https://www.nybooks.com en-US Thu, 07 May 2026 17:32:25 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/pop-pleasure-freedom-the-secret-public-jon-savage/ In his decades of writing about pop music, Jon Savage came to understand its liberatory power.]]> Jarrett Earnest Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/pop-pleasure-freedom-the-secret-public-jon-savage/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/scarred-in-hong-kong-city-like-water-dorothy-tse/ Recent fiction by Hong Kong writers explores life in a society traumatized by ever-tightening Chinese national security laws that suppress political discussion and artistic freedom. ]]> Louisa Lim Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/scarred-in-hong-kong-city-like-water-dorothy-tse/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.]]> Adam Hochschild Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/what-happened-in-vegas-john-gregory-dunne/ An impulsive trip to America’s “idiot Disneyland” thrust John Gregory Dunne among characters who, like him, sought distraction from their private miseries.]]> Charlie Lee Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/what-happened-in-vegas-john-gregory-dunne/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/against-nostalgia-kathleen-jamie-peter-davidson/ In their poems and essays, Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson transcend Scottish sentimentalism and find new points of entry into their shared past.]]> David Wheatley Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/against-nostalgia-kathleen-jamie-peter-davidson/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/living-emily-berry/ It was hard for us, the way you diedevery day, slowly and then all at once,just as such things are said to happen.Spring came, so soon it almost seemedyou could’ve waited, but I know, I know,you couldn’t wait. My head was full of namesof flowers, and I kept picking stonesout of the earth as if […]]]> Emily Berry Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/living-emily-berry/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/indianas-indiana-jones-the-grave-robber-carpenter/ FBI agents who raided an Indiana farm in 2014 were astonished to find some 42,000 artifacts and bones looted by an amateur archaeologist.]]> Nina Siegal Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/indianas-indiana-jones-the-grave-robber-carpenter/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/the-sage-of-washington-walter-lippmann/ Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.]]> Samuel Earle Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/the-sage-of-washington-walter-lippmann/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/the-peepers-dan-chiasson/ Easter morning Hungry to gainon quiet and nightand cold and rain we pixelatewe complicateour veins are antifreeze our throats are bubblegumour forestssocialist no liege, no CEOwe give awayour loamy, pitchy songs they say what they meanstay, staythe winter’s over we made them from decaythe understoryordered us some food thanks understorythanks salamandersthanks paramecia God set the […]]]> Dan Chiasson Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/the-peepers-dan-chiasson/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/dont-call-it-entertainment-everything-is-now-j-hoberman/ In Everthing Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde's attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.]]> Prudence Peiffer Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/dont-call-it-entertainment-everything-is-now-j-hoberman/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/counting-heads-jean-paul-marat/ Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination transformed the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness into the revered martyr of the people’s cause.]]> Lynn Hunt Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/counting-heads-jean-paul-marat/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/facing-the-past-transcription-ben-lerner/ Ben Lerner’s dazzling new novel, Transcription, plays variations on the conflicts and bonds that are felt among three generations.]]> Christopher Tayler Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/facing-the-past-transcription-ben-lerner/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/mommie-dearest-kids-wait-till-you-hear-this-liza-minnelli/ In Liza Minnelli’s riveting memoir, the ghost of Judy Garland is felt on every page.]]> Frances Wilson Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/mommie-dearest-kids-wait-till-you-hear-this-liza-minnelli/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/whither-the-nerd-bully-bill-gates/ Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valley’s young founders rebelled against—and, in so rebelling, became.]]> Ben Tarnoff Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/whither-the-nerd-bully-bill-gates/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/irans-new-winter-christopher-de-bellaigue/ The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.]]> Christopher de Bellaigue Tue, 05 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/irans-new-winter-christopher-de-bellaigue/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/04/the-second-redemption-voting-rights-act/ The Voting Rights Act is dead. The law, very likely the most consequential civil rights statute Congress has ever passed, died on April 29, 2026. It was not a natural death. Congress did not repeal it, having concluded, for example, that it was no longer needed. On the contrary, Congress has reauthorized the statute four […]]]> David Cole Mon, 04 May 2026 12:03:24 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/04/the-second-redemption-voting-rights-act/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/03/after-el-fasher-darfur-sudan/ It is hardly surprising that people dance during war. Sometimes these are dances of victory. This past October, after eighteen months of siege, the city of El-Fasher