March 21, 2024

The New York Review of Books Magazine

Where the world's leading authors, scientists, educators, artists, and political leaders turn when they wish to engage in a spirited debate on literature, politics, art, and ideas.

The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
The New York Review of Books
Editor Emily Greenhouse Deputy Editor Michael Shae Executive Editor Jana Prikryl Senior Editors Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Hasan Altaf Contributing Editors Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Art Editor Leanne Shapton Managing Editor Lauren Kane Onl
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Small Island
When we returned to London in 2015, after twelve years in the US, we could not get our son into the local elementary school. His class in Hackney, the neighborhood where we live, had the maximum of thirty kids in it, and none were leaving. Pretty muc
The New York Review of Books Magazine2 min read
Contributors
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. His first book of poems, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was published in 2022. Catherine Barnett’s fourth book of poems, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, will be published this sprin
The New York Review of Books Magazine17 min read
The Trouble with Reality
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton. Pantheon, 338 pp., $32.00 Somehow, without really intending to, I absorbed many years ago a line from The Brothers Karamazov that still comes to mi
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
Einstein Forum
The Einstein Forum, an international public think tank in Potsdam, Germany, seeks a new Director to begin in July 2025. The ideal candidate will have an outstanding intellectual record, preferably in more than one genre, and the ability to create exc
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
The Moon
She’s lying on the asphalt.Her small belly, her chest,her forehead, her hands,her cold feet bare in the night.A hungry cat paces.Shrapnel ringsas it hits neighboringhouses already bombed.The cat grows hungrier.The cat sees the girl,her wounds still w
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
Harvard
hup.harvard.edu■
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min readWorld
‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright
The Body of the Soul by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Yale University Press, 153 pp., $18.00 (paper) Women can do everything, and men can do the rest. I first heard the proverb thirty years
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min read
Outsider’s Outsider
Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 404 pp., $35.00 Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 4, 2023–Jan
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Time & Task to Eliot Weinberger on his LXXV
I. Madagascar:“a rice cooking”(about half an hour)“a locust frying”(a split second)Sioux:“dies in less spacethan a roasting of maize”(under fifteen minutes)Burma:monks trainedin the increments of dawn(sifting daybreakthrough their fingerslike bolts o
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min read
Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage
A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Knopf, 409 pp., $30.00 Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization by Leon McCarron. Pegasus, 340 pp., $28.95 In July 2017, days after the
The New York Review of Books Magazine12 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Who Should Regulate Online Speech?
Social Media, Freedom of Speech and the Future of Our Democracy edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone. Oxford University Press, 404 pp., $27.99 (paper) Is the First Amendment obsolete in the age of TikTok? The constitutional law protecting
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
‘Diabolical Fame’
Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis. Mobius, 645 pp., $28.00 “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” squawks Julius Caesar (Kenneth Williams) in Carry On Cleo (1964), a low-budget lampoon of th
The New York Review of Books Magazine19 min read
Every Creeping Thing
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 30: 1882, Supplement to the Correspondence 1831–1880 edited by Frederick Burkhardt, James A. Secord, and the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project. Cambridge University Press, 716 pp., $125.00 Recen
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
In Search of His Vocation
Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Ian Patterson. Penguin, 411 pp., $27.00 (paper) The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, translated from the French
The New York Review of Books Magazine14 min read
The Cost of Our Debris
Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens. Abrams, 392 pp., $28.00 Before we get to dust itself—and to Jay Owens’s marvelous Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles—it’s worth thinking about how the word is used. “Dust” in th
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min readWorld
The Party Line
The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War by Alan Philps. Pegasus, 451 pp., $29.95 On September 14, 1941, a select few among the Western journalists who had rushed to Moscow after Hitler’s forces
The New York Review of Books Magazine14 min readSocial History
Social Progress & the Courts
The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? by Gerald N. Rosenberg. University of Chicago Press, third edition, 713 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) Three decades ago, when Gerald N. Rosenberg answered the question posed by his book’s subtitle
The New York Review of Books Magazine11 min read
Nefer’s Mission
January by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy. Archipelago, 114 pp., $18.00 (paper) In the first months of my pregnancy, I was so exhausted that walking downhill felt like walking up. The only food th
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
Morning of Departure
The neighbor’s mulberry tree spilling its fruitonto the sidewalk stained the old sneakersI took from my mother’s closet, but there was no needto steal, there’s almost nothing you can ask forthat my mother wouldn’t give you, except maybethe bone from
The New York Review of Books Magazine16 min read
Laugh Riot
In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place: Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambul
The New York Review of Books Magazine4 min read
Covid and Governance: An Exchange
To the Editors: In “Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic” [NYR, January 18], Matthew Desmond has made two false claims about my book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide: “Inexplicably, The Viral Underclass ignores p
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
Letters
Finally, No More Fees To the Editors: Regarding the issue of the Bundesarchiv profiting from the use of archival material of the Nazi era raised in my letter in these pages [“Shameful Profits,” NYR, April 20, 2023], a spokesperson for the minister of

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