The New York Review of Books

10/10/2025

“Venture-funded defense-tech firms like Palantir and Anduril have,” Susannah Glickman writes, “positioned themselves as the solution” to the ills of American industry “without any clear evidence that they can deliver on that promise.”

Last October, on a Martin Luther–inspired website called www.18theses.com, a software executive named Shyam Sankar published a four-thousand-word polemic

10/10/2025

Susannah Glickman on the rhetoric of the defense-tech sector and the reality of defense industrial policy

Last October, on a Martin Luther–inspired website called www.18theses.com, a software executive named Shyam Sankar published a four-thousand-word polemic

10/10/2025

Ken Chen on the films of Miguel Gomes

At first I did not know how to watch the fresh and giggling, gasp-of-delight-inducing, omnivorous, often deliberately pointless, even trolling and

10/10/2025

Jessi Jezewska Stevens on the Icelandic writer Sjón’s weird, dreamy, playful fables

Sjón's Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated.

10/09/2025

Listen to Ashley Dawson talk about his recent essay for the Review on the exorbitant energy costs of AI.

AI's Environmental Footprint

10/09/2025

Congratulations to László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature today. Read an excerpt of his novella Animalinside, free from our archives:

Withdraw into protection and safeguard all that is important to you, take it down to below the earth, all that you have, take down the jewelry, the food, the children's photographs, the armchair where you like to sit with a book in your hand, the curtai...

10/09/2025

“Freedom Ship joins a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the centrality of the fugitive slave issue in bringing on the Civil War and a smaller but growing literature on the maritime Underground Railroad.” —Eric Foner https://go.nybooks.com/4pZU6iO

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves' chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

10/09/2025

Elaine Blair on the “fairy-tale” of women’s equality in the Soviet Union

On the evening of August 30, 1918, an assassin shot Lenin twice as he was leaving an armaments factory. The assailant was twenty-eight-year-old F***y

10/09/2025

In Brian Goldstone’s “beautifully crafted book” There Is No Place for Us, “he tells the revelatory and often heartbreaking stories of five families in Atlanta who are the ‘new face of homelessness in the United States: people whose paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads.’” —Jay Neugeboren

As housing costs have risen and affordable housing remains in short supply, even Americans with full-time job are experiencing homelessness.

10/09/2025

“In MAGA world, social media is judged by a simple standard: Cui bono?” —Jacob Weisberg

Fights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That's because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.

10/08/2025

Join and for a night inspired by vintage personal ads, in the Review and elsewhere. Featuring Molly Ringwald, Nicholas Boggs, Vivian Gornick, Daniel Kehlmann, and more. Wednesday, October 15, from 6–8 PM at Paula Cooper Gallery. Register at: https://go.nybooks.com/4mVEfis

10/08/2025

“Ben Shahn sought out particulars, not generalities, and believed that the process of turning those particulars into art was what made them universal.” —Nicole Rudick

In “The Biography of a Painting,” an essay drawn from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1956–1957, Ben Shahn remembers his early years as an