https://www.nybooks.com/online/ Online comment from the writers of The New York Review of Books en-US Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:35:19 -0400 I first learned of Ossabaw Island from Musa Mayer’s Night Studio (1988), a memoir of her life as Philip Guston’s daughter. At the time I was writing a short story about Guston and had grown fixated on his wife, Musa McKim, who’d given up painting for poetry. McKim’s time at Ossabaw in 1974 was one […]]]> Christopher Alessandrini Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:46:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/28/the-center-of-all-creation/ “What is happening in the world today,” Thomas Merton wrote to Czesław Miłosz in 1959, responding to the latter’s book The Captive Mind, “is a wholesale collapse of man’s capacity to love.” Merton did not believe in the cold war’s strident moral opposition between the free and unfree worlds. Whether in the West or in […]]]> Marina Garcés, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Ece Temelkuran, Thomas Banchoff, Pankaj Mishra Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:22:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/27/the-cruel-and-the-frail/ “I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete sentence, one that echoes a line from the famous mid-century primer See Spot Run. Spot was a dog. Might Rex be one, too? In a sense, he is: a […]]]> Merve Emre Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/27/let-us-fall-for-whatever-we-want-to-diane-williams/ A dispatch from the Art Editor]]> Leanne Shapton Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/26/the-other-donald-leanne-shapton/ I first read Fortress Besieged as a teenager, when the novel, originally published in 1947 and out of print for decades, became a bestseller in China after it was adapted into a TV series in 1990. The book was so popular that its characters quickly became, in the public imagination, types—in fact, archetypes—as though a […]]]> Yiyun Li Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/25/life-in-the-fortress-qian-zhongshu/ In the early hours of Sunday, August 3, 2025, Edward Coristine, a nineteen-year-old computer programmer who had achieved notoriety as an employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, was walking a friend back to her car near U Street in Washington, D.C., when they crossed paths with a group of teenagers. According to prosecutors, […]]]> Dana Liebelson Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/25/the-return-of-the-teen-crime-panic-raise-the-age/ One afternoon around 1990, as a teenager working my after-school job in an optometrist’s basement office, I was listening to a local college radio station when the DJ, needing a break, decided to play the entire B-side of a record. I had never heard anything like it. Sludgy grooves, wails of unidentifiable wind instruments, and […]]]> Ted Reichman Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/23/the-voodoo-thing-dr-john-david-toop/ When the artifacts of an artist’s life are collected as an archive, they change from river to reservoir, their ideas no longer circulating in the artist’s mind but left for others to navigate. Orienting oneself in the archive of a performance artist can be especially fraught because it consists of the ephemera around a performance […]]]> Nicole Rudick Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:40:07 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/22/i-dont-want-dead-art-tina-girouard/ Geoffrey O’Brien is one of those writers who can write about anything: opera, British postwar film, crime fiction, the Third Reich, Grant Wood, Patti Smith, Duke Ellington, Seinfeld. Yet these subjects are often united by a kind of nostalgia—one prompted by pop culture artifacts. His essay from our August 20, 2026, issue, “A Gust from Another […]]]> Geoffrey O’Brien, Lauren Kane Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/22/braving-the-labyrinth-geoffrey-obrien/ The story of Amrum—a German movie about the last days and immediate aftermath of World War II as experienced by a twelve-year-old boy on the isolated North Sea island from which the film takes its title—is both familiar and exotic. Drawn from the autobiographical writings of the actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm, most familiar for […]]]> J. Hoberman Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:45:13 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/19/ghosts-of-amrum/ The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she’s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a thrill hearing her examine ordinary life from unexpected angles. And I love to disagree with […]]]> Merve Emre, Agnes Callard Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/18/socrates-turf-agnes-callard-merve-emre/ I often like John Early’s work. I love John Early’s taste. I came to one of my favorite movies, the bracing, pensive 1990 Canadian docudrama Strangers in Good Company, after he hosted a screening of it at New York’s Metrograph in 2021. On both TV and film, he’s regularly cast as frustrated and venal divas […]]]> Daniel M. Lavery Sun, 16 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/16/insincerity-case-maddies-secret-john-early/ “Punwise, I didn’t feel too reined in on BoJack. If I was champing at the bit to use a joke somewhere, I could usually find a place to trot it out!”]]> Lisa Hanawalt, Leanne Shapton Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/15/from-the-horses-mouth-lisa-hanawalt/ In 1984, the year before Brazil transitioned from a military dictatorship to a tenuous democracy, a young woman named Gabriela Leite attended a national meeting for sex workers held by a progressive ministry of the Catholic Church. There she shocked those assembled by taking the microphone and unabashedly calling herself a prostitute. As she recalled […]]]> Meg Weeks Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/14/what-does-a-puta-want-putafeminism/ Kate Millett would never be more active or more in demand than she was in 1972. Two summers earlier, her debut book had made her a household name. Begun as her thesis for a literature Ph.D., Sexual Politics swelled into a wide-ranging examination of sex as a terrain of political contest and patriarchy as a […]]]> Sam Huber Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/13/the-silent-art-kate-millett/ As an artist in the second half of the twentieth century, Jerry Moriarty did everything you weren’t supposed to do: he painted people, he painted places, and, perhaps worst of all, he told stories with pictures. It’s important to note how not-accepted this was between the 1950s and 1970s, in the messy aftermath of abstract […]]]> Chris Ware Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:47:57 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/12/jerry-survives/ It seems as though Rachel Syme has interviewed all the grandes dames of New York and Los Angeles. She drank cosmopolitans with Carol Burnett, accompanied Sarah Jessica Parker to the ballet, shopped at Rachel Comey with Parker Posey, gabbed with Patti LuPone over Skype, and gabbed with Barbra Streisand on a landline. At a time […]]]> Merve Emre, Rachel Syme Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/11/the-profiler-rachel-syme/ On the evening of June 25, minutes after New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for a million rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs, I caught up with a tenant I know named Josie Wells. Standing outside the auditorium in East Harlem where the vote had just occurred, we spoke about […]]]> Tara Raghuveer Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:22:29 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/08/the-road-to-the-rent-freeze/ On my last visit to Tripoli, this past June, the city often felt as if it had left the protracted conflicts of Libya’s post-Qaddafi era behind. At night, families were out in the streets catching a respite from the heat of the day. The occasional blasts were not gunfire but fireworks at wedding celebrations. Incoming […]]]> Wolfram Lacher Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:17:16 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/05/libya-the-dangerous-gamble/ “Couples therapy”—the words alone are enough to send many people running. But Orna Guralnik, the clinical psychologist and star of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy, has people running to her office. She has become a household name as well as a watchful guide for couples as they navigate intimate and sometimes agonizing discussions, and for […]]]> Merve Emre, Orna Guralnik Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/04/listening-for-the-unconscious-orna-guralnik/ On the morning of Monday, July 20, as the monsoon session of India’s parliament opened, tens of thousands of protesters surged down the radial streets leading to the heart of official New Delhi. Most of them were young people marching in response to a call issued by Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known climate activist, to bring […]]]> Jonathan Mingle Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:04:36 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/01/moving-mountains-sonam-wangchuk/ In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and author of the most recent translation of Homer’s epic, discusses Christopher Nolan’s polarizing blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey.]]> Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:08:47 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/07/31/homer-vs-hollywood-discussing-christopher-nolans-odyssey/