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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest
April 10, 2025
Current Issue
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More from the Review
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest
April 10, 2025
Current Issue
Mozambique on the Edge
For months, the country’s people have been taking to the streets in the aftermath of a falsified election. Could the protests bring lasting change?
March 28, 2025
‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’
The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.
March 27, 2025
Rigorous Innocence
A new volume of essays andcrónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.
April 10, 2025 issue
Rotten in Denmark
Lars von Trier’sThe Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.
April 10, 2025 issue
Toffler in China
The work of the eclectic American futurist exerted a profound and unanticipated influence on China’s digital transformation since the 1980s.
April 10, 2025 issue
The Quantum Chaos of Literature
Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.
April 10, 2025 issue
Planet Ooze
We cannot grow the crops that feed eight billion people and counting without phosphorus. At the rate we waste this precious element, how long will supplies last?
April 10, 2025 issue
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The New Baghdad
The Iraqi capital is witnessing an inequitable construction boom, as the elite launder oil money and the state reconfigures sites of dissent.
March 22, 2025
A Nation Deranged
Matt Eich’s photobook series, “The Invisible Yoke,” is an exorcism of the country’s demons.
March 23, 2025
Giving In to Hitler
When confronted with an analysis of Hitler’s own words that made his goal of war perfectly clear, Neville Chamberlain retreated into complete denial: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t.”
September 26, 2019 issue
The Reason Why
“The passage of time, and the fond illusions fostered by the security of the cold war era and the fall of communism, have returned us to an earlier perspective in which ethics and national self-interest have parted company. We are now taught to think of foreign conflicts, in James Baker’s deathless phrase, as fights in which we have ‘no dog.’”
May 20, 1999 issue
Hitler: Hard to Resist
An offensively imaginative revisionism has come to suggest that Hitler was a political and military genius who was only marginally aware of the butchery of the Jews and the Poles. But the Germans who took part in the Claus von Stauffenberg conspiracy were not in the slightest doubt as to what his brainless military megalomania was doing to Germany or what he personally was doing to the Eastern peoples and the Jews.
September 15, 1977 issue
Munich Man
“Chamberlain was variously described as having been ‘a good mayor of Birmingham in a lean year,’ with ‘a retail mind in a wholesale business,’ who looked ‘at affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.’ Nevertheless, he became prime minister in 1937, and in the following year went to see Hitler at Munich, dressed with inadvertent appropriateness like an undertaker.”
March 28, 1985 issue
The Art of Elsewhere
“Gorey sent dispatches from a dream world where Edwardian grandees cross paths with temptresses in flapper dresses, children confront animals nobody has ever seen before, and eerily depopulated interiors and landscapes leave us feeling that calamity is just around the corner.”
May 10, 2018 issue
Gorey Treasures
Edward Gorey’s drawings capture “a whole little personal world,” as Edmund Wilson put it: “equally amusing and sombre, nostalgic at the same time as claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”
August 4, 2012
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
Free from the Archives
Jan Kott: The Edo Lear“The selection of landscape in Lear is, perhaps more than in any other play, simultaneously a selection of costume and historical time. In King Lear the question where is also the question when.”
Brazil at the Crossroads
Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.
February 23, 2023 issue
Bigger than Bolsonaro
After four years in power, a movement created by elite campaigns has built a mass base.
October 28, 2022
Brazil’s Clown-Elect
“The unpredictable behavior of Brazilian voters can also lead to more baffling outcomes. In 1959, for example, Cacareco, a placid, middle-aged rhinoceros at the São Paulo zoo, was voted onto the city council, having won over 100,000 votes—and this is only the most famous case in Brazil’s long history of ‘protest votes.’”
October 14, 2010
Brazil: Lula’s Prospects
“To understand Lula it is essential to realize that he is at the core a union man, a tough labor negotiator, a formidable forger of consensus, and a leader with a charismatic ability thereafter to mobilize the crowds in the direction chosen.”
December 5, 2002 issue
The Most Influential Invention
A history of paper shares all the facts and technical processes, the quality of the rags, the size of the paper sheets, the color and texture of different surfaces and how they were achieved, but most importantly it gives us a sense of a collective human vocation for creating a world apart on the page.
August 13, 2015 issue
Disappearing Ink
“I left the New Museum’s ‘The Last Newspaper’—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read theTimes every morning on the subway.”
November 1, 2010
The Human Face of Type
“Serifs are not ornamental but functional: most of them are horizontal strokes that help to guide the eye rapidly and smoothly across the page. Sans-serif types, in contrast, present a thicket of vertical strokes that slow down the eye’s horizontal movement.”
August 4, 2011
Clinton Agonistes
The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.
October 22, 1998 issue
Reagan’s Junta
“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”
January 29, 1987 issue
A Special Supplement: Impeachment
There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.
June 28, 1973 issue
A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head
Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”
June 25, 2023
DeepL Edizioni
As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?
March 22, 2023
The Human Costs of AI
Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.
October 21, 2021 issue
How Smart Are Computers?
“Artificial Intelligence has gone through a sober process of realizing that human beings are cleverer than it supposed. It has turned to a more cautious and diversified strategy of accumulating ‘know-how’ rather than mounting frontal assaults.”
November 15, 1973 issue
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
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll; illustrated by Tove Jansson
The Village of Ben Suc
The Village of Ben Suc
Jonathan Schell
At the Louvre: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets
At the Louvre: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets
Set Change
Set Change
Yuri Andrukhovych
Monsieur Teste
Monsieur Teste
Paul Valéry
The Rest is Silence
The Rest is Silence
Augusto Monterroso
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