A Show of Force
What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.
The New York Review of Books by Fintan O’Toole
Articles from: The New York Review of Books
101 articles
Universities: Know Your Rights!
In recent days the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks on higher education. On June 26 the Justice Department announced that it is investigating the University of California system on the grounds that its pursuit of ethnic and racial diversity in h…
The New York Review of Books by David Cole
The Parrot in the Machine
The artificial intelligence industry depends on plagiarism, mimicry, and exploited labor, not intelligence.
The New York Review of Books by James Gleick
Saving Graces
What we conserve and why—art, heirlooms, animals, even the planet—are increasingly urgent questions.
The New York Review of Books by Michelle Nijhuis
Locked Up by Erdogan
For his work as an activist and philanthropist, Osman Kavala has been unjustly imprisoned in Turkey for seven and a half years.
The New York Review of Books by Aryeh Neier
‘The Red and the Green’
The Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito’s proposal for "degrowth communism" as a solution to the climate crisis has inspired fierce debate, including among other Marxists.
The New York Review of Books by Casey A. Williams
Death in the Air
In Murderland, Caroline Fraser traces the correlations between rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers.
The New York Review of Books by Joyce Carol Oates
The New York World
The weekend before the thirty-three-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani stunned Andrew Cuomo and the city of New York by winning a decisive victory in the mayoral primary race, the NYR Online published an assessment by Max Rivlin-Nadler of the powerful coalitio…
The New York Review of Books by Max Rivlin-Nadler, Daniel Drake
The Dismantling of American Health Care
On July 4 President Donald Trump signed into law a piece of legislation that amounts to a declaration of war on the working-class and the sick. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will slice more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, stripping hea…
The New York Review of Books by Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler
Lights Out
For anyone concerned that the world is hurtling toward three degrees of warming by the end of the century—a future described as “hellish” by the UN secretary general—there is one useful byproduct of the budget reconciliation bill the Republican Party scramble…
The New York Review of Books by Jonathan Mingle
Umpires No More
At his confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared judges to umpires. “It’s my job to call balls and strikes,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” It’s not clear that anyone ever really bought the analogy,…
The New York Review of Books by David Cole
The Twilight Zone
Laila Lalami’s prescient new novel follows a woman imprisoned by the government for her dreams.
The New York Review of Books by Sue Halpern
The Contradictory Revolution
Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of American Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.
The New York Review of Books by David S. Reynolds
After Resettlement
How has a group of Liberian refugees, resettled in the US nearly twenty-five years ago after fleeing civil war, fared in a country that has changed vastly since admitting them?
The New York Review of Books by Caroline Moorehead
Romania’s Split Identity
Romania’s divided loyalties between East and West help explain how a nerdy Sorbonne-educated mathematician was elected president.
The New York Review of Books by Costică Brădăţan
Weaponizing the Watchdog
Donald Trump’s fascist takeover of government is a comprehensive affair, and sometimes it’s the little things that reveal just how thoroughly his administration has been dismantling our democratic infrastructure. On June 16 Trump nominated the thirty-year-old…
The New York Review of Books by Walter M. Shaub Jr.
Killing the Moonlight
Electric light, the telephone, radio, the automobile, the movie camera, the airplane: the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth were a blur of technological innovation. In Italy, a provincial, largely agrarian country only …
The New York Review of Books by Alexander Stille
Conservatism’s Baton Twirler
No one will ever write a biography of consequence about Rich Lowry. While remembrances of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, often speak of the void in conservative commentary he left behind upon his death in 2008, few of them hazard to a…
The New York Review of Books by Osita Nwanevu
When Trade Was at a Crossroads
In 1999 the World Trade Organization gathered in Seattle to celebrate free trade. The protest that followed offers a blueprint for effective resistance to globalization at a time of renewed urgency.
The New York Review of Books by E. Tammy Kim
The War App
Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data analytics software company Palantir Technologies. This “compensation actually paid”—a metric that takes into acc…
The New York Review of Books by Mark O’Connell
Watch What You Say
Fara Dabhoiwala considers the right to free speech the con at the heart of the Constitution because of the harms it permits. But what about the harms it prevents?
The New York Review of Books by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Abortion’s Long History
Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?
