc-housing/
An empty stretch of road hemmed in by high cement walls. The level tarmac shines with dew. A muezzin is heard over traffic. Signs point toward Rachel’s Tomb and Jerusalem. Soon a whirring noise...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/24/saint-josef-koudelka/
Judging from the architectural plans that the Border Patrol presented to Congress in 2009, the I-19 Border Patrol Checkpoint was supposed to be enormous. It was to be built in Tubac, Arizona, som...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/23/checkpoint-dreams-arizona-border/
In February Jérôme Tubiana and Joshua Craze wrote a report for the NYR Online about a series of massacres in Darfur, Sudan, where Arab forces are attacking the non-Arab Masalit community as...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/23/tell-it-as-it-is-jerome-tubiana/
On October 13, 1966, the artist Marta Minujín invited sixty Argentine celebrities to a large room, ushered them to seats that were each equipped with a television set and a radio, and filmed and...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/21/wallow-around-and-live-minujin/
A dispatch from the Art Editor
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/20/unfamiliar-colors-leanne-shapton/
The painter Charles Burchfield kept a journal for most of his life, from 1909, when he was sixteen, to 1966, a year before his death. He filled some ten thousand pages—seventy-two notebooks con...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/19/an-orchard-for-a-dome-charles-burchfield/
In our April 4 issue, Daphne Merkin immerses herself in My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand’s “970-page, indexless brick of a memoir.” From this feat of self-mythologizing emerges “an ex...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/16/consider-diva-daphne-merkin/
In 1983, when Argentina held its first presidential election after seven years of military dictatorship, Raúl Alfonsín won with an optimistic slogan: “With democracy one eats, one is educated...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/15/argentina-into-the-abyss/
Most translators are the worthiest of people: gifted, erudite, hardworking, and modest in their material needs. People who crave money and fame choose other jobs. Babysitting would pay better, th...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/becoming-one-with-genius-jennifer-croft/
You said I had to sleep in the cage but the smoke alarm went off and wouldn’t stop so I was like fuck this and slept in the other room, whose love seat is hardly better than the cage. But you w...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/domme-song-8-michael-robbins/
A lively biography of Marie de Vignerot, the niece, confidante, and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, sheds light on the religious passions and political intrigues of seventeenth-century France.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/piety-power-la-duchesse-marie-de-vignerot/
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, About Dry Grasses, combines the painterly images, frustrated characters, and existential spirit of his earlier work.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/an-anatolian-chekhov-nuri-bilge-ceylan/
The modern reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Robert Louis Stevenson as a romantic fantasist, but in his day he was considered one of the best essayists of his gener...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/thus-i-lived-with-words-robert-louis-stevenson/
Tracy Kidder’s portrait of a doctor and his homeless patients offers personhood to people many Americans have trained themselves not to see.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/sisyphus-on-the-street-rough-sleepers/
In a past life I was not defined by his death.… I was not rerouted like a plane through ...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/intention-to-return-callie-siskel/
A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/a-wary-faith-in-the-courts-before-the-movement/
“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she flirted with the possibility that she was.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/the-way-she-was-barbra-streisand/
A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/wings-of-desire-they-flew-carlos-eire/
The bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death is an opportunity to ask what a witty dandy with the flamboyant attitudes of a raucously chauvinistic age can offer today's world.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/a-hectic-life-byron-a-life-in-ten-letters/
Behind the victory of his chosen successor in February’s elections lies a complicated story of how outgoing President Joko Widodo’s co-opted much of Indonesian society while consolidating imm...
Can histories of economic crisis provide us with useful lessons?
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/the-crash-next-time-seven-crashes-harold-james/
I am delighted to have Anahid Nersessian as my guest, not least because she’s a good friend. Anahid is a professor of English at UCLA. I have been reading her work for a long time, and I think ...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/12/the-channeler-anahid-nersessian/
On February 16, not long after news of the death of Alexey Navalny became public, television cameras caught Russian president Vladimir Putin on a visit to the industrial city of Chelyabinsk. He a...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/mourning-navalny-the-dissident/
Few pieces of federal legislation merit as much and receive as little attention as the Farm Bill.1 Most people who slog through this five-hundred-page-document are stunned by its breadth and comp...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/10/eyes-on-the-farm-bill/
“You can write down all the equations of fluid dynamics and still be surprised by a tornado.”
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/09/your-fancy-pants-brain-james-gleick/
On February 16 Alabama’s supreme court ruled that fertilized, unimplanted embryos created using in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children under state law. The three couples at the center of the...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/08/life-and-death-in-alabama-ivf/
I have often wished that I could access at least one of the many police files that have undoubtedly been compiled about me since September 11, 1973, the day a military junta toppled Salvador Alle...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/07/my-secret-police-files/
In one of the Supreme Court’s most sweeping rulings in modern times, a five-man majority has effectively nullified a critical provision of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the Un...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/06/the-constitution-turned-upside-down/
In the city of Rafah, at the southern edge of Gaza, people are consumed by terror and dread. Over the course of nearly five months, IDF airstrikes have funneled over half of the Strip’s populat...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/02/unilateral-actions-gaza-rafah/
In our February 22 issue, Robyn Creswell writes about one of the most fabled episodes in Arab history in his review of Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus. Al-A...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/02/a-permanent-elegy-creswell/
The earliest work in Guardian, an exhibition at Tara Downs of seven paintings by Budd Hopkins, is a small abstract tondo, a circular canvas with tracks of off-white paint rising from the surface ...
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/01/out-there-budd-hopkins-art-ufos/
At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/outsiders-outsider-harry-smith/
What has happened to Britain?
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/small-island-gary-younge/
Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/iraqs-twenty-years-of-carnage-wounded-tigris/
In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/every-creeping-thing-correspondence-of-charles-darwin/
The stated purpose of Jay Owens’s new book is to “think with dust,” specifically “human-made” dust and what it reveals—the forensic fingerprint, so to speak, that our species has left...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-cost-of-our-debris-dust-jay-owens/
The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/in-search-of-his-vocation-marcel-proust/
to Eliot Weinberger on his LXXV I. Madagascar: “a rice cooking” �...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/time-task-richard-sieburth/
A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.
Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January, about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/nefers-mission-january-sara-gallardo/
To understand Trump’s continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why do they find him so funny?
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/laugh-riot-trump-fintan-otoole/
A new book about Western journalists’ experience in Moscow during World War II sheds light on the problems of media manipulation and self-censorship in coverage of Russia today.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-party-line-the-red-hotel-alan-philps/
Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/diabolical-fame-erotic-vagrancy-taylor-burton/
She’s lying on the asphalt. Her small belly, her chest, her forehead, her hands, her cold feet bare in the night. A hungry cat paces. Shrapnel rings as it hits neighboring houses already bombed...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-moon-mosab-abu-toha/
The neighbor’s mulberry tree spilling its fruit onto the sidewalk stained the old sneakers I took from my mother’s closet, but there was no need to steal, there’s almost nothing you can ask...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/morning-of-departure-catherine-barnett/
For decades Gerald Rosenberg, author of The Hollow Hope, has argued that courts labor under structural constraints that will almost always deprive them of the ability to bring about significant c...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/social-progress-the-courts-hollow-hope-rosenberg/
William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-trouble-with-reality-rigor-of-angels-egginton/
To the Editors: In “Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic” , Matthew Desmond has made two false claims about my book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide: “...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/covid-and-governance-an-exchange/
To the Editors: Regarding the issue of the Bundesarchiv profiting from the use of archival material of the Nazi era raised in my letter in these pages , a spokesperson for the minister of state i...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/finally-no-more-fees/