The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.
With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.
Who were we? Where did we come from? What did we look like, trudging up the hill between Convent Avenue and the subway, sitting obediently in class, arguing madly as soon as the bell rang? We were the children of tailors, shopkeepers,...
Brandon Shimoda’s book about how the descendants and survivors of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.
At the center of Children of Radium is Joe Dunthorne’s search for information about his great-grandfather—a German Jewish scientist who helped developed chemical weapons for the Nazis.
can still speak from their cage? It’s been quiet for a while now.A wind came through &drowned out the last of thechatter. It was a terrible chatter.Then the rain came and we thought itmight clean us.It did not clean us. They took...
Two books by leading First Amendment scholars offer a timely defense of the principle that politicians should not try to control what universities and professors teach their students.
Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals.
Frank Costigliola's biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.
To the Editors: In a recent book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023), I argue that contemporary science shows that free will is a myth (along with the passing opinion that the world would become more humane if that...
Hugo is eager to join Dorian and their friend Ada, a boulder who will eventually grow up to be a planet, on a trip to watery Hydrox, Dorian’s home planet. They arrive to find a crisis caused by masses of butterfly people, who have been...
It’s 1998, and teenagers Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith are making a video game. They’ve never met in person, but they meet online to discuss their plans for Saga of the Sorceress , inspired by a character from the Mystic Knights video game...
Though the title sounds like a murder mystery, in this case it refers to a feeling Miranda reports to her sister, Charlotte, by email, during a visit to their parents’ home: “You know what it’s like: the usual desire to kill.” That’s the...
Lady Zenobia “Zia” Osborn is bored with society’s expectations. She’s clever and nurtures a dream of becoming a composer. Zia and her friends, who call themselves the Lady Knights, play Robin Hood, taking from the wealthy (specifically,...
In the tradition of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me and their own Nothin’ But a Good Time , Bienstock and Beaujour spliced together dozens of interviews with musicians, producers, staff, and others on the scene to craft...
JP Laurent has seen better days. The retired engineer is reeling from the death of his wife and a battle with brain cancer that caused him to take early retirement. His longtime best friend, Dulin Marks, a comic-book writer, has decided...
Jimmy Baker has always had anger issues. His career as a minor league hockey player ended abruptly when he was ordered to go after opposing player Cory Richards, goaded Cory into punching him in order to juice his own adrenaline, and...
An excited child awakens a younger brother for a walk under the full moon. The young narrator points out the night sky and various phenomena and encourages the little one to listen for night creatures: wolves, loons, a barred owl,...
Although candidate Donald Trump “vowed to drain the influence peddling swamp in Washington, DC,” author Lewis asserts in the book’s introduction, “he did the exact opposite” as president. Particularly egregious is the administration’s...
With more than 200 color images and five essays, this sumptuous volume celebrates an iconic flower. Introduced by Kristine Paulus, collection development librarian at the New York Botanical Garden, essays include fashion historian Amy de...
“My mother has an invisible shield. I’ve tested it,” declares a floppy-haired child, who then proceeds to illustrate the many ways in which that hypothesis has been proven. This mom is ready for anything her child throws at her...
After fleeing an abusive husband, New Zealander Jessamine Sibley takes a new job at a library in a small town in Bent River County, Virginia. At first, she’s excited about her fresh start. She has a new career, new friends, and a new...
An unnamed stage actress sits in her apartment, telling her young son a fairy story. Urged on by the ghosts of blood-drenched women that only she can see, she speaks of a boy born in a stately home. A curious, perpetually hungry child...
A cancelled flight has jeopardized Piper Adams’ maid of honor responsibilities. Instead of being on a plane to her best friend Allie’s bachelorette party and wedding at an all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas, she’s stuck at the Atlanta...
Han is introduced as “mostly ornery. That’s another word for grumpy .” Then Kate and Olly move in; the youngsters are “curious and loquacious. That’s another word for talkative .” Though Han tries to avoid the kids, eventually they meet,...
His best friend, Jasminder Cheema, who has her life together, is going with Joe Chan, one of the hottest boys in school—because of course she is. But when Jas surprises Alfie one morning with the news that their school’s golden couple,...
Kurt Endlicher is a young Viennese adult-education teacher living on his own for the first time. As the book begins, he has just moved into his aunt’s old apartment, where he initially clashes with one of his neighbors, Paul. “I had...
Robbie Jordan is on the cusp of motherhood, and she and her husband, Abe O’Neill, couldn’t be happier. Business is buzzing at Pans ’N Pancakes, Robbie’s diner. But as she and her staff of two, Danna Beedle and Turner Rao, work hard to...
The author, an experienced leader in risk management, here shares his method for turning professional setbacks into opportunities by focusing on six distinct areas, using a system he calls Presilience®. First, readers learn how...
Hiding out in the near-future “Perfect. Animal. Worlds.” (or PAW) Biosphere, 11-year-old Hazel McCrimlisk hopes that learning to speak with the animals will help her locate her scientist parents, who were mysteriously abducted by a...
I just mailed off the final chapter of my new book on competition between autocratic and democratic great powers in the twenty-first century, focused on China, Russia, and the United States. It draws on lessons from the cold war to argue...
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...
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?