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The Grain of the Note

For the composer Liza Lim, voices and instruments alike are materials to be fractured, strained, and pushed to the edge.

July 5, 2026

Gordon F. Sander

Hungary: The Flood

Peter Magyar’s landslide electoral victory in April made clear that after sixteen years, Hungarians were tired of Viktor Orbán.

July 23, 2026 issue

Omer Bartov

The Judeo-Bolshevist Target

Popular memory in the West tends to separate the Holocaust from the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking.

July 23, 2026 issue

Susan Rubin Suleiman

On the Precipice

Critics who call André Breton’s Nadja a novel miss its most innovative aspects.

July 23, 2026 issue

Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack

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.

July 23, 2026 issue

Installation view of the Classical Body section of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Art exhibition

“What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met.”

— Jed Perl: Fashion Forward

July 23, 2026

Current Issue

Mark O’Connell

Space Oddity

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.

July 23, 2026 issue

David Quammen

Song of Our Cells

Though a mystery to Darwin in his lifetime, the constant mutation of our genes is what allows for life’s magnificent diversity.

July 23, 2026 issue

Julia Preston

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.

July 23, 2026 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Climate and Punishment

Vigil finds George Saunders returning to the theme of his first novel, grief—this time not for a person but for a planet.

July 23, 2026 issue

Mark Ford

The Late Bohemian

Rosemary Tonks emulated French Symbolist poets before converting to Christianity and renouncing all her own works.

July 23, 2026 issue

Jenny Uglow

Wonder & Disillusion

The naturalist George Forster was fascinated by plants and animals, but he was also driven by a passionate belief in the rights of all people regardless of race, gender, or social status.

July 23, 2026 issue

Bryce Covert

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.

July 23, 2026 issue

Andrew Raftery

When India Reinvented Prints

Two forceful exhibitions have shown how Indian artists and presses met the cultural upheaval of the nineteenth century with lithographic prints that rendered Hindu gods more approachable and helped to galvanize national identity.

July 23, 2026 issue

Brenda Wineapple

An Uncertain Triumphalism

America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of national unity and inventiveness in the anxious aftermath of civil war and recession.

July 23, 2026 issue

At the Galleries

Jarrett Earnest

The Eyes Have It

Carol Rama’s abstractions from the late 1960s conjure burned, brutalized bodies.

July 23, 2026 issue

Travis Diehl

Is the Artist Present?

By transforming her own old paintings into new works of art, Eliza Douglas raises questions about sincerity and cynicism.

July 23, 2026 issue

Lovia Gyarkye

Shades of Solace

In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new paintings, mourners find clarity through communion—a departure for an artist known for her masterful portraits of solitude.

June 25, 2026 issue

New Poems

Jim Johnstone

Tornado

July 23, 2026 issue

Laura Kolbe

[Maybe more often than most…]

July 23, 2026 issue

Sandra Lim

Summer House

June 25, 2026 issue

NYR Online

Tanvi Misra

The Unraveling of Afghan Asylum

Afghan asylum seekers fled a crisis the US had a direct role in fomenting—only to become targets in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

June 28, 2026

Nate Wooley

Resistance Choirs

The composer Raven Chacon has long sought ways to combine narrative and political clarity with avant-garde, nonlinear form.

June 26, 2026

Mary Turfah

Safety Is When There’s No One Dying

Israel’s assault on Palestine and Lebanon has reconfigured how children understand the world.

June 24, 2026

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

‘An Eternal Indoors’

The power of Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” series—over twenty YouTube videos and now a feature film—comes from the mix of longing and fear with which it views the pre-digital past.

June 23, 2026

Christopher Benfey

Variations on Broken Eggs

When Hannah Arendt suggested that democracy consists, in part, in how we talk with one another, I’m guessing she was thinking of her friendship with Randall Jarrell.

June 20, 2026

Liana Finck

No One

There are things I’m terrible at. One of them is writing dialogue.

June 19, 2026

Adania Shibli

Dead Lands

Rather than letting ourselves tire of repeated stories, how might we allow them to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise?

June 17, 2026

Caroline Tracey

Putting the Lake to Work

State officials have long treated the Great Salt Lake as a resource to exploit, including through far-fetched engineering schemes. Now its future is on the line.

June 14, 2026

Nic Johnson

Planet UFC

Mixed martial arts have become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.

June 13, 2026

Private Life Podcast

Robert Glück, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O’Hara, and Dreams

Episode 19 of Private Life

July 1, 2026

Eve Babitz, read by Gina Gershon

Eve Babitz’s Letters from Too L.A.

Episode 17 of Private Life

June 17, 2026

Matthew Aucoin, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry

Episode 16 of Private Life

June 11, 2026

See All Episodes

Letters from Havana

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Life on the Verge

“‘On the verge.’ It’s a phrase that has been applied to Cuba at many moments during its recent history.”

April 5, 2018 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

Cuba: The Big Change

A report from Havana

May 12, 2016 issue

Jeri Laber

Is Cuba Really Changing?

“Cuba has been described as ‘the Soviet Union with palm trees,’ and one can readily see why, both in the forms that its repression has taken and in the economic failure that has forced it to seek a new image internationally.”

April 20, 1995 issue

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Four Days with Fidel: A Havana Diary

“Returning after half a dozen years, I am struck by the silence of the streets.”

March 26, 1992 issue

Having a Poem with You

Langdon Hammer

Alert to Reality

The first biography of James Schuyler suggests that his tendency to withdraw was both a harbinger of his disabling mood disorder and the wellspring of his shimmering poetry.

November 20, 2025 issue

Lucy Sante

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

He was lionized, imitated, studied, analyzed, enshrined, revered.

October 12, 2017 issue

Dan Chiasson

Crossing the Invisible Line

The astonishing work of poet Eileen Myles set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.

March 24, 2016 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street

“One has to go back to fairly remote periods—ancient Rome, eighteenth-century London—to find poetry as meticulous in its gossip and as minute in its urban observation as Frank O’Hara’s.”

December 2, 1993 issue

Free from the Archives

Gordon S. Wood: The Fundamentalists and the Constitution

“The Founding Fathers [were] different from all subsequent American political leaders—not because they were divinely inspired, or immune from worldly passions and interests, but because they were the products of different historical circumstances.”

Brief Encounters

Clare Bucknell, interviewed by Julia Shi

Spare Me the Hedgehoggery

“I’m not fond of efforts to see ourselves reflected in places where we aren’t: better, I think, to let the past be the past in all its irreducible bloody-minded weirdness.”

June 27, 2026

Lovia Gyarkye, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

Figuring

“I’m focused on work that has real stakes and ideas that might feel scary to articulate. I think there’s freedom in that risk.”

June 21, 2026

Dennis Lim, interviewed by Gabriel Winslow-Yost

The Moviegoer

“When we keep saying cinema is dead or dying, we lose sight of what we have actually lost and what might still be possible, even as so much about the art form continues to change.”

June 13, 2026

Suzy Hansen, interviewed by Dahlia Krutkovich

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.”

June 6, 2026

On Iran

Christopher de Bellaigue

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.

May 28, 2026 issue

Anonymous

From the Rooftops of Tehran

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

April 23, 2026 issue

Orly Noy

Longing for My Tehran

On the Israeli news, I watch as the country whose citizenship I hold devastates the one where I was born.

March 14, 2026

Neve Gordon

The Gaza Doctrine

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.

March 22, 2026

On Israel and Gaza