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Where the Meanings Are

Fairfield Porter was an insider among the East Coast elite, but his own portraits of life in Southampton and Maine give the charming impression of an outsider looking in.

August 20, 2026 issue

Chris Ware

Jerry Survives

Jerry Moriarty’s “paintoons” were not exactly comic strips, but something like picture-poems with a punchline.

August 12, 2026

J. Hoberman

Ghosts of Amrum

Fatih Akin’s latest feature narrates how World War II shaped a German North Frisian island where my family, too, has complex wartime ties.

August 19, 2026

Daniel M. Lavery

Insincerity Case

John Early’s Maddie’s Secret mourns the loss of the ingenue from the silver screen.

August 16, 2026

Meg Weeks

What Does a Puta Want?

Brazil’s putafeminism is a working-class, sex-radical feminism that positions whores as its flagbearers.

August 14, 2026

Troy in flames; from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

“The only side of Odysseus—and indeed of the Odyssey—that you get in Nolan’s film is the negative one.”

— Daniel Mendelsohn: Artful Weaving

August 20, 2026

Current Issue

Julian Bell

Explosions in the Mind

Fusing religious subjects with unerring technique, the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán discovered a zone in oil paint that might well be called “sacred.”

August 20, 2026 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Out of the Rubble

In novels written immediately after World War II, Wolfgang Koeppen mined the conscience of Germany.

August 20, 2026 issue

David Cole

Close Calls

In the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term, it showed that it is willing to constrain Trump but less willing to accept limits on its own authority.

August 20, 2026 issue

Michael Greenberg

Whose Party?

As Democratic Socialists rack up primary victories, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party looks increasingly out of touch.

August 20, 2026 issue

Dan Chiasson

Where the Meanings Are

Fairfield Porter was an insider among the East Coast elite, but his own portraits of life in Southampton and Maine give the charming impression of an outsider looking in.

August 20, 2026 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

A Gust from Another World

The Search for Bridey Murphy caused a sensation in 1950s America, and while its tale of reincarnation was soon discredited, it revealed a deep cultural fascination with the supernatural.

August 20, 2026 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Refusing to Look Away

In Killing Spree, the poet Jorie Graham pursues an essentially ethical impulse to find a true language for the evil in the world.

August 20, 2026 issue

Mark Danner

Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.

August 20, 2026 issue

Matthew Aucoin

A Taste of Infinity

With his commitment to impractical and borderline impossible projects, the composer Dylan Mattingly has created a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched musical landscape.

August 20, 2026 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

Fridas for Everyone

The face that sold a million mugs returned to museums and the operatic stage this spring, as if there was a yearning to reconnect with the real Frida Kahlo.

August 20, 2026 issue

Laura Marsh

Home Invasions

In John Lanchester’s novel Look What You Made Me Do, a couple’s private language is weaponized against them.

August 20, 2026 issue

New Poems

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

The Nightjar

August 20, 2026 issue

Elizabeth Metzger

Blueprint

August 20, 2026 issue

Anne Carson

Zoom

August 20, 2026 issue

At the Galleries

Coco Fusco

The Grand Master of Abjection

Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.

August 20, 2026 issue

Gabriella Angeleti

Along the Ucayali River

Sara Flores adapts the ancient designs of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe of Peru into large, pattern-based paintings.

August 20, 2026 issue

Jarrett Earnest

The Eyes Have It

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

July 23, 2026 issue

NYR Online

Sam Huber

‘The Silent Art’

In her parallel career as a sculptor, the feminist theorist Kate Millett returned again and again to the image of the cage.

August 13, 2026

Tara Raghuveer

The Road to the Rent Freeze

This summer New York’s tenants won their years-long fight to protect nearly half the city’s apartments from rent hikes. Where can the movement go from here?

August 8, 2026

Wolfram Lacher

Libya: The Dangerous Gamble

For six years a fragile stalemate has kept Libya’s conflict frozen. A new US-brokered mediation effort risks upending that balance.

August 5, 2026

Jonathan Mingle

Moving Mountains

The Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk has spent decades advocating both for India’s climate and for its youth.

August 1, 2026

Alisa Solomon

‘Take that Phony Dream and Burn It’

The latest Death of a Salesman shows how America’s empty promises can turn hope into reactionary ressentiment.

July 29, 2026

Caitlin L. Chandler

Life on the List

In 2017 a regional Yemeni governor found himself added to the UN’s al-Qaeda sanctions list on mysterious grounds. Then his world started to unravel.

July 26, 2026

Jillian Steinhauer

La Querelle des Femmes

A sweeping show in Warsaw took up the tradition of women-only exhibitions.

July 25, 2026

Helen Epstein

Gaza’s Deadly Soil

Amid tight Israeli restrictions, new remote research is starting to make visible the scale of toxic fallout across the Gaza Strip.

July 22, 2026

Daniel Schlozman

The DNC Against Itself

As it drifts to the margins of US politics, the Democratic National Committee has become the stage for an internal struggle over resources and prestige.

July 20, 2026

Private Life Podcast

Daniel Mendelsohn, read by Anthony Roth Costanzo

From the Archive: “A Little Iliad” by Daniel Mendelsohn

Episode 22 of Private Life

July 22, 2026

Daniel Mendelsohn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translation

Episode 21 of Private Life

July 15, 2026

Geoffrey O’Brien, read by EIleen Myles

From the Archive: “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street”

Episode 20 of Private Life

July 8, 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

Frank Conroy: Violent Movies

“In Bonnie and Clyde, the violence is paced with the meticulousness one usually associates with music, and relates throughout to other themes in the movie—escape, speed, innocence, ignorance, loneliness.”

Brief Encounters

Lisa Hanawalt, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

From the Horse’s Mouth

“Punwise, I didn’t feel too reined in on BoJack. If I was champing at the bit to use a joke somewhere, I could usually find a place to trot it out!”

August 15, 2026

Joe Dunthorne, interviewed by Aleander Santos

All of Life

“Writing poetry is pretty constant for me. It sometimes feels like a semiconscious biological process. Like burping.”

July 25, 2026

Meghan O’Gieblyn, interviewed by Lauren Kane

Against Slop

“AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought.”

July 11, 2026

Charlie Lee, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

‘Extraordinarily Profitable Fiduciary Rapport’

“John Gregory Dunne thought about money in almost metaphysical terms, as if it made up the very structure and texture of reality.”

July 4, 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

Sophia Goodfriend

Target Practice

Artificial intelligence systems—now an integral part of the Israeli war machine—began as tools developed to surveil every aspect of Palestinian life.

July 23, 2026

Helen Epstein

Gaza’s Deadly Soil

Amid tight Israeli restrictions, new remote research is starting to make visible the scale of toxic fallout across the Gaza Strip.

July 22, 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

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

Piper French

To Break the Siege

By sailing to Gaza, activists in the flotilla movement have long tried to pressure their own governments to honor international law.

May 31, 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