The New York Review of Books by Linda Greenhouse
Nobody’s Grand Tour
Only seventy-two pages into Schattenfroh, Michael Lentz’s bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel, the story, which had just seemed to be getting off the ground, cuts short. The type gives way to facsimile pages covered with the handw…
The New York Review of Books by Anahid Nersessian
How to Blow Up a Planet
What happened to the future? When did we lose it, and what has taken its place? Political scientists have found a continual decline in visions of a shared transformative future since the early 1980s. Around the world, in party manifestos, inaugural speeches, …
The New York Review of Books by Trevor Jackson
The Ayatollah’s Kingly Woe
The Supreme Leader’s frail health and Israel’s recent attacks have left the Islamic Republic on the brink of paralysis.
The New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaigue
What If We Took Democracy Seriously?
In our Fall Books issue, Osita Nwanevu reviewed Sam Tanenhaus’s doorstopper Buckley, a biography of the conservative intellectual and bon vivant remembered fondly—too fondly, Nwanevu argues—by many people appalled at the current state of argument in America. …
The New York Review of Books by Osita Nwanevu, Nawal Arjini
Algorithm Nation
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 by Jacob Weisberg
The Price of Tomorrow
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 by Geoff Mann
From the Cesspool to the Mainstream
The “new fusionist” intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.
The New York Review of Books by Suzanne Schneider
Massacre Under the Starry Flag
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 by Vicente L. Rafael
The War Over Defense Tech
Last October, on a Martin Luther–inspired website called www.18theses.com, a software executive named Shyam Sankar published a four-thousand-word polemic with the title “The Defense Reformation.” “As a nation, we are in an undeclared state of emergency,” it b…
The New York Review of Books by Susannah Glickman
Pervasive Impunity
Rich Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.
The New York Review of Books by Cora Currier
Storm Warnings
The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.
The New York Review of Books by Mark Lilla
The Lingering Delusion
Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.
The New York Review of Books by Fintan O’Toole
Falling Off the Map
World War I set the stage a century ago for new ways of thinking about where states come from and what happens when they disappear.
The New York Review of Books by Linda Kinstler
How the Web Was Lost
The Internet was not meant to suck.
The New York Review of Books by James Gleick
Where Wokeness Went Wrong
Symbolic struggles cannot be a force of resistance to the Trump administration.
The New York Review of Books by Susan Neiman
Not for Sale
President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland have caused consternation and fear among Danes and Greenlanders alike.
The New York Review of Books by Gordon F. Sander
‘We’ve Got to Kill and Kill and Kill’
As Francisco Franco’s reputation grows on the far right, a new history of his regime reminds us of its unrelenting violence toward Jews.
The New York Review of Books by Dan Kaufman
Selling a Defective Dream
How did multilevel marketing schemes come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The answer has to do with how we think of workers and how we think of consumers.
The New York Review of Books by Zephyr Teachout
The Third Sovereign
If there is hope for the earth, it will depend in part on acknowledging indigenous sovereignty in the face of insatiable resource extraction.
The New York Review of Books by Robert Sullivan
Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script
Understanding Britain’s postwar reforms like the National Health Service requires peering into the ‘lost world’ of wartime conservatism.
The New York Review of Books by Ferdinand Mount
It’s a Racket!
Cryptocurrency has largely managed to remain free of government regulation, and as a result has often become a vehicle for fraud and criminality.
The New York Review of Books by Jed S. Rakoff
The Anti-Trans Playbook
The current crusade against trans people imperils not just their rights but the survival of the legal doctrine built to protect all women from discrimination.
The New York Review of Books by Paisley Currah
The Plague That Won’t Die
As my recent diagnosis shows, tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide—and America is hardly immune.
The New York Review of Books by Pria Anand
Why ‘The West’?
The idea of the West survived a once-shared civilization as a code for its fractious heirs. A new book suggests its enduring constants have been a fear of Russia and of internal decay.
The New York Review of Books by Yuri Slezkine
A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs
In December 2019, three months before the pandemic, I was standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn when I recognized a prominent older film critic also waiting for the train. I had been reading his work for many years, so I decided I would introduce myself. …
The New York Review of Books by A. S. Hamrah
The Scramble for the Seafloor
Since 1779 photosynthesis has been the standard-issue explanation for the continuation of life on earth: plants absorb sunlight, which fuels their metabolism, and create oxygen as waste. This is such basic, grade-school science that it normally wouldn’t bear …
The New York Review of Books by Rebecca Egan McCarthy
L’Affaire Carlson
On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he told a hall full of the conservative think tank’s staff and fellows in a video leaked to The Washington Free B…
The New York Review of Books by Suzanne Schneider
At What Cost?
