https://www.nybooks.com/online/ Online comment from the writers of The New York Review of Books en-US Wed, 27 May 2026 19:48:03 -0400 In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast […]]]> Lili Anolik, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 27 May 2026 19:48:03 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/27/lili-anolik-on-eve-babitz-her-legacy-and-unsent-letters/ Father Bob Prevost, today known to the world as Pope Leo XIV, says that when he first arrived in Peru as an Augustinian missionary in 1985, thirty years old and three years a priest, he was naïve. “It was all very natural to me,” he recently told his biographer Elise Ann Allen, to see the […]]]> Greg Grandin Sun, 24 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/24/the-education-of-pope-leo-xiv/ In March the NYR Online published Amy Littlefield’s sweeping overview of the shifts in abortion access since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization effectively outlawed the procedure in more than a dozen states. Many of these changes have been driven by the expansion of telehealth services that dispense Mifepristone and […]]]> Amy Littlefield, Nora Caplan-Bricker Sat, 23 May 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/23/future-abortion-rights-amy-littlefield/ Call it “the art of the self-deal.” You sue yourself, announce a hasty “settlement” when the judge questions whether you are engaged in collusion (with yourself), and direct the creation of a fund consisting of nearly $1.8 billion to be doled out to your allies by a hand-selected commission—all without judicial or congressional approval. Acting […]]]> David Cole Wed, 20 May 2026 12:02:02 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/20/trump-v-trump-anti-weaponization-fund/ In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above […]]]> Ingrid D. Rowland, Lisa Yuskavage Wed, 20 May 2026 09:36:48 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/20/from-the-archive-radiant-angry-caravaggio/ Even in a country that has made a pastime of its declamatory public letters, this one seems to stand out. It’s not every day that a list of signatories includes such unlikely comrades as Virginie Despentes—the punk feminist author of King Kong Theory, the Vernon Subutex series and, most recently, Dear Dick Head—and Bernard-Henri Lévy, […]]]> Harrison Stetler Tue, 19 May 2026 12:42:28 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/19/bollores-way-grasset-french-publishing/ As President Trump’s erratic negotiations with Iran drag on and oil prices continue to rise, the United States’ ostensible ethical justification for the war—regime change—has largely disappeared from mainstream coverage. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christopher de Bellaigue argues that the US and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has mostly succeeded in strengthening the Islamic […]]]> Christopher de Bellaigue, Daniel Drake Sat, 16 May 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/16/between-devil-deep-blue-sea-christopher-de-bellaigue/ During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also found the time to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—the first time a president […]]]> Larry Wolff Sat, 16 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/16/opera-in-ragged-times-joplin-treemonisha/ In September 1507 the Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque sailed his small fleet to a point off the coast of Hormuz Island, in the narrow bottleneck that provides access to the Persian Gulf. Negotiations between the Portuguese and the independent Kingdom of Hormuz broke down quickly, and the small tributary state of Persia sent hundreds […]]]> Nicholas Mulder Thu, 14 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/14/empires-of-flow-control-hormuz/ In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives […]]]> Ingrid D. Rowland, Jarrett Earnest Wed, 13 May 2026 13:22:49 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/13/ingrid-d-rowland-on-art-history-raphael-and-disegno/ In Love, two women fight until they understand their fighting as a pretense to touch. The fighting is a kind of intimacy, an annual rite of slapping, biting, and hair-pulling that eventually gives way to a “realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” The epiphany that they are […]]]> Raven Leilani Tue, 12 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/12/the-work-of-feeling-morrison-love/ “Most memoirists Botox out their own imperfections, but celebrity ghostwriters tend to do the full facelift.”]]> Frances Wilson, Chandler Fritz Sat, 09 May 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/09/i-couldnt-have-done-it-without-you-frances-wilson/ 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/ 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/ 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/ 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/ 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/ 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/