{"id":47873,"date":"2009-05-26T18:55:20","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T22:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nybooks.wpengine.com\/about\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T09:59:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:59:40","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"About the Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The New York Review<\/em> was launched during the New York City newspaper strike of 1963, when the magazine\u2019s founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication\u2014one in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time could write about current books and issues in depth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readers responded by buying almost every copy and writing thousands of letters to demand that the Review<\/em> continue. From the beginning, the editors were determined that the Review<\/em> should be an independent publication; it began life as an editorial voice beholden to no one, and it remains so today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silvers and Epstein continued as co-editors until her death in 2006, and Silvers served as sole editor until his death in 2017. Since 2019 Emily Greenhouse has edited The New York Review<\/em>, <\/em>and it remains the magazine where, across twenty issues each year, the major voices in world literature and thought discuss books and ideas. In addition to the print magazine, the NYR Online<\/em> publishes thorough and wide-ranging essays about politics national and global, film, art, and the cultural preoccupations of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n

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For more than sixty years The New York Review<\/em> has been guided by its founding philosophy that criticism is urgent and indispensable. It is the journal where Mary McCarthy reported on the Vietnam War from Saigon<\/a> and Hanoi<\/a>; Hannah Arendt wrote her \u201cReflections on Violence\u201d<\/a>; Noam Chomsky wrote about the responsibility of intellectuals<\/a>; Susan Sontag challenged the claims of modern photography<\/a>; James Baldwin penned a letter to Angela Davis<\/a>; Jean-Paul Sartre talked about the loss of his sight<\/a>; and Elizabeth Hardwick eulogized Martin Luther King<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the pages of the\u00a0Review<\/em>, Joan Didion wrote\u00a0a rigorous defense of the Central Park Five<\/a>;\u00a0Nadine Gordimer<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Bishop Desmond Tutu<\/a>\u00a0described apartheid in South Africa; V\u00e1clav Havel published his\u00a0reflections from the Czech underground<\/a>; Helen Vendler read poetry by everyone from\u00a0William Wordsworth<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Wallace Stevens<\/a>; Timothy Garton Ash\u00a0observed\u00a0Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell<\/a>; Mark Danner\u00a0reported on\u00a0torture at CIA black sites<\/a>; Janet Malcolm wrote about\u00a0psychoanalysis<\/a>,\u00a0Diane Arbus<\/a>, and\u00a0translation<\/a>; and Garry Wills\u00a0wrote about American politics and the Catholic Church<\/a>.\u00a0Joan Acocella\u00a0watched the work of Bob Fosse<\/a>; Yasmine El Rashidi\u00a0reported from Tahrir Square during Egypt\u2019s Arab Spring<\/a>; Darryl Pinckney\u00a0wrote about Ferguson, Missouri<\/a>;\u00a0Namwali Serpell\u00a0teased out the figure of the whore in literature and film<\/a>; Zadie Smith\u00a0charted two paths for the contemporary novel<\/a>; Tim Judah\u00a0reported from the outbreak of war in Ukraine<\/a>; Sherrilyn Ifill wrote about the Supreme Court\u2019s repeal of both\u00a0affirmative action<\/a> and\u00a0Roe<\/em>\u00a0v.\u00a0Wade<\/em><\/a>; Fintan O\u2019Toole\u00a0analyzed Trumpism<\/a>; Aryeh Neier\u00a0deplored the genocide in Gaza<\/a>; and Martha Nussbaum\u00a0defended the rights of animals<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein wrote in the Review<\/em>\u2019s first issue, \u201cThe hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Review was launched during the New York City newspaper strike of 1963, when the magazine\u2019s founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication\u2014one in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time could write about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-about.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-47873","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/nybooks.com\/about\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebPage","headline":"About the Review","url":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/about\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/about\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Uncategorized","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matthew Howard"}],"creator":["Matthew Howard"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The New York Review of Books","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2009-05-26T22:55:20Z","datePublished":"2009-05-26T22:55:20Z","dateModified":"2026-03-25T13:59:40Z"},"rendered":"