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Politics, Literature, Arts, Ideas: the latest articles and features from The New York Review.

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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.
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December 27, 2025 at 3:33 PM
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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 Beacon. A week earlier Roberts had recorded a staunch defense […]
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December 22, 2025 at 3:27 AM
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A Christmas Story
The Bible is unquestionably the most scrutinized “book” in history. Yet certain obvious facts about it nonetheless escape notice. For example, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in the Review’s December 18, 2025, the Bible is not in fact a book, but “books,” as its original Greek name (biblia) attests: sixty-six of them, or seventy-three, or seventy-six, depending […]
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December 21, 2025 at 3:27 AM
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‘Minimum Victory’
On December 1, a group of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians published a manifesto in Ukrainska Pravda about how the war might end. “It is difficult to speak of victory,” it begins, “when the enemy is mounting unprecedented and at times successful ground attacks.” Already in August, when the group started drafting the text, Ukraine’s […]
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December 21, 2025 at 3:27 AM
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‘They Killed Our People’
In the spring of 2008, at a small desk piled with papers and notebooks, Lisa Hicks-Gilbert sat spellbound in front of a laptop. After a lifetime of zigzagging around Arkansas, raising two children on her own while cleaning houses and working in restaurant kitchens, she had settled into the first job that left her time […]
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December 20, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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East Side Story
The Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig, the Shark Tank shark Kevin O’Leary, and Timothée Chalamet walk into a bar. The bar is the restaurant of the London Ritz, and it’s 1952. Gwyneth Paltrow is also there, at another table. O’Leary, playing the part of the ink tycoon Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, notices the […]
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December 19, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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A Medicine Ball in Your Stocking
The final art newsletter of 2025 covers the art and illustrations in the Review’s Holiday Issue and has a more practical purpose than previous newsletters: I’ve been inundated with gift guides for things I can’t afford, so I’ve decided to make my own guide. Herewith, twelve tried-and-true gifts that I’ll be giving or have already […]
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December 18, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’
Films are rarely made in response to film critics, so it is unlikely that Bi Gan’s wildly ambitious new film was inspired Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema.” In any case, Bi was six years old, living in Kaili, China, when Sontag declared in The New York Times that “cinema’s 100 years seem […]
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December 14, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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The Liberator
One of the first things I thought of when I heard that Frank Gehry had died was a line from Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A reporter visits the title character’s former business manager, Mr. Bernstein, to interview him following the newspaper mogul’s death, and he comments that the old man had known Kane […]
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December 13, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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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 mentioning, but in July 2024 a team led by Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine […]
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December 11, 2025 at 3:25 AM
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‘Want in the Midst of Abundance’
Most of us grumbled through the latest federal government shutdown, vexed by airport delays, minimally staffed national parks, and shuttered local offices. But the forty-three-day disruption in federal service hit hard for hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees going without pay and for the roughly 42 million Americans served by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance […]
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December 10, 2025 at 3:25 AM
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Investing in the Wrong Securities
“The less coherent and self-confident ‘the West’ is, the more it needs an outside threat.”
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December 7, 2025 at 3:25 AM
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When the Spleen Ran Out
I arrived in New York City from Madison, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1977, driving a U-Haul truck containing all my worldly possessions. My girlfriend, Gretchen, had preceded me by several months and rented a third-floor, $150-per-month apartment in a block of nine crumbling tenements on East 14th Street between Avenues B and C, right across […]
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December 4, 2025 at 7:24 PM
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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. It can be awkward or presumptuous to bother a […]
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December 2, 2025 at 2:27 PM
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‘But Not Yet’
“For those people who feel that they haven’t accomplished enough yet—which is to say, almost all of us!—Amy Clampitt’s life provides an allegory of persistence rewarded.”
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November 29, 2025 at 7:04 PM
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The Dude Ranch Above the Sea
As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his brain, and soon Fagen landed at […]
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November 29, 2025 at 7:04 PM
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An Outsider from the Beginning
Sifting the contradictions of the Bible can bring Jesus and Mary into sharper focus and illuminate their surprisingly human features.
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November 29, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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The Soundtrack of a Generation
The Oasis reunion tour was a series of football stadium nostalgia-fests, with the fans the unmistakable stars of the show.
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November 26, 2025 at 2:35 AM
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Gaza: The Threat of Partition
On Monday the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s twenty-point peace plan for Gaza, which creates a “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump and with the participation of foreign leaders including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, to oversee governance of the Strip. Trump hailed the approval as “a moment of true Historic […]
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November 24, 2025 at 2:32 AM
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The Road to Miaoxi
During the Cold War, educated people in free societies were so familiar with figures on the other side of the Iron Curtain that they were referred to just by their last names: Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Havel, Forman. They knew the name, too, of the Soviet system’s most notorious instrument of control, the Gulag network of forced […]
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November 23, 2025 at 2:31 AM
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‘Adventures in Sensations’
On December 18, 1974, Peter Hujar ate breakfast, met with an editor from Elle magazine, talked to Susan Sontag on the phone, spent the afternoon photographing a recalcitrant Allen Ginsberg, got Chinese takeout with the critic Vince Aletti, worked in the darkroom, practiced harpsichord, and fell asleep listening to the conversations of sex workers on […]
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November 23, 2025 at 2:31 AM
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Runaway Short-Termism
Since retaking the presidency in January, Donald Trump has initiated a blitz of chaotic, damaging economic policies. For months, as Nic Johnson wrote in the NYR Online this past April, he has been waging an unprecedented trade war against much of the world, “imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella” in the […]
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November 22, 2025 at 4:05 AM
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Non Nom
A dispatch from the Art Editor
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November 20, 2025 at 5:35 PM
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Shithole Cinema
In Radu Jude’s Romania, people don’t have a good word to say about the country or its citizens; on the contrary, they curse the place with a vehemence as funny as it is obscene. Making crude jokes about “Romanianness” passes for the country’s national pastime and even, in the form of Jude’s cinema, its chief cultural […]
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November 20, 2025 at 1:06 AM
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This May Have Been Life
There are only a few surviving recordings of the photographer Peter Hujar’s voice. In the portion of his archive at the Morgan Library in New York, a fifteen-minute tape of a hypnosis session—Hujar was always trying to quit smoking—records his unconscious fantasies about sleeping with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, his long-time nemesis. It has a […]
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November 15, 2025 at 11:15 PM