The New York Review of Books
@nybooks
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‘The premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.’
Joined December 2007
Our 5/29 issue is now online, with @rachelbnolan on the collapse of Venezuela, @harikunzru on woo-woo authoritarians, @fotoole on the grievance economy, @suehalpernVT on toxic Facebook, Chris Ware on a comics masterpiece, and much more.
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In retrospect, there were some warning signs.
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No child in America will ever again doubt that he or she has the intelligence and ability to be president.
SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!.
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An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory
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Jeff Sessions enforcing civil rights, Betsy DeVos setting education policy—how long until Chris Christie is overseeing the nation’s bridges?.
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Starting in 1973 with an essay about Hollywood, Joan Didion wrote thirty-eight articles for The New York Review. Her final contribution, in May 2017, was a memorial for our founding coeditor Robert Silvers. We mourn the passing of our longtime friend.
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I cannot go on.restricting myself to images. because you think it is your right.to dispute my meaning:. I am prepared now to force.clarity upon you. — Louise Glück.
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Trump knew that Michael Flynn was under criminal investigation when he asked James Comey to “see your way clear to letting this go.” Murray Waas has seen the White House memo, which implicates the president in an obstruction of justice
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Masha Gessen saw this all coming in July 2016
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With great sadness we must announce that Robert B. Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review, died this morning after a short illness.
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In celebration of our new site, we're offering free access to our archive of over 20,000 articles, as well as a selection of classic New York Review pieces, “Twenty-Five from the Archive." Here's Ellen Willis on 'Easy Rider' and 'Alice's Restaurant'
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The poet Mosab Abu Toha, winner of the Palestine Book Award and founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, has reportedly been detained by the Israel Defense Forces. In May we published his poem “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike.”
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“The only reason we didn’t descend into violence that day was that the students remained calm. They were the only adults in the room.” —@NadiaAbuElHaj1 on the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia
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The language of Cormac McCarthy, wrote Michael Gorra in our December 22 issue, “has all the richness of the King James Bible, its cadences slow and forever beautiful and forever at odds with the world it describes.”
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Shortly after the last guilty verdicts came down in the trials of the Central Park 5, Didion wrote a 16,000-word piece carefully detailing the racism and rush to judgment, in both the courts and public opinion, that resulted in five wrongful convictions.
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@lithub We heard nobody wants to quarantine with Ayn Rand.
“Reading and thinking about Ayn Rand’s novels felt like being trapped in a small elevator with someone who talked too loudly, kept saying the same thing, and just wouldn’t shut up.”
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We’re pleased to announce that Ian Buruma has been named editor of The New York Review of Books
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the path of Trump’s enablers: “Corruption is a process, as well as a set of practices. It involves gradual changes in ethical and behavioral norms that make actions that were once considered illegal or immoral seem acceptable.”
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You all do know it’s mostly long articles about books, right?
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Isaiah Berlin died on this day in 1997. Here is his “short credo,” A Message to the 21st Century
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We mourn the death of Charles Simic (1938–2023), who since 1999 wrote 175 essays and poems for The New York Review, on subjects ranging from Saul Steinberg to the Fourth of July to gun violence to Buster Keaton.
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We sneak one in every twenty years, to make sure you’re paying attention.
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Our entire archive of Joan Didion’s writing can be found here:
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Demands for passwords to social media accounts will set a precedent that may affect all travelers around the world.
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Miguel Ángel Asturias repeatedly blurs the barrier between reality and fantasy, dreams and waking, genuine and false, past and present, giving readers access to the confused perceptions, fears, and musings of a gallery of unfortunates and scoundrels.
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Despite mass protests and China’s promises when it took back Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, Beijing’s new security law is crushing the former colony’s autonomy, @BarbaraDemick reports
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Aryeh Neier on the humiliations, beatings, amputations, sexual abuse, and torture in Israeli prisons
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Trump and his Republican wrecking crew are ripping out the floorboards under the government ethics program. His administration has shown us what immunity to accountability looks like, writes @waltshaub
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Congratulations to Nathan Thrall (@NathanThrall) for winning the #Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which grew out of this article.
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“I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.” A new essay by Zadie Smith:
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: When disaster struck a school bus, it was more than just a human tragedy. @NathanThrall on how one man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule:
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“Whatever else she may do—wherever her curious intelligence may take her, whatever twists and knots of motive and plot and genitalia she may invent—she never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.” – @MargaretAtwood, on Ursula Le Guin
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Our democracy is designed to check the impulses of dangerous men. We can and will stop Trump, writes @DavidColeGtown
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Born on this day, 260 years ago: William Blake. At his death he was almost completely forgotten. He had sold less than thirty copies of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. An obituary called him “an unfortunate lunatic.”
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Fintan O’Toole: The US has engaged in many armed conflicts, but three have never ended: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror. Their toxic residues flow from different directions into the current breakdown of the American polity.
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“What a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.” Zadie Smith:
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“The real truth is that you are dying. The real truth is that you have one foot in the grave.” A story about age, and parents, and lies, by J.M. Coetzee
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Voting machines are not as secure from cyber-attack as they should be, but election security activists are stepping in where authorities may be failing, writes @jennycohn1
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The US looks the other way as Kenya, an important trading and defense partner, dissolves into undemocratic chaos
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Alex de Waal on mass starvation as a weapon of war.
