NYR Online

The Return of Trump—I

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences. 

November 8, 2024

The Return of Trump—II

On Gaza, trade, con men, sinking feelings, the federal workforce, and “Brexit plus plus plus.”

November 9, 2024

The Return of Trump—III

On abortion, labor, NatCon, the rise of authoritarianism, the darkroom of propaganda, and the threat of mass deportation. 

November 10, 2024

The Return of Trump—IV

On burnout, hell, billionaires, health care, the specter of the limousine liberal, and the anti-trans agenda.

November 11, 2024

The Return of Trump—V

On tantrums, dominion, the Southern Strategy, fearmongering ads, New York’s haves and have-nots, and Candidate Fain. 

November 13, 2024

The Return of Trump—VI

On rage, fluoride, the task of the journalist, the Garden of American Heroes, and the Buffs and the Blues. 

November 15, 2024

The Return of Trump—VII

On veterans, fascism, Africa abandoned, and “less-than-kosher activities.”

November 17, 2024

‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Israel’s assault on Lebanon threatens to render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration.

November 2, 2024

North Gaza: Between Death and Displacement

As it escalates its attacks on north Gaza, the Israeli army has ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate—and cut off food aid to all who remain. 

October 17, 2024

The Path to Regional War

For more than nine months, Israel and the Iran-led axis of resistance maintained a precarious balance of mutual deterrence. Now that balance has collapsed.

October 11, 2024

Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

September 23, 2024

Planet 2025

Donald Trump’s war on what he calls the “deep state” and his broader war on climate science are neatly aligned.

October 30, 2024

Pennsylvania’s Grassroots Revival

Since 2017, middle-aged women have been rebuilding the state’s Democratic party infrastructure, not just in its liberal suburbs but in its rural Republican strongholds. 

October 18, 2024

What the New Right Wants

The Heritage Foundation has reinvented itself to include a new generation of conservatives at odds with their elders. Project 2025 lays bare the contradictions.  

September 22, 2024

Late to the Party

In the aftermath of this summer’s scramble to replace Joe Biden, Democrats will need to confront why they had such trouble thinking and acting as a party—even when it mattered most. 

July 30, 2024

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 2024

The Women She Left Behind

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

September 18, 2024

Desert Visions

The flamingos were listening to and watching me and I was listening to and watching them. We were reading one another.

September 4, 2024

Three Kinds of Sun

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun.

August 24, 2024

A Portrait on the Wall

It had not really occurred to me until many years after her death that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

July 14, 2024

‘This Head, These Limbs’

After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law.

June 25, 2024

Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

June 19, 2024

Harmony

You can practice a song a thousand times and still its first note sends you into the unknown.

June 11, 2024

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land in Appalachia. In western North Carolina, those questions have everything to do with the booming tourist economy.

November 3, 2024

An Inflection Point in Sri Lanka

In the aftermath of a protracted economic crisis and a historic popular struggle, a left-wing party has come to power. Can it address the country’s deep-rooted structural issues? 

October 28, 2024

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

A New Chapter for Bangladesh?

When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.

September 28, 2024

Betraying Iraqi Girls

If Iraq legalizes child marriage, it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression.

September 15, 2024

‘Make Europe Great Again’

Viktor Orbán’s program has found less support among European politicians than it has among far-right ideologues in the United States, who consider his regime a model for a second Trump administration.

August 20, 2024

Misjudging Labor

The Supreme Court’s recent Starbucks decision is the latest episode in a long history of judicial hostility toward labor.

August 10, 2024

Sudan Starves

As its civil war rages on, Sudan is facing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years. 

June 23, 2024

‘We Got Kidnapped Again’

Migrants are facing unprecedented dangers traveling to—and waiting at—the US–Mexico border, but the Democratic Party has yet to rethink its immigration policy.

October 25, 2024

Fragile Unity in South Africa

Short of a majority for the first time in three decades, the African National Congress now has to govern with its longtime rival. Will the alliance hold?

