NYR Online

The Shame of Israeli Medicine

Faced with the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the systematic deprivation of Palestinians’ right to health, Israel’s medical establishment has disregarded the field’s most basic ethical principles.

May 31, 2025

Gaza: Starvation and Exile

The Israeli government has announced plans to make civilians in the Strip accept further displacement as a condition of receiving food—and eventually to push them out of Palestine altogether.

May 18, 2025

‘Legal Whack-A-Mole’

Since October 7, Israel’s oldest and most prominent human rights group has faced stiffer opposition than ever before. 

May 9, 2025

Reoccupying Gaza

A consensus has by now emerged among Israel’s leaders that the country’s army will take direct, long-term control of the Strip—and attempt to expel its inhabitants.

April 23, 2025

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

March 15, 2025

‘Trump Gaza Number One’

The AI-generated vision of postwar Gaza that Trump posted on social media was only thirty-three seconds long, but it spoke volumes about how his administration sees the world.

March 2, 2025

Days and Nights in Gaza

Watching TV that first day, we awaited the roar of planes and the rumble of explosions. We didn’t have to wait long. 

February 9, 2025

Israel: Life By the Sword

For fifteen months Israel’s government clung to the fantasy of “total victory” in Gaza—with considerable public support. 

January 25, 2025

From Evasion to Defiance

As the courts resist his deportation orders, Trump has responded with shockingly bad-faith arguments—and brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

May 1, 2025

Breaking the Conveyor Belt

Motivated perhaps above all by culture-war grievance, in the past month Donald Trump has tried to radically reshape a century-old system of global trade.

April 20, 2025

Why Harvard Defied Him

How the university fares in its struggle with Donald Trump may well determine the future of academic freedom in the United States.

April 19, 2025

The President of Brooklyn

The saga of Eric Adams’s mayoralty has come to epitomize the spirit of Trump’s second term—from its ethos of aggrieved narcissism to its punitive approach toward the vulnerable. 

April 17, 2025

The Apathetic Court

The Supreme Court has in recent years consistently neglected petitions from inmates across the country—even those with the most persuasive claims. 

April 9, 2025

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system. 

March 30, 2025

Don’t Join the Autocrats!

Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin are not just morally wrong but damaging to the US’s long-term interests. 

April 2, 2025

Our Chamberlain?

Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has been even more inept and inexplicable than the appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

March 3, 2025

Scot-Free

We are living through an inflection moment in the distribution of impunity.

March 1, 2025

The Making of Emergencies

For centuries, theorists of liberal governance have worried about how emergencies can unfetter executive power. Trump has given those fears new urgency. 

February 16, 2025

Speed Up the Breakdown

The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins.

February 15, 2025

More Babies!

Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

February 7, 2025

The Roots of Bukele’s Gulag

Understanding why Trump is using El Salvador to test the limits of illegal deportation requires returning to the US’s long history of outsourcing violence.

June 1, 2025

Mozambique on the Edge

For months, the country’s people have been taking to the streets in the aftermath of a falsified election. Could the protests bring lasting change?

March 28, 2025

USAID: Goodbye to All That? 

By gutting USAID, the Trump administration has imperiled the lives of thousands—and threatened the very future of the humanitarian and development industries.  

March 12, 2025

Nothing Gold Can Stay 

Gold is both a vehicle for disguising illicit financial flows and a product of illicit activity itself.

February 1, 2025

Break the Aspiration Meter!

Far from providing a nostalgic refuge from the contemporary Internet, The Sims taps into some of its most foundational assumptions. 

June 8, 2025

Beyond the Asylum

Over the past decade a range of politicians and public figures have called to rebuild asylums in order to address the country’s mental health crisis. But there is another, better way forward.

May 25, 2025

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Mornings with Murray

New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail.

April 27, 2025

Spaghetti Underground

The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.

April 18, 2025

Single-Player Politics

Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols.

March 16, 2025

Patriarchal Bargains

In her long-out-of-print study of conservative gender politics, Andrea Dworkin reflected on how right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them.

February 26, 2025

‘Life, Work, and Architecture’

Elizabeth Mock, whose exhibitions on domestic architecture thrilled midcentury museumgoers, believed that contemporary design should be for everyone.

February 5, 2025

Finding the Story

Running a nonfiction workshop in prison for three months, I saw how writing could let my peers forge a new identity. Then it came to an end. 

May 21, 2025

In Search of Almas Ali

My grandfather was an early activist in the struggle for a free Bangladesh. Why was he killed by the independence movement he helped found?

May 4, 2025

The Return

Syria will not be liberated as long as the better part of her, you, remains a hostage of this long-drawn-out captivity. 

April 10, 2025

A Thornbush in the Desert 

Memories of a Uyghur political prisoner.

January 14, 2025

The New Baghdad

The Iraqi capital is witnessing an inequitable construction boom, as the elite launder oil money and the state reconfigures sites of dissent. 

March 22, 2025

Turkey: The Buried and the Dead

In the aftermath of devastating earthquakes in 2023, survivors looking for the missing have been trapped in a legal and bureaucratic labyrinth.

March 9, 2025

War and Peace in Munich

At the city’s annual international security conference, European leaders vowed to double down on national defense. At what cost?

