NYR Online

Timid Europe

For the past month European leaders have lent tacit and sometimes open support to the US and Israel’s war in Iran—with one notable exception.

March 31, 2026

Bottling the World Economy

Now that the Gulf states have become diversified industrial giants, blocking the Strait of Hormuz will have catastrophic effects on trade networks and food systems across the globe.

March 23, 2026

The Gaza Doctrine

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.

March 22, 2026

Lebanon’s Negations

Tenuous modus vivendis have always defined the Lebanese state. Israel’s war will merely create a new one—at the cost of great destruction and death.

March 18, 2026

Longing for My Tehran

On the Israeli news, I watch as the country whose citizenship I hold devastates the one where I was born.

March 14, 2026

Of Fire and Rain

It was sometime in the afternoon, checking my phone for news from home, that I saw the flames.

March 14, 2026

Iran Transformed

To understand the regime the US now seeks to obliterate, we have to return to the political and economic convulsions that produced last January’s uprising.

March 8, 2026

The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War

Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.

March 6, 2026

Syphoning Morale

The attack on the independence of Stars and Stripes is a window into Hegseth’s unaccountable military.

March 27, 2026

The Neocons’ Revenge?

Trump’s war has deepened the already-widening cracks in the MAGA coalition.

March 25, 2026

Since Dobbs

The telehealth network circumventing abortion bans has given people new choices—even as they contend with new forms of uncertainty.

March 13, 2026

The New War on Speech

In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.

March 10, 2026

Trading with the Enemy

By striking down Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court acted like a court should, in response to a president who acted like a president shouldn’t.

February 23, 2026

The Men Who Sold the World

For half a century the US government has assigned a dollar value to human life. By denying that the EPA needs to mitigate carbon emissions, the Trump administration is driving that value down to zero.

February 20, 2026

Authoritarianism from Below

To some cops and the unions that represent them, the federal invasions of American cities are a chance to undercut the already fraying democratic constraints on police power.

February 14, 2026

Medicaid Undone

By making Medicaid distinguish still more sharply between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, the Trump administration is exacerbating a problem built into the program’s foundation.

February 13, 2026

Elegy for Rafah

For the tens of thousands of Gazans who need to leave the Strip but want the chance to come back home, life revolves around the Rafah crossing.

March 20, 2026

Pieces of Gaza

An exhibition in Paris of archaeological treasures from Gaza served as a reminder of how much of the Strip’s history has been destroyed.

February 12, 2026

Gaza: The Threat of Partition

By putting the possibility of reconstruction out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the current UN-endorsed “peace plan” may make it impossible for them to remain. 

November 23, 2025

What ‘Day After’ for Gaza?

The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future.

October 25, 2025

The Emirates on the Tightrope

For decades the UAE pursued vast ambitions for a regional maritime empire, at great human cost. Now many of those schemes have been thrown into crisis. 

April 10, 2026

Nepal’s Republic of Amnesia

After overthrowing the government last fall, can Nepal’s youth movement address the inequities that have burdened the country since its founding?

January 17, 2026

Machado Agonistes

The Venezuelan opposition leader courted US military intervention—but she did not get what she bargained for.

January 15, 2026

The Gray Tick

Since leaving Iran fifteen years ago I have felt a permanent anxiety for loved ones there. Never is it sharper than when the regime shuts the Internet down.

January 13, 2026

‘Minimum Victory’

Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future. 

December 20, 2025

Ghana: The Victors and the Spoils

The country has spent fifteen years lurching from one corrupt administration to another. What could break the cycle?

August 26, 2025

Kashmir: Death and the River

In the aftermath of India and Pakistan’s four-day war in May, peace remains elusive. A major fault line will be over water. 

July 17, 2025

The War to Remake Myanmar

For many of the armed groups fighting across Myanmar, the goal is not only to defeat the military but to end the centralized state itself.

June 11, 2025

A Clearing of the Ground

Hampshire College, 1970–2026

April 19, 2026

War Games

In spite of moments of inspired athleticism and grace, the 2026 Winter Olympics were haunted by the war to come.

April 19, 2026

Building the Electrostate

The long story of public power suggests that state ownership can in fact appeal to the broad American public.

February 26, 2026

‘Fill It with Reality’

It’s been two months now since I became a maid.

February 10, 2026

Never Again, Once Again

Invoking the memory of Jewish persecution to denounce the assault on immigrants today is not an offense but a moral imperative. 

February 7, 2026

The Solidarity of the Hopeful

Reflections on literature, politics, and religion from the second installment of the Georgetown Global Dialogues

October 31, 2025

After Flight

Having lost the organic link to his past, the refugee contrives for himself a room to which only he has the keys.

