Sue Halpern is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and also writes on technology and politics for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic and many other publications. Halpern is the author of eight books, most recently the novel “What We Leave Behind,” and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Halpern holds a doctorate from Oxford University.

Marc Elias is the Firm Chair of Elias Law Group, a mission-driven firm committed to helping Democrats win, citizens vote, and progressives make change. Marc is a nationally recognized authority and expert in campaign finance, voting rights, redistricting law, and litigation. He has successfully argued and won four cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as dozens of cases in state supreme courts and U.S. courts of appeal, and has successfully represented several House and Senate candidates in post-election litigation, recounts and challenges. Marc is also the founder of Democracy Docket, the leading digital news platform dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections in the courts.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation Review contributors and esteemed guests discuss critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, the state of the left, and more. Each event, held on Zoom, will last ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Rigging the Vote: Trump’s Threats to Elections appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

WEEK 1: LUKE
This session will look at the art of truth, the character of narrative meant to compel assent to a vision of transcendent meaning in a life that could have sunk into obscurity in the absence of this devoted form of witness.

WEEK 2: ACTS
Believed to be by the author of Luke, this is an account of the earliest days of what became the Christian movement.

WEEK 3: FIRST CORINTHIANS
This beautiful and highly important letter by St. Paul to the newly formed church at Corinth offers a vision of the teaching and way of life of nascent Christianity as well as the metaphysics they imply. Paul is highly learned in the heritage of Hebrew Scriptures.

WEEK 4: JOHN
The Gospel of John differs from the other gospels in many ways, first of all in that it conveys a sense of the transforming wonder of the Incarnation, of Deity dwelling among us, bringing that primal Light into the world, that primal Word, holding time to the measure of eternity—John compels with the language of ecstatic belief.

Four one-hour sessions: May 6, 13, 20, and 27. All sessions will start at 7pm ET. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind(2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing,” and the inaugural Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence from Harper’s Magazine (2025).

The post Marilynne Robinson on the New Testament appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist. She found her way into journalism covering the Nicaraguan insurrection against Anastasio Somoza in1979. Since then she has written about Latin America for The Guardian, Newsweek, The New Yorker, National Geographic magazine, El País, and The New York Review of Books. She is the author of three works of reportage and a memoir. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, the Princess of Asturias award for the Humanities, and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism. Her most recent book is The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America.

Michael Ignatieff is a university professor, writer, and former Canadian politician. Most recently the president and rector of the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, for years he was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Among his many books are The Needs of Strangers (1984), Isaiah Berlin (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004), and Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013). Between 2006 and 2011 he served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation TheNew York Review’s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, the state of the left, and more. Each event, held on Zoom, will last ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post American Imperialism and the End of Sovereignty appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

WEEK 1: CREATION
Biblical Creation is like an all-suffusing light, abrupt and intentional, within which being emerges and the Creator makes Himself known. This conception is unique and essential to biblical literature. We will look at contexts in which it is explored, notably in Psalms and Job.

WEEK 2: LAW
The laws of Moses, as they are meant to structure the material life of a community pleasing to God, are both radical and humane, or radical because they are humane. We will look at relevant passages in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

WEEK 3: PSALMS
This beautiful body of poetry is a mortal voice speaking into the mystery of brief, troubling, glorious existence, of sacred reality as felt human experience. We will look at selected psalms.

WEEK 4: PROPHECY
These writings integrate the profound value of nations and peoples with the recurrent fact of corruption, desolation and captivity. Their visions of a world at peace with itself are full of that original and essential light. We will look at Isaiah, primarily.

Four one-hour sessions: March 2, 9, 16, and 23. All sessions will start at 7pm ET. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind(2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing,” and the inaugural Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence from Harper’s Magazine (2025).

The post Marilynne Robinson on the Old Testament appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has represented Washington’s 7th District, which encompasses most of Seattle, since 2017. She is the first and only South Asian American woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. She serves on the House Budget, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Steering and Policy Committees, and she is Chair Emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Previously, she led advocacy efforts for women’s and immigrant rights and racial and economic justice.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation The New York Review’sAdvising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post The State of the Left appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

David Cole is the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia and the former National Legal Director of the ACLU.

Pamela Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School and Codirector of the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. She is a coauthor of The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process and Keeping Faith with the Constitution.

About This Series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation The New York Review’s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post The Emergency Court appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School and University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. She is a pioneer of the law and literature movement and a scholar of feminism and race in American jurisprudence. For two decades, she wrote the “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column for The Nation Magazine. She is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, the 1997 Reith Lecturer for the BBC, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent book is The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies and The Spirit of the Law.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation Review’sAdvising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post A Summer of Fear: Violence, Intimidation, and Freedom of Speech in the US appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Francisco Cantú is a writer and translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and VQR, and his work has been collected in The Best American Essays series and featured on This American Life. He teaches at the University of Arizona, where he is one of the coordinators of the Field Studies in Writing Program and DETAINED, a community archive that collects oral histories of people who have been incarcerated in for-profit immigrant detention centers.

Caroline Moorehead is a historian and biographer, most recently of a quartet of books on the resistance in France and Italy before and during World War II and a life of Mussolini’s daughter Edda. She is a human rights journalist and the author of Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees.

Julia Preston is a journalist focusing on immigration. She is the coauthor, along with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, an account of Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy. She was previously a contributing writer at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit organization that publishes reporting on criminal justice and immigration. Before the Marshall Project, she worked at The New York Times, first as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and thenas the paper’s national correspondent covering immigration.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation Review’sAdvising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Is America Abandoning Immigrants? Mass Deportation and Resistance appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Four one-hour sessions: January 28, February 4, 11, and 18. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Memberships begin at $119 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, essayist, and translator. His eleven books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). Over the past thirty years. Mr. Mendelsohn has contributed over three hundred essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, and has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, and BBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. Mr. Mendelsohn’s honors include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Prix Médicis in France and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint professor of Humanities at Bard College, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2025.

About this series

The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, seductive—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly thirty centuries, from the Homeric epics to twentieth-century cinema and theater. Our cultural obsession with these characters raises a compelling question: Why have male authors focused so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? In this four-part NYRSeminar, New York Review of Books Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn will take participants through a series of close readings of major works that established and then developed our female literary archetypes— from Homer’s Odyssey to representative works of Greek tragedy, and from the nineteenth-century novel and opera to four major works of twentieth-century theater—as we explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.

The post Drama Queens: Daniel Mendelsohn on Twentieth-Century Theater appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

This course will cover the following texts: Madame Bovary, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, Madame Butterfly.

Three one-hour sessions: January 7, 14, and 21. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Memberships begin at $99 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, essayist, and translator. His eleven books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). Over the past thirty years. Mr. Mendelsohn has contributed over three hundred essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, and has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, and BBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. Mr. Mendelsohn’s honors include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Prix Médicis in France and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint professor of Humanities at Bard College, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2025.

About this series

The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, seductive—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly thirty centuries, from the Homeric epics to twentieth-century cinema and theater. Our cultural obsession with these characters raises a compelling question: Why have male authors focused so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? In this four-part NYRSeminar, New York Review of Books Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn will take participants through a series of close readings of major works that established and then developed our female literary archetypes— from Homer’s Odyssey to representative works of Greek tragedy, and from the nineteenth-century novel and opera to four major works of twentieth-century theater—as we explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.

The post Drama Queens: Daniel Mendelsohn on Madame Bovary and Italian Opera appeared first on The New York Review of Books.