March 6, 2025

Darfur: A War Within a War

As a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces rages across Sudan, Arab and non-Arab communities are once again fighting in Darfur.

February 2, 2025

What Labor Could Lose

After four years under Jennifer Abruzzo, who fought to revitalize its mission, the National Labor Relations Board finds itself more threatened than ever.

January 19, 2025

The Reunited

The Biden administration has spent years reunifying families separated during Trump’s first term—but as his second approaches, they find themselves vulnerable again. 

December 11, 2024

At the Gates of Fortress Europe

The story of Sajjad Mohammedhasan, who sought asylum but received a year in Lithuania’s border prisons.     

December 17, 2024

Death in Nogales

An unarmed Mexican migrant was shot dead on an Arizona ranch. The response revealed widespread support for violence at the border.

November 16, 2024

An EPA Without Science

The agency’s rollbacks under Lee Zeldin suggest that Trump’s war on the administrative state has become, effectively, a war on the future.

May 16, 2025

Smoke, Heat, Flame

California’s recent firestorms may be unprecedented in their intensity and damage, but what seems like a new crisis is just the latest chapter in a longer history of exploitation.

February 15, 2025

The Climate Finance Racket

By investing in climate finance while accelerating fossil fuel production, the Gulf states are playing all sides of the energy market.

November 11, 2024

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land in Appalachia. In western North Carolina, those questions have everything to do with the booming tourist economy.

November 3, 2024

An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat

The conceptual artist Mike Kelley considered the creative expression of ordinary people to be beautiful, pathetic, and fascinatingly bizarre.

June 4, 2025

Sovereign Wager Fascinator

Photographs from the 2025 Kentucky Derby

May 28, 2025

One Cubit at a Time

Medieval theologians produced ornate architectural drawings in their efforts to comprehend divine instructions. A recent book recovers their contributions to the form.

May 24, 2025

In the Cut

The painter Walter Price keeps returning to a personal lexicon of images, as if hoping both to wear them out and make them new. 

April 16, 2025

The Weight of Their Art

A new retrospective of the British artist and designer Tirzah Garwood—long overshadowed by her more famous husband—recovers the full scope of her life and work. 

April 15, 2025

A Nation Deranged

Matt Eich’s photobook series, “The Invisible Yoke,” is an exorcism of the country’s demons.

March 23, 2025

‘Routine, Ordinary Care’

The photographs in Carmen Winant’s latest book remind us how unsensational abortion access is, and how necessary. 

March 8, 2025

From Whisper to Shout

The photographer Boris Mikhailov has spent a lifetime seeing through the illusions of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.

February 22, 2025

‘Her Own Woman’

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page—and then reimagined the self she had established.

March 13, 2025

Grandfather’s Bible

In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.

February 23, 2025

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

‘Isn’t Reality Sad Enough?’

In the films of the Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, characters are always tipping toward both laughter and violence. 

May 17, 2025

The Quantum Generation

The filmmaker Jia Zhangke has spent a career trying to capture how China’s ordinary citizens experience the twenty-first century.

May 13, 2025

Of Light

Payal Kapadia’s films are defined by the slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions.

March 14, 2025

A Country for Old Monsters

In Nosferatu and Wolf Man, the forces of evil are not so much confronted as fatalistically, inevitably succumbed to. 

February 10, 2025

Sympathy for the Troll

Leos Carax’s ostentatiously intelligent films, full of references to cinematic history, are all in frantic search of a worldview.

January 26, 2025

Tinker Tailor Soldier Sigh

Where we might have expected a show about the state of the nation, the spy series Slow Horses instead examines the state of the office.

January 18, 2025

‘Haunted, Haunted’

The characters in Mike Leigh’s new feature, anchored by a magnificent performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, hardly seem to be living in his usual noisy democracy.

January 16, 2025

‘Let Them Eat War’

Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator draws on a long history of nostalgia for an idealized republican Rome.

December 15, 2024

All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

April 13, 2025

‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’ 

The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.

March 27, 2025

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found 

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life. 

March 19, 2025

An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality. 

May 10, 2025

Mama Tried

In Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, newly revived with Adam Driver, a country star looks back on his wasted years. 

December 8, 2024

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024

Dancing Laser Beams

George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.

July 17, 2024

Colors and Shapes

“The best design is one that is clearly and immediately comprehensible but also notably beautiful.”

June 14, 2025

Scratching the Surface

“What we’ve come to call ‘election denial’ is, of course, a conspiracy theory, and support for that is an article of faith for many Trumpists who want to work in the administration, so to a greater or lesser extent, they’re all under the spell of conspiratorial thinking.”

June 7, 2025

Straight to It, Then

“Everyone has an opinion, but clarity is apparently in short supply.”

May 17, 2025

Translating from Troy to Ithaca

“The Odyssey is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.”

May 10, 2025

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

Anemones

A dispatch from the Art Editor

January 15, 2025

Wintry Mix

A dispatch from the Art Editor

December 18, 2024

A New Leaf

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 20, 2024

On the Gray Lakeshore

A dispatch from the Art Editor

October 19, 2024

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014