September 10, 2025

Buried Sunshine

The more I learned about the legacy of coal mining in my Illinois hometown, the more light it seemed to cast on the state’s long histories of violence.

July 26, 2025

Waiting for Day Zero

In Los Angeles, home to the largest population of Iranians outside Iran, supporters of the exiled crown prince insist that their moment has come.

April 22, 2026

Fifteen Below Zero

Up against the delirious scale of Operation Metro Surge, ordinary people juggle daily life with looking out for each other however they can.

January 30, 2026

‘They Killed Our People’

More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested. 

December 19, 2025

The Road to Miaoxi

Ruins of Mao-era “reform-through-labor” camps remain scattered throughout the mountains of Sichuan. Five years ago I decided to retrace one former prisoner’s path. 

November 22, 2025

When a Salmon Strays

Swimming up Argentina’s Paraná River, a non-native fish encountered a landscape being remade at an unprecedented speed.

October 14, 2025

Looking for Alicia

Finding a disappeared person in Mexico is like chasing a ghost through a labyrinth.

September 14, 2025

Kyiv: Death and Other Borders

In Ukraine today all ideas are sharply embodied. They pierce and startle.

August 22, 2025

The New Imams

Muslim religious leaders in the US need to navigate the demands of a secularizing, pluralistic, and Islamophobic country. Several new institutions are emerging to train them.

July 15, 2025

Finding Gertrud Kauders

Only many decades after my great-aunt’s death in the Holocaust did we discover the remarkable story of her life and work.

April 17, 2026

My Elsewheres

A lifetime of travel outside the United States has enlarged my sense of history far beyond the prevailing American ideology of race.

February 1, 2026

Leaving Khartoum

When war came to Sudan’s capital, I was trapped in my apartment complex with neighbors I hardly knew. Suddenly we were all we had.

December 30, 2025

When the Spleen Ran Out

Memories of East Village restaurants, circa 1977

December 4, 2025

The Power of the Source

Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory has reenergized leftists and spurred centrist Democrats to embrace the call for “affordability.”

January 7, 2026

The Scrolling Eye

The values of Zohran Mamdani’s digital campaign were those of the amateur content creator: playful, self-deprecating, celebrating ordinary delights. 

January 7, 2026

Mamdanism Without Guarantees

What would Zohran Mamdani’s vision of “comprehensive planning” entail?

January 6, 2026

A Council Divided

The City Council that Zohran Mamdani will inherit is a tricky one to navigate.

January 5, 2026

‘Imagination for the Other Fellow’

Fans and pundits have frequently wrapped Zohran Mamdani in Fiorello La Guardia’s mythic mantle—even when the comparison seems naïve or premature.

January 4, 2026

Sanctuary City

The question is less what Zohran Mamdani symbolizes for New York’s immigrant communities than what benefits he might deliver for them. 

January 2, 2026

Wielding the Ice Pick

Zohran Mamdani has revealed himself to be a hard-nosed practitioner of realpolitik, especially within his own coalition.

January 1, 2026

Until the Next Storm

With the deadlines imposed by New York’s signature climate law looming, Zohran Mamdani will have to enforce the city’s green transition.

January 1, 2026

Life Storage

Protecting graves in New York City has never been easy.

January 18, 2026

‘Have You Met Z?’

Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not, as some critics suggest, a stale collection of old creeds but a dynamic system with small businesses at its core.

November 6, 2025

The Sliwa Era

For more than four decades, Curtis Sliwa has been a bellwether for New Yorkers’ perception of urban crime—and what they think should be done about it.

October 23, 2025

How New York’s Tenants Won

To understand how Zohran Mamdani swept New York’s mayoral primary, it helps to know why the city’s tenants went on the offensive against real estate.

July 22, 2025

‘Go Out and Sue a Polluter’

For a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Texas was home to a working-class, populist environmental movement. What might its legacy be today?

April 13, 2026

The Scramble for the Seafloor

With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all.

December 10, 2025

The Costs of the Cloud

How much power does AI consume?

September 27, 2025

What’s Underground

Lithium, an essential ingredient in rechargeable batteries, epitomizes the contradictions of “green capitalism.”

September 17, 2025

We Goofed

A new exhibition celebrates the humble poetry of errata. 

April 25, 2026

A Workingman’s Surrealist

The artist H. C. Westermann cribbed from science fiction, pulp novels, and comic strips to make impeccable constructions from utilitarian stock.

April 11, 2026

‘Tell Me Your Worst’ 

Helene Schjerfbeck captured the difficulty—even the terror—of confronting the self.

