https://www.nybooks.com/online/ Online comment from the writers of The New York Review of Books en-US Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:30:31 -0400 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/ In 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “in Sausalito people live on anything that floats.” Those midcentury houseboat dwellers were the antecedents of Marin County’s “anchor-outs,” people who live on the anchorage in Richardson Bay and therefore, as Piper French writes in her review of Joe Kloc’s Lost at Sea in our September 24 […]]]> Piper French, Maggie McGowan Sat, 05 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/05/society-gumbo-piper-french/ Ratko Mladić’s death last week at eighty-three in The Hague—where he was serving a life sentence for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995—is a reminder that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the […]]]> Aryeh Neier Sat, 05 Sep 2026 08:28:05 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/05/an-exception-in-world-affairs-ratko-mladic/ I don’t understand why people talk to Isaac Chotiner. His reputation as the best interviewer-assassin at work today—maybe ever—precedes him. I suspect that each guest thinks he will be the one to finally best Chotiner. And he makes good use of this hubris. He calmly and respectfully dismantles the tendentious arguments people make about everything […]]]> Merve Emre, Isaac Chotiner Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/09/01/itching-for-a-fight-isaac-chotiner-merve-emre/ On a muggy morning in late July, when tens of thousands of protesters thronged to central New Delhi to head toward parliament, they seemed to already have a sense that their march might be historic. Most were students and young graduates, many of whom had traveled from towns hundreds of miles away to attend their […]]]> Poorna Swami Sun, 30 Aug 2026 06:38:33 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/30/every-tiny-molecule-of-ash-delhi-protests/ Paul Julian just wanted everyone to get out of the way. Maneuvering down the narrow hallways on the Warner Brothers studio lot while carrying a very long, freshly painted background, the artist (who had worked as a WPA muralist before his animation gig) would emit a car horn–esque “beep-beep” to warn his colleagues of his […]]]> Lucas Adams Sun, 30 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/30/youll-never-catch-him-coyote-vs-acme-road-runner/ “It was out of estisal that some Iranians chose war,” writes Nahid Siamdoust in the NYR Online. Estisal, which, loosely translated from Persian, means “having no options” or a state of helplessness, is also, she contends, what has made some Iranians vulnerable to the disinformation being spread by both state and private media—a perhaps more […]]]> Nahid Siamdoust, Janhavi Munde Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:30:00 -0400 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/08/29/expatriate-dreams-nahid-siamdoust/ “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/