in North Darfur fell to the Janjaweed—the nickname of the government-aligned Arab militias who razed Darfur twenty years ago, now widely used for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces […]]]> Jérôme Tubiana, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin Sun, 03 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/03/after-el-fasher-darfur-sudan/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/02/mystery-brain-daniel-lefferts/ Last year the right-wing Passage Publishing, whose mission—“to push forward new ideas and ways of thinking that can break us out of our cultural and political cul-de-sac and open up new possibilities for art and publishing”—has led primarily to the production of texts by Internet intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and the pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist, […]]]> Daniel Lefferts, Daniel Drake Sat, 02 May 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/02/mystery-brain-daniel-lefferts/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/02/his-moo-was-refined-the-story-of-ferdinand/ On a rainy Sunday in New York City in October 1935, Munro Leaf, an editor at the book publisher Frederick A. Stokes Company, picked up a legal pad and dashed off a story for his friend, the illustrator Robert Lawson. Spun out in forty minutes across six handwritten pages, the draft centered on a young […]]]> Jane Bayard Curley Sat, 02 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/02/his-moo-was-refined-the-story-of-ferdinand/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/01/my-classroom-life/ The English department I hoped to join had two tenure-track jobs going that year, and one of them looked straightforward enough. They needed a medievalist, someone to do Chaucer and Beowulf; though later I learned the position had long been a revolving door, ever since a negative tenure decision had ended up in the courts. […]]]> Michael Gorra Fri, 01 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/01/my-classroom-life/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/quoting-the-world-max-norman/ There may be no unifying style in Eugène Atget’s photographs—only an uncanny realism that still arrests viewers a century after his death.]]> Max Norman Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/quoting-the-world-max-norman/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/30/ever-new-beverly-glenn-copeland/ As a child, when I learned about capital-H History, I pictured it as a kind of basalt cliff: unmovable, unshakeable, a monument I could look up at and wonder how it formed. (I had been reading too many fantasy novels at the time.) But as I grew older I learned more and more about what hadn’t been […]]]> Bijan Stephen Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/30/ever-new-beverly-glenn-copeland/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/29/maya-lin-reads-ghosts-in-the-house/ In the October 21, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler wrote “Ghosts in the House,” about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century, including the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In this episode of […]]]> Martin Filler, Maya Lin Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:49:57 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/29/maya-lin-reads-ghosts-in-the-house/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/27/why-this-war-conversation-on-iran/ New York Review contributors Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, and Suzy Hansen come together for a wide-ranging conversation on what the war in Iran means for the future of US politics and America’s place in the world. This conversation originally aired on April 22, 2026.]]> Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, Suzy Hansen Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:47:44 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/27/why-this-war-conversation-on-iran/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/26/vengeance-is-theirs/ As if to counterweight the gentle, tender-hearted Shakespeare of the film Hamnet, now the brutal and bloody Titus Andronicus has arrived in New York, in an impressive Red Bull Theater production. A content advisory provided by Red Bull lists the kind of material to which the play exposes us: “violence, sexual violence, murder, mutilation, racism, […]]]> James Romm Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/26/vengeance-is-theirs/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/25/we-goofed/ Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, is a temple. Although the Beinecke is cuboid it has the atmosphere of a pyramid, flanked in faintly translucent marble slabs that suck light into the building and radiate it outward at the same time. A new literary exhibition, “‘Beauties of My Style’: […]]]> Jo Livingstone Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:56:52 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/25/we-goofed/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/pentimenti-paul-muldoon/ It was Jan van Eyck who first sent a ripplethrough greater Bruges by banishing both streakand stipple in a truly historicmoment that saw him painting “fat on lean”and leaving no trace of a brush stroke on either a girl’s sleek loinor the streamlined carcass of a bowhead whale.The process of scouring lanolin from sheep’s woolmay […]]]> Paul Muldoon Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/pentimenti-paul-muldoon/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/this-bitter-earth-salt-lakes-tracey/ The world’s salt lakes are the canary in the coal mine for the climate crisis, and they are shrinking at a drastic rate.]]> Rosa Lyster Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/this-bitter-earth-salt-lakes-tracey/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/manet-and-morisot-game-on-tallman/ An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.]]