New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.
The New York Review of Books by Marilynne Robinson
God of the Gaps
Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.
The New York Review of Books by Robert P. Baird
Blood Work
A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.
The New York Review of Books by Clair Wills
Whose Hemisphere?
The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.
The New York Review of Books by Fintan O’Toole
Trump’s Attack on Philanthropy
Universities, law firms, and news media have already been targeted by the administration. As the Justice Department pushes to investigate the Open Society Foundations, it seems that philanthropies that support critical voices may be next.
The New York Review of Books by Aryeh Neier, Gara LaMarche
The Crime of Witness
Renée Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.
The New York Review of Books by Fintan O’Toole
When the Chips Are Down
President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.
The New York Review of Books by Julian Gewirtz
The Struggle for the Fed
The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?
The New York Review of Books by Trevor Jackson
An American Reckoning
Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today.
The New York Review of Books by Ben Rhodes
Poland: Halfway to Democracy
What do the far right’s fluctuating fortunes in Poland suggest about countries seeking an off-ramp from autocracy?
The New York Review of Books by Joy Neumeyer
Is It Easy Being Green?
To the Editors: Regarding Bill McKibben’s review of The Story of CO 2 Is the Story of Everything [“It’s a Gas,” NYR, January 15], and with all due respect to McKibben, I believe that his characterization of the transition to a wind and solar economy as someth…
The New York Review of Books by Mark Roller, Bill McKibben
Torn Asunder
As Guatemala and El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.
The New York Review of Books by Oscar Lopez
Never Again, Once Again
A few years ago, in the early summer of 2019, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared on its website that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” Apparentl…
The New York Review of Books by Peter E. Gordon
Authoritarianism from Below
As National Guard troops and federal officers swarmed Washington, D.C., in August, sent by President Donald Trump to confront what he declared a “crime emergency,” members of the city council expressed their outrage. Janeese Lewis George, who represents a nor…
The New York Review of Books by Stuart Schrader
A Bitter Winter in Ukraine
Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.
The New York Review of Books by Tim Judah
Poisonous Objects
Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.
The New York Review of Books by Carolina A. Miranda
A Real Live Socialist
What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.
The New York Review of Books by Thomas Powers
‘We Think They’ll Kill Someone’
Indigenous communities in Mexico who oppose the construction of megaprojects on their lands do so at great risk.
The New York Review of Books by Anjan Sundaram
As Kennedy Went
Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s conte…
The New York Review of Books by Linda Greenhouse
Trading with the Enemy
Friday’s Supreme Court decision rebuffing President Trump’s signature foreign policy initiative—worldwide tariffs imposed pursuant to an asserted national emergency—was extraordinary in multiple respects. In its nearly 250-year history, the Court has rarely r…
The New York Review of Books by David Cole
Building the Electrostate
In the United States today, officials at all levels of government generally act as if private enterprise is the only way to provide goods and services. Yet a bastion of public ownership survives: more than a quarter of electricity customers—including the resi…
The New York Review of Books by Sandeep Vaheesan
Who Speaks for Us?
The representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people.
The New York Review of Books by Marilynne Robinson
Post Mortem
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.
The New York Review of Books by Robert G. Kaiser
Diversity by Other Means
Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.
The New York Review of Books by David Cole
Policy, Not Biology
To the Editors: This is a response to “The Anti-Trans Playbook,” published by Paisley Currah in The New York Review of Books on December 18, 2025. Currah misleads readers regarding the positions held by the authors. Currah’s opinion piece is wrong on the fact…
The New York Review of Books by Kara Dansky, Elspeth Cypher, Elizabeth Chesak, Paisley Currah
China’s Leader Manqué
Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan.
The New York Review of Books by Orville Schell
Since Dobbs
Brianna knew her husband would claim the pregnancy was an act of God. Their marriage was falling apart. She was fed up with his infidelity and with managing their kids and home on her own. The couple had recently separated when she realized her period was lat…
The New York Review of Books by Amy Littlefield
Shenzhen Express
In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.
The New York Review of Books by Yi-Ling Liu
Possessing the Painful Parts
Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.
