Arts

Society & Culture

Jenny Uglow

All That Glitters

The science of gemstones has always been intertwined with their value as luxury items.

February 12, 2026 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Inside the Music

The decline of traditional newspaper reviews of new music offers an opportunity to expand our ideas of what music criticism could be.

November 6, 2025 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Helluva Town

A new history of New York City during World War II captures the glory, tawdriness, poverty, narcissism, beauty, and grime of this “aggregation of villages.”

October 9, 2025 issue

Martin Filler

What Joys Lie in Store

Can Printemps New York recapture the commercial sorcery of glamorous department stores like Wanamaker’s, Barney’s, and Bloomingdale’s?

September 25, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Magic from Elsewhere

The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future.

December 18, 2025 issue

Susan Tallman

The Plunderers’ Dilemma

Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.

December 18, 2025 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

Poisonous Objects

Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.

March 12, 2026 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Painted Sermons

The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality.

February 26, 2026 issue

On Old New York

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Jason Epstein

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

Lucy Sante

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021)

Janet Malcolm

A selection of Janet Malcolm's contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her pieces here.

Janet Malcolm

A Second Chance

September 24, 2020 issue

Janet Malcolm

Good Pictures

January 15, 2004 issue

Janet Malcolm

The Master Writer of the City

April 23, 2015 issue

Janet Malcolm

The Trial of Alyosha

June 14, 1990 issue

Janet Malcolm

Truth About Translation

June 23, 2016 issue

Janet Malcolm

Justice to J.D. Salinger

June 21, 2001 issue

The Latest

Bridget Alsdorf

‘Tell Me Your Worst’

Helene Schjerfbeck captured the difficulty—even the terror—of confronting the self.

March 29, 2026

Lauren Kane

Indecorous Decorations

Medieval ideas about sex and love, both rowdy and reverent, are recorded on objects meant for everyday use.

March 28, 2026

a conversation with Osita Nwanevu and Suzanne Schneider

The Neocons’ Revenge?

Trump’s war has deepened the already-widening cracks in the MAGA coalition.

March 25, 2026

Jenny Uglow

Rivals of the Landscape

The more we learn about J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.

April 9, 2026 issue

Pablo Scheffer

The Tennissance

Two young tennis stars have revived the sport by embodying the sort of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Nadal and Federer so fascinating.

April 9, 2026 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

‘Not Insane!’

The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.

April 9, 2026 issue

David Beal

The Docteur Is In

The Congolese rumba pioneer Docteur Nico helped define the sound of African decolonization—and became one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar.

March 11, 2026

Beatrice Loayza

Timekeepers

In The Secret Agent, his sad, riotous new feature, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho at once archives a vanished world and mythologizes it.

February 22, 2026