> Susan Tallman Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/manet-and-morisot-game-on-tallman/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/art-for-our-age-of-chaos-new-humans-new-museum-whitney-biennial/ The 2026 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s exhibition “New Humans; Memories of the Future” are attempts to respond to a world full of darkness, trauma, and strife.]]> Jed Perl Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/art-for-our-age-of-chaos-new-humans-new-museum-whitney-biennial/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/ladder-to-the-moon/ after Georgia O’Keeffe, 1958                      Soaked in the information of stillness, I found the moon too chaste—cut at the sourceof its language.                                                    Night, green with blue:ready for the ladder’s famebefore mountains turned                into an idée fixe. Months into my sea               psyche, I still wake up                with this land in my head—cornered somewhere, missing a wall                                                         or some edge, a […]]]> Fiona Sze-Lorrain Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/ladder-to-the-moon/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/visions-of-depravity-ceija-stojka-making-visible/ On Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center]]> Ben Davis Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/visions-of-depravity-ceija-stojka-making-visible/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/inflatable-life-paul-chan-automa-mon-amour/ On Paul Chan at Greene Naftali]]> Dawn Chan Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/inflatable-life-paul-chan-automa-mon-amour/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/seeing-by-hand-june-leaf/ “I feel my fingers have eyes,” June Leaf once said. The need to literally feel her way through her work is a primary subject of her art.]]> Nicole Rudick Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/seeing-by-hand-june-leaf/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/charlatans-bores-on-pedantry-visser/ The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.]]> Clare Bucknell Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/charlatans-bores-on-pedantry-visser/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/drawn-to-the-void-wright-of-derby/ John Wright of Derby introduced chiaroscuro to British audiences, using everything from blazing bladders to ivory planets to illuminate his dazzled subjects. ]]> Julian Bell Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/drawn-to-the-void-wright-of-derby/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-music-of-what-happens-poems-of-seamus-heaney/ Seamus Heaney’s complete poems, following on editions of his letters, prose, and translations, confirm the extent of his achievement.]]> Nick Laird Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-music-of-what-happens-poems-of-seamus-heaney/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/a-vital-unconscious-wifredo-lam/ Wifredo Lam’s paintings spring from a unique synthesis of European modernism and Afro-Cuban consciousness.]]> Coco Fusco Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/a-vital-unconscious-wifredo-lam/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-rise-and-fall-of-david-adjaye-princeton-collects/ Three high-profile buildings by the eminent Ghanian British architect have just been completed, but allegations of sexual misconduct have severely damaged his prospects for future commissions.]]> Martin Filler Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-rise-and-fall-of-david-adjaye-princeton-collects/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/how-should-a-pixel-be-dry-leaf-koberidze/ Every low-resolution frame of Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, shot on a mobile phone nearly twenty-years-old, enacts a drama of form.]]> Dennis Lim Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/how-should-a-pixel-be-dry-leaf-koberidze/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-masked-avengers-how-to-be-a-guerrilla-girl/ The Guerrilla Girls used indisputable data and a dry, polished style to show that the art world, contrary to its self-conception, was deeply retrograde.]]> Elaine Blair Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-masked-avengers-how-to-be-a-guerrilla-girl/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/londons-brutal-underground-london-falling-radden-keefe/ In Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, an ordinary boy’s deadly obsession with the ultrarich reveals deeper corruption at the heart of modern London.]]> Mark O’Connell Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/londons-brutal-underground-london-falling-radden-keefe/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/22/waiting-for-day-zero-los-angeles-iranians/ This past Easter Sunday the leaders of an Iranian opposition party in exile gathered for a celebratory picnic with family and friends at Lake Balboa Park in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Citrus-and-mint-scented hookah smoke wafted from a lakeside gazebo decked with the prerevolutionary flag of Iran, and a hundred or so people mingled around […]]]> Will Alden Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:01:34 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/22/waiting-for-day-zero-los-angeles-iranians/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/22/martin-filler-on-writing-frank-gehry-and-the-dramatic-world-of-architecture/ In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first […]]]> Martin Filler, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:41:10 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/22/martin-filler-on-writing-frank-gehry-and-the-dramatic-world-of-architecture/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-right-amount-of-crazy-fintan-otoole/ In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.]]