https://www.nybooks.com/online/ Online comment from the writers of The New York Review of Books en-US Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:51:29 -0400 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/ There are seven questions in pure mathematics deemed important enough by the Clay Mathematics Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to “furthering the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought,” that each of their solutions carries a prize of $1 million. To date only one of these “Millennium Prize Problems,” as the foundation calls them, has […]]]> Dan Rockmore Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/27/the-work-of-math-in-the-age-of-artificial-reproduction/ The cover for our Fall Books Issue—a painting of ripe purple plums in a punnet, surrounded by hand-painted cover lines—was an unexpected collaboration between the Irish-born New Yorker Lena Beug, a commercials director, and the Canadian Jason Logan, who makes ink from natural pigments that he forages from rural and urban environments.  I had assigned the […]]]> Lena Beug, Jason Logan, Leanne Shapton Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/26/a-plum-assignment-lena-beug-jason-logan/ In the second season premiere of Private Life, host Jarrett Earnest is joined by the writer and critic Lucy Sante to discuss Pauline Kael’s career, pop culture writing, and Sante’s writing for the Review, where she has been a frequent contributor since the 1980s. The conversation focuses on “The Perils of Pauline” (published in the […]]]> Lucy Sante, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:24:11 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/23/lucy-sante-on-pauline-kael-film-criticism-and-pop-culture/ To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on 157 directors. One of these offers the following superlative assessment: “She remains (now alongside Marguerite Duras) the greatest female auteur of our cinema.” Naming the recipient of this praise shouldn’t be […]]]> Erika Balsom Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:22:46 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/23/sand-castles-la-derive-delsol/ In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks […]]]> Christopher Alessandrini, Nandini Krishnan Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/19/certain-grain-of-stupidity-christopher-alessandrini/ Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1 might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, […]]]> Martin Filler Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/15/doing-business-with-the-devil/ In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in […]]]> Lucas Adams, Daniel Drake Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/12/comics-relief-lucas-adams/ Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969, bickering like siblings as they created some of the songs that would find immortality on the albums Let It Be and Abbey Road—one of the most magical involves the underappreciated musician Billy […]]]> Brian Seibert Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/12/in-billys-band/ On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her […]]]> Jarrett Earnest Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/10/i-wish-you-love-dolly-parton/ We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme—something different and, often, a little risky or uncomfortable. Our final guest, Anna Silman, interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider several years ago. Back then, when Twitter was still called Twitter, it was possible for a […]]]> Merve Emre, Anna Silman Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/08/subject-relations-anna-silman/