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The Alito draft opinion’s “claims to neutrality and humility should make you nauseous and irate,” writes @LizaBatkin. “The decision is a power grab cloaked in false modesty.”.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities prepares to close in response to Trump‘s budget
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Masha Gessen on Trump, language, and meaning: “This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality.”
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“Howard French writes not only to correct the historical record but to urge readers to understand how their world has been made by Africa’s contributions.” —Adom Getachew
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“He is a remorselessly political creature, devoid of principle, who, more than any figure in modern political history has damaged the fabric of American democracy.”
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If the Department of Justice “determines there is sufficient evidence to convict Trump of criminal acts,” write @ianbassin and Erica Newland, then it “has no jurisdiction to do anything other than indict.”.
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Why read the classics? . This month we’ve unlocked Italo Calvino’s timeless answer to an important question.
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You know things are bad when the Pizzagate guy doesn’t like your covers
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They say some people even read them.
The obscure $15 paperbacks put out by the @nybooks Classics imprint have become unexpected and relatively inexpensive status objects on Instagram and elsewhere
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Putin uses a retrograde, mythic version of Russia's past to oppress Ukrainians; they, in contrast, have a clear vision of the future for their country, say Olesya Khromeychuk and Sonya Bilocerkowycz.
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“American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism,” writes Sarah Churchwell. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist, it means they’re not European and it’s not the 1930s.”
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No high-performing nation in the world has privatized its schools.
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More outrage is being perpetrated and felt than can be contained within the existing frame of institutions and discourses. History is spilling over.
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We mourn the death of Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), a frequent contributor to the Review on subjects ranging from Jane Austen to colonial India to Annie Proulx, and whose novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies we are proud to have excerpted prior to their publication.
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Masha Gessen: The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism.
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Marx expected the crisis of capitalism to end in worker revolt and communism. Karl Polanyi saw that the greater likelihood was fascism.
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It is not until later.that you have to be young. it is one of the things.you meant to do later. but by then there is.someone else living there ….
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Hell of a Fiesta: @EnriqueKrauze on the collapse of Venezuela, a “humanitarian crisis of immense proportions”
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We mourn the passing of Milan Kundera. Starting in 1981 he contributed 7 essays to The New York Review of Books, on subjects ranging from Czech literature and history to Stravinsky, Janacek, Kafka, and an artist’s control over the reception to his work.
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The unexpected grandeur Renoir found in the shimmering skins of ordinary onions
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“In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more.” Charles Simic: Age of Ignorance
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“As the Chinese state works to wipe out Uighur culture and identity, the writers, artists, and activists of the Uighur diaspora are demonstrating that their community will not simply be erased.” – @jlfreeman6
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“Reading and thinking about Ayn Rand’s novels felt like being trapped in a small elevator with someone who talked too loudly, kept saying the same thing, and just wouldn’t shut up.”
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“Lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.”
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From our archives: “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”
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Mukul Kesavan on the murder of Gauri Lankesh, an ideological assassination designed to punish intellectual dissent
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The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s offers some chilling comparisons to the present day, writes Adam Hochschild
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“Everybody in Russia who opposes the invasion is fighting at the cost of their lives and their freedom for a future without war and dictatorship.” —Daria Serenko interviewed by @janaprikryl
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We have brought out from the paywall some of our favorite contributions by Didion over the years. Here is her first piece for the Review, “Hollywood: Having Fun.”.
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“Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.” (Sidney Hook, quoted by Charles Simic, 2012)
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“This generation will be remembered for having allowed for concentration camps for children to be built on ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’” Seventy-nine writers sign an open letter about the unjust imprisonment of migrant children:
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Please spare a thought for the poor @parisreview, who will surely be dejected in a few hours after being trounced in softball by our crew. You’d think that publishing four whole issues a year might leave time to practice, but who are we to judge another publication’s priorities?
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William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) on the ancient Buddhist art from the forgotten world of the early Deccan Plateau of western and southern India
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For much of her life, Laura Ingalls Wilder was a schoolteacher or a farmer. She didn’t publish the first of her Little House books until she was sixty-five
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Robinson: “The basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.” http://t.co/JQnjDtCoyP
http://t.co/zkzBsl8HYh.
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David Graeber, Against Economics: “Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems.”
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In November 2002, Didion gave the inaugural lecture in the New York Public Library’s Robert B. Silvers lecture series, where she talked about the sentimentalization of September 11.
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In 1979, Didion took issue with the vogue for Woody Allen’s “serious” pictures.
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Trump is violating the Constitution. Here’s how he can be held accountable.
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The first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of @Harvard’s schoolmaster. @Yale funded scholarships with rents from a slave plantation it owned. @Georgetown underwrote school operations with slave sales. @Columbia subsidized slave traders.
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Congratulations to Louise Glück, who has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poem “A Children’s Story” appears in our current issue:
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Thirteen months ago Timothy Snyder wrote this about how Putin would exploit Trump’s vanity and need for praise
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“ICE opposed, blocked, and delayed reunification even in cases where parents had been processed through the judicial system. Today it is estimated that more than a thousand families have still not been reunited.” —Patricia J. Williams
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Zadie Smith on Tár and the Gen X midlife crisis.
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“Gerrymandering is not only designed to preserve majorities,” writes Laura Moser, running for Congress in Texas. “It’s also designed to preserve cynicism and non-participation.”
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“The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters & victimizes whites & blacks alike”
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“If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” – Christopher Browning
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Wallace Shawn: “Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good.”
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