https://www.nybooks.com/online/ Online comment from the writers of The New York Review of Books en-US Wed, 28 Oct 2026 10:01:26 -0400 In the fall of 2015 I attended a workshop at our children’s elementary school that warned of the dangers of Snapchat, the social media platform popular, in those days, with tweens and teens. Adults feared that “snaps,” or disappearing posts, would be an opportunity for peer pressure, bullying, and harassment. But a seventy-four-year-old presidential candidate […]]]> Dan Chiasson Wed, 28 Oct 2026 09:53:50 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/28/very-bernie-memes-midterms/ In mid-March Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s senior director for counterterrorism, took the stage at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. The think tank has served as the inner sanctum of the foreign policy establishment for more than a century: the place where a bipartisan collection of diplomats and strategists planned much of […]]]> Jonathan Guyer Tue, 27 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/27/trumps-blob-foreign-policy/ Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a small body of art and writing celebrated in Asian American culture for its embrace of difficulty. Her best-known project, the experimental text Dictee (1982), contains an unpredictable mix of forms—catechism, letter, biography, schoolbook—and images ranging from anatomy charts and Paleolithic […]]]> Spencer Lee-Lenfield Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:45:40 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/26/a-collective-reminiscing-theresa-hak-kyung-cha/ Among the bodybuilders Gavin Francis discusses in his essay from the October 22 issue of the Review, the most surprising is surely Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, who keeps in a drawer (along with his stash of pornographic postcards) a chart measuring his progress with “Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser,” a real device invented by the man […]]]> Gavin Francis, Chandler Fritz Sat, 24 Oct 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/24/ripped-off-gavin-francis/ On September 9 the incumbent mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Brett Smiley, lost his reelection bid to a twenty-seven-year-old democratic socialist named David Morales. It was the first time an incumbent mayor failed to win his party’s primary in the city’s history, and the latest in a wave of progressive victories over establishment Democrats that […]]]> Nina Sparling Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/23/the-renters-take-providence-morales/ On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and the vice president of Lebanon’s Jewish Communal Council (Conseil communal israélite libanais), was abducted from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a shadowy militant Shiite network, associated with the milieu from which Hezbollah was then emerging, which called itself the Organization of […]]]> Joelle M. Abi-Rached Thu, 22 Oct 2026 07:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/22/natives-of-the-country-lebanon-jewish-community/ Season 2, Episode 5 of Private Life]]> Elaine Blair, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:46:03 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/21/elaine-blair-on-lena-dunham-sex-and-television/ Season 1, Episode 2 of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole]]> Dan Chiasson, Fintan O’Toole Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:28:49 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/20/bernie-sanders-utopia-lab/ In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive […]]]> Lola Seaton, Lauren Kane Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/17/switching-on-lola-seaton/ For years I have been haunted by a grainy video I saw in 2023, when I was interviewing poultry processing workers in Green Forest, Arkansas. In those months I spoke often with the organizer Magaly Licolli, who directs Venceremos, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the rights of poultry workers. One day we were sitting […]]]> Alice Driver Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/14/the-return-of-child-labor/ Season 2, Episode 4 of Private Life]]> Leslie A. Fiedler, Rachel Kushner Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/14/rachel-kushner-reads-from-love-and-death-in-the-american-novel/ Season 1, Episode 1 of Endgame]]> Annette Gordon-Reed, Fintan O’Toole Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:13:38 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/13/thomas-jefferson-with-annette-gordon-reed/ Our newest podcast, hosted by Fintan O’Toole]]> Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/12/introducing-endgame/ On October 7, 1989, East Germany celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a military parade down Karl-Marx-Allee—an old-fashioned display of state power as protests against Communist rule spread across the country. Opponents of the regime were galled by the phalanxes of goose-stepping soldiers and columns of tanks. That same day, representatives of East Berlin’s theaters gathered […]]]> Ian Johnson Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/11/our-1989-house-of-hopes/ Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a connoisseur of clouds. In many of his shots, the big sky of Ukraine’s fields and steppe swallows the frame. When tiny human forms emerge upward into the heavens, they come as a surprise. As they grow they become monumental, often viewed from below. This is a fairly standard technique in Soviet […]]]> Sophie Pinkham Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/10/between-earth-and-sky-dovzhenko/ In the Review’s October 22 issue, Matthew Aucoin surveys Philip Glass’s six-decade musical career, occasioned by the premiere of his new symphony, Lincoln, at Tanglewood this past summer. “Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form,” Aucoin writes. “And Glass did […]]]> Matthew Aucoin, Daniel Drake Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/10/the-composer-matthew-aucoin/ Season 2, Episode 3 of Private Life]]> Edwin Frank, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:40:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/07/edwin-frank-on-love-and-death-in-the-american-novel/ Perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for “unselfing” … is what is popularly called beauty. … I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a […]]]> Namwali Serpell Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:49:17 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/07/ming-smiths-ming-smiths/ Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe, Salzburg might be the grandest, or it certainly thinks it is; the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade is the prettiest, with Schubert played and sung amid the lovely hills of the Bregenzerwald overlooking the upper Rhine; and Bayreuth is without doubt the most grueling. Richard Wagner characteristically decreed that […]]]> Geoffrey Wheatcroft Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/06/the-wexford-touch/ The late Nigerian sculptor Erhabor Emokpae is perhaps best known for his bronze replica of the sixteenth-century ivory mask of Queen Idia, the kingdom of Benin’s premier iyoba, or queen mother. The year was 1977. Nigeria had attained political independence from Britain less than two decades earlier and been through a bitter civil war in […]]]> Kovie Biakolo Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/04/a-delicate-repair-benin-bronzes/ Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines […]]]> Poorna Swami, Nawal Arjini Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/03/protesting-with-panache-poorna-swami/ I met Karan Mahajan, the Indian-American novelist and essayist, in 2018, when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library. Karan was beginning to write The Complex, his novel that has just been released; I was finishing The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. I was drawn to Karan right away. […]]]> Karan Mahajan, Corey Robin Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/10/02/the-private-life-of-power/ In this episode of Private Life, the actress Holland Taylor reads Renata Adler’s essay “The Perils of Pauline,” an expansive assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue. Taylor has been working on films, television, and Broadway since the 1960s. She is a nine-time Emmy nominee, winning once, in 1999, […]]]> Renata Adler, Holland Taylor Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:01:46 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/30/from-the-archive-the-perils-of-pauline/ Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the significance of particular things, downplaying others, and ignoring most of what bombards our senses, all so that we might be convinced, from now until bedtime, that we understand ourselves […]]]> Mark Lilla Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:02:59 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/29/from-fear-set-free-judith-shklar/