The New York Review of Books by Omari Weekes
Born in the USA
For the Supreme Court to accept the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, it would have to repudiate the Constitution, its own precedents, and the long-standing position of all three branches of the US government.
The New York Review of Books by David Cole
The Aging Class
Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.
The New York Review of Books by Trevor Jackson
War Games
At the opening of the 2026 Winter Olympics, held simultaneously at venues in Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo, the notion of the games as an occasion for international peace took the form of armonia, or “harmony” in Italian. It was a quality exhibited mo…
The New York Review of Books by Jake Nevins
‘The Right Amount of Crazy’
In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.
The New York Review of Books by Fintan O’Toole
Waiting for Day Zero
This past Easter Sunday the leaders of an Iranian opposition party in exile gathered for a celebratory picnic with family and friends at Lake Balboa Park in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Citrus-and-mint-scented hookah smoke wafted from a lakeside gazebo …
The New York Review of Books by Will Alden
Mystery Brain
Last year the right-wing Passage Publishing, whose mission—“to push forward new ideas and ways of thinking that can break us out of our cultural and political cul-de-sac and open up new possibilities for art and publishing”—has led primarily to the production…
The New York Review of Books by Daniel Lefferts, Daniel Drake
Iran’s New Winter
The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.
The New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaigue
A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth
Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.
The New York Review of Books by Adam Hochschild
Indiana’s Indiana Jones
FBI agents who raided an Indiana farm in 2014 were astonished to find some 42,000 artifacts and bones looted by an amateur archaeologist.
The New York Review of Books by Nina Siegal
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
As President Trump’s erratic negotiations with Iran drag on and oil prices continue to rise, the United States’ ostensible ethical justification for the war—regime change—has largely disappeared from mainstream coverage. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christop…
The New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaigue, Daniel Drake
Opera in Ragged Times
During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also found the time to make himself chairman of the board of…
The New York Review of Books by Larry Wolff
Our Climate’s Wild Card
Methane's part in the climate crisis remains largely overlooked, even though it is responsible for 30 percent of all global warming to date, and despite the fact that it's still possible to purge it from our skies.
The New York Review of Books by Jonathan Mingle
Damming the Big Ocean
Edward Fishman's Chokepoints explains how the US came to rely on its economic arsenal, but stops short of a complete assessment of the unreliable tactic and its often devastating consequences.
The New York Review of Books by Quinn Slobodian
Dreams of Our Nation
Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.
The New York Review of Books by David W. Blight
Navalny’s Unfinished Work
In his posthumous memoir, Alexei Navalny’s utopian vision of “the Beautiful Russia of the Future” remains strangely detached from history.
The New York Review of Books by Benjamin Nathans
The Future of Abortion Rights
In March the NYR Online published Amy Littlefield’s sweeping overview of the shifts in abortion access since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization effectively outlawed the procedure in more than a dozen states. Many of t…
The New York Review of Books by Amy Littlefield, Nora Caplan-Bricker
Labour’s Love Lost
With Keir Starmer’s and his party’s future in doubt after local elections in May, there is a paucity of talent among his rivals.
The New York Review of Books by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Innocents Abroad
“One of my guiding principles as a white American writing about the US is that it’s important to include yourself in your analysis, to acknowledge your own complicity or at least involvement in the country’s history or power.”
The New York Review of Books by Suzy Hansen, Dahlia Krutkovich
Planet UFC
For decades it has been White House tradition to invite Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a ceremonial exchange of a bowl of shamrocks, symbolizing Irish-American friendship. But two months into Donald Trump’s retu…
The New York Review of Books by Nic Johnson
Broken Promises in Cuban Miami
Donald Trump has reversed the government’s longstanding benevolence toward Cuban asylum seekers, even as his administration exacerbates the crisis they fled.
The New York Review of Books by Ada Ferrer, Miriam Pensack
Compromised Values
Joe Manchin’s memoir reveals that the West Virginian Senator worshipped “work” at the expense of supporting his party’s efforts to help working people.
The New York Review of Books by Bryce Covert
The New Ellis Island
A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.
The New York Review of Books by Julia Preston
Hungary: The Flood
Peter Magyar’s landslide electoral victory in April made clear that after sixteen years, Hungarians were tired of Viktor Orbán.
The New York Review of Books by Gordon F. Sander