> Fintan O’Toole Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-right-amount-of-crazy-fintan-otoole/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/19/a-clearing-of-the-ground-hampshire-college/ Small liberal arts colleges face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise. The casualties are staggering, with an estimated eighty-nine colleges closing or merging since 2020 alone and forecasts that a quarter of the nation’s private colleges and universities are at risk in the coming decade. […]]]> Christopher Benfey Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/19/a-clearing-of-the-ground-hampshire-college/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/19/war-games-olympics-empire/ At the opening of the 2026 Winter Olympics, held simultaneously at venues in Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo, the notion of the games as an occasion for international peace took the form of armonia, or “harmony” in Italian. It was a quality exhibited more convincingly in the ceremony’s fusion of disparate parts than in its relentless […]]]> Jake Nevins Sun, 19 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/19/war-games-olympics-empire/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/18/after-mystics-lauren-kane-medieval-art/ Earlier this spring, Lauren Kane journeyed up to the Cloisters—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s outpost on the northern tip of Manhattan, which houses European art inside a complex of buildings cobbled together from the ruins of several medieval cloisters brought over from France and Catalonia in the early twentieth century—to visit “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, […]]]> Lauren Kane, Daniel Drake Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/18/after-mystics-lauren-kane-medieval-art/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/17/finding-gertrud-kauders/ In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then […]]]> Simon During Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:47:16 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/17/finding-gertrud-kauders/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/16/hardy-men-hardy-boys-passage-press/ In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would […]]]> Daniel Lefferts Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/16/hardy-men-hardy-boys-passage-press/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/16/she-knows-a-place-mavis-staples/ There’s a recording I hold close, Joan Armatrading’s “Woncha Come on Home.” When the song was released in 1977, it was common for music producers to double-track vocal lines, recording two nearly identical takes and layering them on top of each other to produce a full, uniform sound. The vocals in “Woncha Come on Home,” […]]]> Sophie Abramowitz Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/16/she-knows-a-place-mavis-staples/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/15/everything-but-the-leanne-shapton/ A dispatch from the Art Editor]]> Leanne Shapton Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/15/everything-but-the-leanne-shapton/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/15/from-the-archive-the-banality-of-empathy/ In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy. In this episode of Private Life, “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye. […]]]> Namwali Serpell, Lovia Gyarkye Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:36:56 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/15/from-the-archive-the-banality-of-empathy/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/13/go-out-and-sue-a-polluter/ Shortly before Christmas in 1969 a dense fog rolled in across the bayous of the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than four days it blanketed a vast region, as far west as San Antonio and as far east as Port Arthur. Flights were grounded, cars crashed, and all traffic halted in the Houston Ship Channel, […]]]> Scott W. Stern Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:36:58 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/13/go-out-and-sue-a-polluter/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/11/a-widening-gulf-adam-hanieh/ “It would be a mistake to treat the Gulf as politically homogeneous. The war has clearly shown the weight of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but it has not eliminated the different calculations of other Gulf states.”]]> Adam Hanieh, Nawal Arjini Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/11/a-widening-gulf-adam-hanieh/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/11/a-workingmans-surrealist-hc-westermann/ You could say that H. C. Westermann became an artist on the morning of March 19, 1945. While serving as a marine gunner on the USS Enterprise during World War II, the twenty-two-year-old witnessed an enemy aircraft dive-bomb the nearby USS Franklin off the coast of Japan, killing more than seven hundred men—most of them […]]]> Jeremy Lybarger Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/11/a-workingmans-surrealist-hc-westermann/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/10/the-emirates-on-the-tightrope/ On Sunday, March 22, the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, maternal brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, put on a brave face. The evening prior, President Donald Trump declared that if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened within forty-eight hours, he would order strikes on Iranian […]]]> Colin Powers Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:27:39 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/10/the-emirates-on-the-tightrope/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/09/namwali-serpell-on-toni-morrison-criticism-and-narrative-empathy/ In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a […]]]> Namwali Serpell, Jarrett Earnest Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:21:30 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/09/namwali-serpell-on-toni-morrison-criticism-and-narrative-empathy/