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The New York Review of Books

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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 10d

Our 10/23 issue is now online, with @jacobweisberg.bsky.social on deep fake news, Elaine Blair on feministskaya istoriya, Andrew Katzenstein on Pynchon, Suzanne Schneider on Hayek’s bastards, Jay Neugeboren on the working homeless, Ariel Dorfman on Pinochet’s Nazi, and more.

October 23, 2025 Issue

Table of Contents

The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 13h

“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

The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 14h

“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.

The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 15h

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.

The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 16h

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.

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

“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.”

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

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

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.

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

“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

Reposted by The New York Review of Books

susannah glickman @susglickman.bsky.social · 3d

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

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

“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

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

Ariel Dorfman on the escaped Nazi war criminal who went on to help Augusto Pinochet murder and disappear thousands of people in Chile

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.

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

“Venture-funded defense-tech firms like Palantir and Anduril have,” Susannah Glickman writes, “positioned themselves as the solution” to the ills of American industry “without any clear evidence that they can deliver on that promise.”

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

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

Susannah Glickman on the rhetoric of the defense-tech sector and the reality of defense 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

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

Ken Chen on the films of Miguel Gomes

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

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

Jessi Jezewska Stevens on the Icelandic writer Sjón’s weird, dreamy, playful fables

Stripped of Myths | Jessi Jezewska Stevens

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

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

Congratulations to László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature today. Read an excerpt of his novella Animalinside, free from our archives:
buff.ly/9gx85pA

Animalinside: A Collaboration | László Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann

Withdraw into protection and safeguard all that is important to you, take it down to below the earth, all that you have, take down the jewelry, the food, the children’s photographs, the armchair…

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Reposted by The New York Review of Books

Bilal Baydoun @bilalb.bsky.social · 5d

"...we have arrived not at the minimalist state of libertarian dreams but at a fully militarized one instead. State violence, rather than market discipline alone, will enforce the “natural” hierarchies that new fusionists find so captivating."

www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

From the Cesspool to the Mainstream | Suzanne Schneider

The “new fusionist” intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.

www.nybooks.com

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

“Freedom Ship joins a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the centrality of the fugitive slave issue in bringing on the Civil War and a smaller but growing literature on the maritime Underground Railroad.” —Eric Foner

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.

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

Elaine Blair on the “fairy-tale” of women’s equality in the Soviet Union

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

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

“In MAGA world, social media is judged by a simple standard: Cui bono?” — @jacobweisberg.bsky.social

Algorithm Nation | Jacob Weisberg

Fights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That's because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.

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

Tomorrow: join Fintan O’Toole, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and Patricia J. Williams for an online discussion on political violence in America. www.eventbrite.com/e/a-summer-o...

A Summer of Fear: Violence, Intimidation, and Freedom of Speech in the US

Fintan O’Toole hosts Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor and Patricia J. Williams for a wide-ranging conversation on political violence in America.

www.eventbrite.com

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

“Ben Shahn sought out particulars, not generalities, and believed that the process of turning those particulars into art was what made them universal.” —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

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

Vicente L. Rafael on how a massacre in the Philippines faded from American history

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.