Books, Arts, and Culture

In early 2020, just before the coronavirus upended American life, I sat down with a prominent poverty expert and asked what she thought of the efforts...

“I always knew I would someday write a book about my family,” writes Maria Stepanova in a chapter of In Memory of Memory called “On Beginnings.”...

When Frances Wilson was a teenager her mother forbade D.H. Lawrence’s books in the house and her college English professor refused to teach him. It was...

One night in September 2018, in a gentrifying neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old accountant named Botham Jean came home from work. Without locking...

World War II was an emergency that demanded a complete economic mobilization. In response to the war, the US government put forward a system of comprehensive...

At the start of D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, the American Civil War has recently ended. With the defeat of the Confederacy, the...

In his book Lihiyot Ba’olam (Being-in-the-World, 2014), the Israeli historian Boaz Neumann took on an intellectual challenge. Drawing on primary sources, Neumann—who died of cancer at...

To the Editors: As an author and longtime devotee of The New York Review of Books, I’d aspired to be mentioned in its pages, but not...