October 23, 2024

Voting for Their Jobs

Georgia’s capital might lean toward the opposition in next month’s elections—but in smaller towns dissent is weaker and critics still more embattled.

September 19, 2024

Kashmir: Crackdowns and Plunder

By revoking Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, India has launched a settler-colonial project. 

July 21, 2024

The Next Mass Extinction?

As avian influenza spreads to the farthest reaches of the planet, scientists have expressed both urgency and fatalism.

April 14, 2024

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

April 12, 2024

Shipping’s Shadow World

The shipping industry, which moves more than 80 percent of global trade, is poorly regulated, environmentally dangerous, and rife with labor violations.

April 9, 2024

‘Every Molecule of Hydrocarbon Will Come Out’

Gulf States are increasingly shaping global climate policy, even as they plan to accelerate fossil fuel production. 

February 21, 2024

A Living Requiem

In her new installation, the sculptor Nour Mobarak transforms the hymns of the powerful into the complaints of the weak.

October 25, 2024

A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

In the first decade of his career, the artist CF seemed to be reinventing comics from first principles, assembling strange new worlds only to smash them into pieces.

October 24, 2024

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Ahead of the Diminishing World

Most of the bohemians Alice Neel painted were far from my own queer milieu in downtown New York—but when she turned to that world she captured it with energy and defiance. 

September 8, 2024

Pitiless, Restless Brecht

A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress.

August 22, 2024

Lights, Camera, Royals!

Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

August 18, 2024

‘We Took Care of the Network’

The Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles imagined an asylum that could cure not only individual patients but society itself.

August 17, 2024

Worldly van Eyck

Was the Netherlandish master a painter of visionary experience or of life here on earth?

August 14, 2024

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

The Pitch of Passion

James Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence.

August 2, 2024

‘The Small Girl’s Proust’

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle tends to be read as a romance novel. But beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit. 

July 13, 2024

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general. 

November 3, 2024

Anora’s Honor

The title character in Sean Baker’s new film is sharp-tongued and invulnerable—until a marriage plot catches up with her.

November 1, 2024

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965. 

October 12, 2024

‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’

Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators. 

August 25, 2024

Eastern Sounds 

Ahmed Abdul-Malik recorded six overlooked albums combining jazz and North African folk music. A new European quartet has revived his legacy to create a new music of their own.

October 6, 2024

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024

Color Me Country

Cowboy Carter is both a country album and a Beyoncé album—the genres aren’t mutually exclusive, nor should they be. 

August 7, 2024

Take Eight 

The saxophonist Jon De Lucia brings Dave Brubeck’s overlooked octet back to life.

August 6, 2024

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024

Dancing Laser Beams

George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.

July 17, 2024

Taking the Performance Apart

A retrospective of the artist Joan Jonas displays her will of steel, her porosity before the world, and her ways of playing with perception.

June 30, 2024

Second Hand News

In David Adjmi’s new play, a fictional Seventies rock band struggles with life and art.

May 18, 2024

All Bets Are Off

“The Democrats must do everything in their power and influence to oppose, slow down, and attach political costs to the Trump agenda.”

November 9, 2024

A Richer Sense of Humanity

“History is as potent a presence as myth.”

November 2, 2024

True as True Can Be

“The answer to habitat and species destruction, to climate change and pollution, is always the same: stop doing the things that cause them.”

October 26, 2024

Illuminating the Scriptorium

“There is possibly too much emphasis on the ‘wackiness’ of medieval life and thought. How easily we chortle at the goings-on in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, as if the pages were meant only to be silly.”

October 12, 2024

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

Over Donner Pass

A dispatch from the Art Editor

July 17, 2024

After a Fashion

A dispatch from the Art Editor

June 19, 2024

Best in Show

A dispatch from the Art Editor

May 15, 2024

Tulips!

A dispatch from the Art Editor

April 17, 2024

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014