At first I did not know how to watch the fresh and giggling, gasp-of-delight-inducing, omnivorous, often deliberately pointless, even trolling and irritating movies of Miguel Gomes, who has been lauded as one of contemporary cinema’s most original political filmmakers. What confounded me wasn’t that his works were particularly dull or unentertaining—it’s that they were often […]

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 begins. There follows a litany of provocations: Chinese escalation in the South China Sea, Iranian attacks on US […]

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, the First Amendment “has proved a singularly valuable resource in trying to resist assaults on democratic norms,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah in his review of Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea from our September 25 issue. Appiah argues that the idea […]

Four hundred years ago Robert Burton concluded his majestic (and majestically unwieldy) treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy with a few words of distilled wisdom that remain as useful for sufferers of depression now as they were then: “Be not solitary, be not idle, SPERATE MISERI CAVETE FELICES” (unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious). […]

For a central figure of Impressionism, it is surprising how often Gustave Caillebotte seems to be disappearing offstage. Even in self-portraits he can be hard to catch hold of. In a chilly mealtime painting from 1876, shortly after his father had died, he lavishes attention on the table settings, envelops his mother and brother in […]

Hours after his inauguration, Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency.” The US, he warned in an executive order, suffered from “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid.” If it failed to expand its energy infrastructure and increase supply, Trump warned, “this situation will dramatically deteriorate in the near future […]

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. Nwanevu, prolific in the pages of The Guardian, in American magazines, and on Bluesky (and, at one time, […]

After seven hundred days of death announcements, of lost faith, of suffering that has choked our breath and lined our faces, the nightmare of forced displacement is back—displacement from the north to the south of Wadi Gaza, to what the occupation calls a “safe zone” when everybody knows it is anything but. I’ll never forget […]

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 any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more. Between September 2 and September 19 the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats […]

“I went to college to do illustration, because I wasn’t brave enough to paint. Coming out the other side as a graphic designer felt a little accidental.”

Last week the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration sweeping new powers to profile low-wage Latino workers. In one unsigned paragraph, its Republican-appointed justices effectively sanctioned a dystopia now common across America: armed agents sweeping through parks, farms, churches, parking lots, bus stops, tow yards, and car washes, grabbing people based on physical appearance and […]

To see the density of windmills in Malta, Caravaggios on the nose: this is July, mincing toward. A tier worse than Economy Plus, the rest of us—but the view. I’m a curled world URL, like Carmelites I cede my rights. Look at me, I’m a twee Pasolini. Or trying to wince like Dirk Bogarde at […]

A dispatch from the Art Editor

Lithium is the third element in the periodic table. It is the lightest, least dense metal—although it is never encountered as such in nature, since it’s too reactive to exist without being bonded in a compound. Lithium ions and minerals appear in an impressive range of environments: hard rocks, liquid brines, soft clays, and even, […]

The Supreme Leader’s frail health and Israel’s recent attacks have left the Islamic Republic on the brink of paralysis.

On the beach in Pie de la Cuesta, a small vacation town in the municipality of Acapulco, a soldier in a cream-colored desert camouflage uniform appears out of nowhere, blocking the way. Just beyond the tents offering coconut-oil massages and rows of palapas where visitors feast until sunset, he had been sheltering from the heat […]

Although the opioid crisis is typically associated with the United States, it plagues the other side of the southern border too. “Despite the efforts of activists, the Mexican government refuses even to count the dead,” Dawn Marie Paley writes in the Review’s June 12 issue. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Paley continues, has “said fentanyl consumption ‘isn’t […]

The refugee is an object. A problem to be solved, a number, an expense. A full stop, never a comma. Since the refugee cannot be willed away, they must remain a thing. They are their own category of human. At the detention center, seeds of words are distributed among eighty minors. An “A” is flung […]

The Trump administration’s clear-cutting of the civil service has been accompanied by an effort to undermine the agencies tasked with ensuring ethical conduct by federal employees and preventing the politicization of government services. As Walter M. Shaub Jr. writes in the NYR Online, the president’s attacks on government integrity have been comprehensive: the administration has initiated several […]

I was staying with my friend Awdah Hathaleen in the village of Umm al-Khair early this July when our conversation took an unusually somber turn. I had known Awdah—a thirty-one-year-old activist, organizer, and teacher—since February 2024, when I joined the Palestinian-led “protective presence” efforts he helped organize with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, a nonprofit […]

For ten or so daysI’ve been searching for a loaf,just a loaf.They said it vanished from global warehouses.A child saw it take to the stage,or was it bombed by a plane. The loaf is elusive, and my feet are tired.My little ones don’t understand,they think they’re in the old days,you ate whenever you got hungry,they […]

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 ask whether at least the mediocrity of his heir at […]

In the final conversation of this series, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open up the books and compare bottom lines, and eventually get to a rare frank discussion about who, on both sides of the ledger, feels […]

Swimming pools, whether in paintings by David Hockney and Eric Fischl or in unsettling films such as The Swimmer (1968), based on a John Cheever story and set—but where else?—in Connecticut, have always excited me. In The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, an evenly tanned ad executive who swims across eight miles of backyard pools to reach […]

This conversation begins with the poet, writer, and translator Daisy Rockwell reading her poem “The Music Metaphor.” For translators, the question entertained by this poem arises all the time, though in many different forms and situations: How do we decide which translations are better than others? To answer, the two publishers on this panel, Jacques […]