Seventeen-year-old Selaina lives in isolation; her mother warns her never to wander past a particular stream in the forest. Beyond it, apparently, lies the “wicked world” of Galanor. That doesn’t stop Selaina from jumping the stream, but...
Forty-year-old Jaycee Grayson, fresh from a stint in the Betty Ford rehab center after having been fired from her job at a big-name Hollywood studio, is about to embark on a new adventure. Her older sister Meredith Grayson-O’Cochlain, a...
Trying to forget a violent encounter with a serial killer, Arista settles into her new home in Sedona, Arizona. The New-Agey town seems like a good fit. Interested in magic, she works at a shop called Cosmic Prisms that sells items like...
When their club decides to have the girls’ team forfeit—even though they qualified for nationals—in favor of funding the boys’ team, white-presenting Barbara, who’s in her final year of secondary school, rallies her fractured teammates...
In Berwyn, Illinois, immigration officers arrested Julio Noriega as he was walking down the street and, without explanation, handcuffed him and pushed him into a van. He was held for ten hours, according to court documents, before agents...
Since the end of the last century, Nell Irvin Painter writes in her essay “‘This Land Is Yours,’” published in our March 27 issue, historians of many different American regions have shown in their work that “places assumed to be only and...
On January 9, when Venâncio Mondlane stepped off the plane in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, he was returning to a changed nation. In October 2024 he had stood as the opposition candidate in disputed presidential elections; he...
In 1991 the Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem released his first album on ECM, Barzakh, a trio that also featured Béchir Selmi on violin and Lassad Hosni on percussion. “Barzakh”—“separation” or “barrier” in Arabic—is a...
Miss Georgina Harrington is frustrated with her cousin Percy Pendergrast, even though he’s the best of all her relatives. It’s not his fault she’s forced to stay hidden in Essex while he presents her discoveries under his name, but it...
Whatever modern trend has got you down—political correctness, health and wellness, device madness, you name it—Rudnick skewers it in his latest comedy of manners. At its center is a lovely man named Rob who has recently lost his longtime...
Sybil Sweet is what people might call a hot mess. She has trouble keeping a job and a relationship. Her mother is a tough character who makes it clear she has no faith in her, and Sybil sadly leans into the assumption that she’s a...
Emelie is burned out from her life as a journalist in the city. Unable to leave the house for a time, she eventually drives to the country and begins camping, nature soothing her fractured state. Out in the woods, she notices an odd...
“How could anyone fall for that?” remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it’s less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal. The flat Earth society is...
After Cincinnati Lee, an American girl who has some Chinese heritage, snags her ailing 135-year-old archaeologist great-great-great-grandfather’s diary, she learns about a clay idol from Peru that he looted (and which has cursed the...
As the sky darkens, the family tinkers with a rusty old car. After securing the titular couch to the car’s roof, they drive over “the gravelly roads… / up in the mountains, down by the hollow,” to a field of old abandoned vehicles. With...
One day, Addie’s husband comes home and tells her, “You look like my wife, but you are not my wife.” Then he adds, “My wife is prettier than you are.” This pronouncement comes as one in a long line of increasingly erratic behaviors for...
Annie is 37 weeks pregnant, shopping for a crib at IKEA, when suddenly she feels a terrible jolt, “a wave underneath me,” she thinks, “lifting me up.” An earthquake has hit Portland. In her assured debut novel, Pattee follows Annie...
When the moon and every lunar sample on Earth transform into a cheese-like substance, it seems amusing at first, but the appearance of this newly organic, extremely unstable satellite has far-reaching, apocalyptic consequences. A variety...
Scarlett Wilcox is happy to be a spinster, but she’ll begrudgingly marry as long as she gets to keep focusing on her true passion: medicine. Accordingly, the Duke of Torrance, a family friend, is doing his best to find a man who won’t...
Shayleigh Myers’ world hasn’t changed much over the past year. She still works hard to make Crystals & CuriosiTEAS the premier destination for herbal remedies in Bray Harbor despite stiff competition from Madam Malvina, the owner of...
Kahlenberg is well known—and a source of controversy—for having aligned, though a liberal, with conservative thinkers in arguing against the affirmative action of old. The goals of racially based affirmative action are, he writes,...
Gramma Tala (from Moana ) pushes her titular granddaughter to “listen to the powerful voice inside her.” Grandma Paguro, from Luca —a sea monster, like her grandson—urges Luca to take risks and to find friends who will love and accept...
Stanley Webb is in a bad way, as so many of his age: He’s in a memory ward, sinking into dementia, leaving his wife to tend single-handedly to a house that’s too large for her. Maggie—the true hero of Binge’s involving novel—is the...
For decades, biographers have focused on Martin Luther King Jr.’s successful leadership in the South while suggesting that his Northern activism failed because it lacked direction and local support. Theoharis, a professor of political...
Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an essay about Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Working with McIntosh...
The photobook is a strange medium. It combines two technologies—one about as old as Christianity, the other younger than the United States. If photographs did not render the bound codex and its descendants obsolete, as they are said to...
This week the NYR Online published an open letter signed by eighteen constitutional scholars from across the ideological spectrum that argued that the Trump administration’s treatment of Columbia University “risks deterring and...
The ghost of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra may still prowl Princesses’ Street by night, but hardly anyone in this affluent neighborhood in western Baghdad would recognize him. Born in 1919, Jabra was displaced from Palestine in the Nakba and...
Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.
The Friends of Universal Reform, about five hundred of them, trooped into Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel to debate the woman question, consider scriptural authority, and damn the institution of slavery. “A revolution of all Human affairs...
We cannot grow the crops that feed eight billion people and counting without phosphorus. At the rate we waste this precious element, how long will supplies last?
The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.
A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.
A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume.
Tell me about the final day my body—full as it’ll go without yet changingsize or shape, denser than it ever packed itself, the last day of Body-Before—will still not show, when mirror still won’t mark how underfleshhas no reserve, no...
Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.
In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.
The Met’s Caspar David Friedrich exhibition offers an introduction to an artist whose work—luminous, disturbing, serene—reveals an all-encompassing physical realm.
The comparison between man and candleHas been suggested then as now:A flame is ignitedAnd in the end self-annihilates. This is libel. I am warning you.I object. I am neither wax nor paraffin,Not even self-steering stearin.I am not a mold...
We write as constitutional scholars—some liberal and some conservative—who seek to defend academic freedom and the First Amendment in the wake of the federal government’s recent treatment of Columbia University. The First Amendment...
This newsletter comes to you while I’m watching Thunder on the Hill, part of the “Douglas Sirk Noir” series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. A convicted murderer, bickering nurses and nuns, a risky childbirth, a sadistic...
In the mid-1940s, when Weegee took his haunting photograph of Frankie Newton, the trumpeter was already retreating from the jazz scene. He was working as a superintendent at an apartment house on East 17th Street; the picture shows him...
Since the assassination on December 4 of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, by an alleged shooter whose apparent motive was righteous fury at the iniquity and injustice of America’s profit-driven system of health care, one thing we...
“If you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of...
Mahmoud Khalil has been a public face of the pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia University and Barnard College since last spring. I have known him for over a year. During the encampment on campus he served as the lead negotiator...