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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2h

Francesca Wade on the inspiration Lucinda Childs took from Gertrude Stein for her latest performance, Stein

It begins with a white chair slowly gliding across the stage behind a giant gauze curtain. Then two dancers emerge, one from each wing, approaching one

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2h

Peter Cole on reading the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik today, “with cries of revenge in the air and the streets”

Psalmist of the Gap | Peter Cole

Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2h

Mae Ngai on the long history of asylum—and the political battles over when to provide it—in the United States

The End of Asylum | Mae Ngai

The second Trump administration has undone the division between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with?

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4h

“There’s an insistent analogy in Tokarczuk’s work...between the arbitrarily constructed qualities of gender roles and the arbitrarily constructed qualities of nation-states.” —Christopher Tayler

In the Fourth Person | Christopher Tayler

In 1896 the French writer Alfred Jarry gave a speech introducing his play Ubu Roi, a pioneering work of avant-garde provocation, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4h

“In the Soviet Union…almost in lockstep, an entire nation of women worked the equivalent of two jobs while their brothers and husbands worked only one.” —Elaine Blair

Equality Without Feminism? | Elaine Blair

On the evening of August 30, 1918, an assassin shot Lenin twice as he was leaving an armaments factory. The assailant was twenty-eight-year-old Fanny

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4h

The Icelandic novel Red Milk raises the question, “What causes perfectly normal children, socialized in liberalism, to turn into right-wing extremists when they grow up?” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Stripped of Myths | Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Sjón’s Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated.

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David @daverino.bsky.social · 2d

"Even if the boats’ occupants were..carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, &, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial"
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Getting Away with Murder | David Cole

During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose

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Philip Gourevitch @pgourevitch.bsky.social · 3d

RIP Diane Keaton — the news of her death sent me looking for this excellent piece about her and her serious interest in photography by her friend Larry McMurty

www.nybooks.com/articles/200...

Diane Keaton on Photography | Larry McMurtry

1. My friendship with Diane Keaton began about twenty-eight years ago, when I found her, one morning, sitting in the flower bed outside the Madison Hotel,

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Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan on X) @markanthonyneal.bsky.social · 2d

The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors | Eric Foner | @nybooks.com

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors | Eric Foner

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 1d

“To describe the commitment to the future as those of us in the present ‘sacrificing’ ourselves is to fundamentally misrepresent what is at stake.” — @geoffmann.bsky.social

The Price of Tomorrow | Geoff Mann

The current discount rate means that the government views the long-term future of humanity as not metaphorically but literally worthless.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2d

“Brian Goldstone calls the displaced people he writes about ‘the working homeless,’” Jay Neugeboren writes. His book “reveals an America few of us know.”

The Homeless We Don’t See | Jay Neugeboren

As housing costs have risen and affordable housing remains in short supply, even Americans with full-time job are experiencing homelessness.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2d

“The two world wars turned industrial power into US military dominance not because they empowered the genius of individuals but because they built a new and formidable state.” —Susannah Glickman on the past and future of industrial policy

The War Over Defense Tech | Susannah Glickman

Last October, on a Martin Luther–inspired website called www.18theses.com, a software executive named Shyam Sankar published a four-thousand-word polemic

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 2d

“Tokarczuk’s body of work is animated by the idea that being trapped in a single consciousness—one’s own—is a somewhat desolate condition.” —Christopher Tayler

In the Fourth Person | Christopher Tayler

In 1896 the French writer Alfred Jarry gave a speech introducing his play Ubu Roi, a pioneering work of avant-garde provocation, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 3d

“Watching a [Miguel] Gomes film can give the impression of someone inventing the future of cinema by repurposing its prehistory,” writes Ken Chen, ”as if he were a Looney Tunes character who tears up the railroad tracks behind him.”

Serene and Delirious | Ken Chen

At first I did not know how to watch the fresh and giggling, gasp-of-delight-inducing, omnivorous, often deliberately pointless, even trolling and

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 3d

“The rates at which we currently practice discounting mean that the long-term future of humanity, the living world, and the planet itself are not metaphorically but literally worthless.” — @geoffmann.bsky.social

The Price of Tomorrow | Geoff Mann

The current discount rate means that the government views the long-term future of humanity as not metaphorically but literally worthless.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 3d

Part of what makes Sjón’s Red Milk so “eerie,” writes Jessi Jezewska Stevens, is that its neo-Nazi protagonist has an “utterly commonplace [childhood]—nothing like the trauma that might be expected to fuel a later grievance politics.”

Stripped of Myths | Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Sjón’s Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 3d

In Pinochet’s Chile, “it was whispered” that an “unrepentant Nazi” had served as “an adviser to the dictatorship’s secret police and even [became] an interrogator. But was it true?” —Ariel Dorfman

Pinochet and the Vans of Death | Ariel Dorfman

In 38 Londres Street Philippe Sands investigates a Nazi war criminal’s collaboration with the Chilean dictatorship’s system of repression, torture, and murder.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 3d

“With any new medium, there’s a formative period before the rules are set when you can be part of discovering what the form will be.” —Jacob Weisberg, interviewed by Lauren Kane

New Media Rules | Jacob Weisberg, Lauren Kane

“With any new medium, there’s a formative period before the rules are set when you can be part of discovering what the form will be.”

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4d

“While every [Soviet] citizen was expected to work for the Communist state on an equal basis…no one seriously entertained the logical corollary: that housecleaning, cooking, and childcare might also be shared on an equal basis.” —Elaine Blair

Equality Without Feminism? | Elaine Blair

On the evening of August 30, 1918, an assassin shot Lenin twice as he was leaving an armaments factory. The assailant was twenty-eight-year-old Fanny

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4d

Christopher Tayler on Olga Tokarczuk

In the Fourth Person | Christopher Tayler

In 1896 the French writer Alfred Jarry gave a speech introducing his play Ubu Roi, a pioneering work of avant-garde provocation, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4d

“Juvenile, amoral, and quite carefree about wasting your time, [Miguel] Gomes’s films also open up a horizon of total freedom.” —Ken Chen

Serene and Delirious | Ken Chen

At first I did not know how to watch the fresh and giggling, gasp-of-delight-inducing, omnivorous, often deliberately pointless, even trolling and

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4d

During the Philippine–American War, the US Army’s massacre of between 600 and 1,200 civilians made for “sensational news in the United States when it was first reported…. Eventually the event disappeared from popular consciousness and barely figured in popular accounts.” —Vicente L. Rafael

Massacre Under the Starry Flag | Vicente L. Rafael

The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators.

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 4d

“Ben Shahn was most interested in people, not landscapes or architecture or institutions…. His art addresses matters of personhood—personal dignity, above all.” —Nicole Rudick

Becoming Acquainted with America | Nicole Rudick

In “The Biography of a Painting,” an essay drawn from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1956–1957, Ben Shahn remembers his early years as an

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susannah glickman @susglickman.bsky.social · 5d

I write here about why he’s full of shit www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 5d

“Healing is never a solo performance; it is much more like a duet.... The success of any technique depends more on ‘the patient’s sense of alliance with an actual or symbolic healer’ than on adherence to a particular therapeutic approach.” — @drgavinfrancis.bsky.social

Hope Management | Gavin Francis

Four hundred years ago Robert Burton concluded his majestic (and majestically unwieldy) treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy with a few words of distilled

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