March 29, 2026

Indecorous Decorations

Medieval ideas about sex and love, both rowdy and reverent, are recorded on objects meant for everyday use.

March 28, 2026

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world.

January 25, 2026

Dead Ringers

The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past.

January 14, 2026

Catching Us Looking

Gustave Caillebotte subverts our expectations about lines of sight and lines of desire.

September 30, 2025

Killing the Moonlight

A recent exhibition of Futurism at Italy’s national modern art museum celebrated the movement’s techno-optimism and played down its fascist roots.

August 24, 2025

My Classroom Life

The best way to learn something is to teach it.

May 1, 2026

The Hardy Men

Why is a right-wing press reissuing century-old adolescent mystery novels?

April 16, 2026

The Stony Dark Within

Rainer Maria Rilke’s temperament, it could be said, was fragile, ghost-haunted, unironic, unthrifty, reliant, romantic, intermittently animistic, and decidedly non-avant-garde.

February 25, 2026

Our Moments

The sentences in Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World are acts of attention, as uncertain and unstable as life itself. 

January 6, 2026

Timekeepers

In The Secret Agent, his sad, riotous new feature, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho at once archives a vanished world and mythologizes it. 

February 22, 2026

Promo Time

At the center of KPop Demon Hunters is a fantasy of unmediated connection between fans and idols, a frictionless vision of the perfected market.

February 2, 2026

East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

December 18, 2025

‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’

If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?

December 13, 2025

A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs

Major film studios embracing AI, newspapers announcing the death of moviegoing, critics devoid of values: all of this can instill a great sense of defeat. We have to write against it. 

December 2, 2025

Shithole Cinema

There’s uncanny comedy in watching Radu Jude’s ugly films as an ugly American.

November 19, 2025

This May Have Been Life

Ira Sachs’s adaptation of Peter Hujar’s Day quietly captures the careful attention its subject brought to his intimate, delicate photographs.

November 15, 2025

Making Up an Escape

In Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, a self-centered art thief finds himself ever more entangled in a system of dependence.

November 5, 2025

She Knows a Place

For seven decades, the gospel singer Mavis Staples has troubled the opposition between chorus and soloist, background and lead.

April 16, 2026

The Docteur Is In

The Congolese rumba pioneer Docteur Nico helped define the sound of African decolonization—and became one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar.

March 11, 2026

The Dude Ranch Above the Sea

Steely Dan conjured a sealed-in-amber studio perfection—a sound that could alienate listeners as easily as seduce them.

November 29, 2025

‘Like a Hymn’

The jazz pianist Amina Claudine Myers has spent her career weaving jazz, blues, gospel, and classical music into a distinctively personal idiom.

August 16, 2025

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are inspired casting to lead Waiting for Godot, but the Broadway production amounts to Beckett with emotional subtitles.

November 8, 2025

‘One Being Dancing’

In her latest performance, the eighty-five-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs takes up one of her great influences: the work of Gertrude Stein. 

October 10, 2025

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality. 

May 10, 2025

Mama Tried

In Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, newly revived with Adam Driver, a country star looks back on his wasted years. 

December 8, 2024

Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and Disegno

Episode 13 of Private Life

May 13, 2026

Maya Lin Reads ‘Ghosts in the House’

Episode 12 of Private Life

April 29, 2026

Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

Episode 11 of Private Life

April 22, 2026

Mystery Brain

“I tend to be interested in subjects that confound me or strike me as enticingly improbable—I guess you could call them mysteries.”

May 2, 2026

After the Mystics

“There’s nothing quite like the captivating feeling of coming upon, say, a faded relief on a stone wall in some unassuming place, and finding that the work is so much better than it has to be, has a mastery of skill or an originality of thought beyond its purpose.”

April 18, 2026

A Widening Gulf

“It would be a mistake to treat the Gulf as politically homogeneous. The war has clearly shown the weight of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but it has not eliminated the different calculations of other Gulf states.”

April 11, 2026

Novels of the Future

“To ask what literature has been doing all this time, as atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising to ever more alarming levels, is to ask about the basic task facing writers.”

April 4, 2026

To Pay a Translator

The seventh episode of “On Translation”

August 30, 2025

Passing Judgment

The sixth episode of “On Translation”

August 29, 2025

Practical Translation: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’

The fifth episode of “On Translation”

August 28, 2025

Is English a Monocrop?

The fourth episode of “On Translation”

August 27, 2025

Non Nom

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 19, 2025

Tender Eminem, and Other Levines

A treasury of David Levine caricatures

August 26, 2025

Making It Real

The year in poems

December 20, 2022

Hot Cats

A dispatch from the Art Editor

July 16, 2025