“Paradoxically, the more we learn about their influences and practices, the more extraordinary it seems that such individual, idiosyncratic geniuses could flourish simultaneously in the British art world.” —Jenny Uglow on Turner and Constable

“War begets not peace but capitulation, and all capitulation will beget—at the price of so much death and destruction—is a new modus vivendi.” —Loubna El Amine on Lebanon

“Five of the last ten US presidents attended law school,” Yi-Ling Liu writes. “By 2002 all nine members of…China’s most powerful governing body were former engineers.”

Great short piece on the changing reception of this novel inside Israel reflecting its changing collective memory. (I was about to add "lack of" but leaving out is always a defining part of collective memory) www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Essential piece from Adam Hanieh on the breadth of the economic shock induced by the war on Iran. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

“Like The Odyssey and Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of those books people think they know even if they’ve never read it, at least not in its entirety.” —Michael Dirda

David A. Bell (@davidavrombell.bsky.social) on the indigenous and enslaved people who built the French empire

Dan Rockmore on the simple pleasures of algebra

“For most of its history and prehistory, the human race has lived in various states of ignorance and wonder. Even today most of us will accept the disenchantments of knowledge only with great reluctance.” —Robert Pogue Harrison

“Muriel Spark’s two archives, one in Tulsa, the other in Edinburgh...[are] ‘her master plot,’ the ultimate code, created with an ingenuity that only the most insightful of interpreters can crack.” —Miranda Seymour

“Because Gulf-produced chemicals now sustain everything from factories in China to farms in South America,” writes Adam Hanieh, “disruption in the region ripples outward through industries and food systems across continents.”

A great interview with @erinmaglaque.bsky.social where she draws attention to the incredible Anne Wentworth (one of the stars of Voices of Thunder)

“In my childhood home in Iowa, there was a strong belief that the core of Judaism lay in empathy with the suffering of the oppressed and the enslaved. For me that also meant solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation.” —David Shulman

“Throughout my many years as a political activist, I have grown accustomed to feeling anger at Israeli society,” Orly Noy writes. “But now it does not anger me—it frightens me.”

“We lose something important about being human if AI becomes our primary contact with the unknown, our primary experience of the inexplicable.” —an interview with Erin Maglaque

Mlinko's review offers a highly-informed, deeply-considered introduction – to a powerful, little-known, oftentimes violently suppressed literary landscape. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“In writing this review I have learned how difficult it is to find the right tone in the face of picaresque evil. And isn’t it difficult for us all right now?” — Mark Lilla www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“Sex in John Berger’s work is too powerful a force for G. to be merely a libertine; each erotic encounter contains a small spark of revolutionary possibility.” —Ben Lerner on Berger’s 1972 novel, G.

Omari Weekes (@omweekes.bsky.social) on Tyriek White’s debut novel We Are a Haunting

Andrew Katzenstein on the generation of comic misfits inspired by Firesign Theatre

Allied firebombing in Japan “remain a footnote to the atomic blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A full moral reckoning of the horror they inflicted has never taken place.” —Joshua Hammer

“Having fought the fire in the 1990s and escaped it last year, this time my father could only watch and wait.” —Amir Ahmadi Arian on the bombing of Tehran’s oil depots

“The principled opposition to racism and imperialism that once made India the moral leader of Asia went missing well before Modi and his toadies emerged with their WhatsApp forwards to deride the ideals of Gandhi and Nehru.” —Pankaj Mishra

Superb, concise explanation by Adam Hanieh of how and why the US-Israeli war on Iran is having such massive impacts on economies and production around the world: Bottling the World Economy www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

Because Gulf-produced chemicals sustain everything from factories in China to farms in South America, the current consequences are more extensive than 1973 embargo, and more catastrophic than can be gleaned oil prices alone especially for those in the global South. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

I just finished reading this brilliant essay and i couldn’t recommend it more highly

Terrific piece, and even better title. Michael Dirda on "The Count of Monte Cristo" for @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Neve Gordon on attacks against medical facilities in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon https://go.nybooks.com/4bP8y6N

Adam Hanieh on the Strait of Hormuz and the global economy https://go.nybooks.com/4c3m487

“US manufacturing employment fell from 19 million workers in 1980 to 13 million in 2025; today China’s manufacturing workforce is eight times larger. As Shenzheners became skilled cooks, Americans forgot how to fry eggs.” —Yi-Ling Liu

A.E. Stallings’s “Frieze Frame illustrates the power of beauty to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition and ownership.” —James Romm

Michael Dirda on The Count of Monte Cristo

“For many the destroyed city is their best choice,” writes Doha Kahlout. “At least it is a city whose pain they know, a city that knows them.”

“We thought we knew [J.M.W. Turner and John Constable],” Jenny Uglow writes. “But how wrong we were. Far from being familiar or reverential, the Tate show...is a revelation.”

“The majority of young Israelis…haven’t read or even heard of the only canonical Hebrew literary work that portrays the reality of the state’s establishment.” —Nathan Thrall

“Radical spiritual writing—prophecies, autobiographies, spiritual accounts—was a genre in which women [in the 17th-century] flourished: they wrote about childbirth, about raising and feeding children, about abusive marriages.” —@erinmaglaque.bsky.social

“To keep the record of a life not because it was exceptional or edifying but because it was one’s own: this is something almost no one in pre- or early modern Europe seems to have done.” —Catherine Nicholson on Felix Platter’s diaries

“Never in modern history have wealth and location been less decisive in whether someone can get an abortion in the US,” writes @amylittlefield.bsky.social. But now people must weigh their tolerance for “legal risk, isolation, and uncertainty.”

1/ Great review /essay here! Simone Weil: “‘what makes the tragedy extreme is the fact that…because no one is aware that their sayings deserve the slightest attention—everybody being convinced a priori of the contrary, since > www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

An essay by Michael Dirda that begins with a celebration of learning as an act of self reinvention. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Emmanuel Grégoire has been elected mayor of Paris, a vindication of Anne Hidalgo's climate-focused legacy. “We won a cultural battle in Paris,” Grégoire told me in 2022. “The idea that our great cities of the world…are facing a major sustainability issue.” www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Focusing on attacks on health care I show how the Gaza Doctrine is metastasising to Lebanon and Iran just appeared. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

Just received the new issue of @nybooks.com. Includes an essay by the always incisive Fintan O’Toole @fotoole.bsky.social on Trump’s “War of Choice” against Iran. Worth a read👇 www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Adam Hanieh in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

“Religion could be a source of catastrophic oppression for women as well as offering a way to imagine freedom.” —Erin Maglaque, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

Frances Wilson’s “absorbing exploration” of Muriel Spark’s life “cracks Spark’s codes to expose the secret of her inspiration.” —Miranda Seymour

“In Lebanon as in other postcolonial countries, there is no straight line that leads from debate to agreement, conflict to unity, independence to sovereignty, and weakness to strength.” —Loubna El Amine

“Even where [Hungarian women] poets address the most mundane subject matter or the most universal imagery, there are telling differences; not even a poem about trees is ahistorical.” —Ange Mlinko

“Ethnic cleansing in Area C is almost complete, but we are still standing by the remaining families...sleeping in their homes, staying with them through the days, standing between them and the settler thugs.” —an interview with David Shulman

“Today the satiric compulsion is felt by different kinds of writers. The art of ridiculing specific people or institutions in government seems the province of television and the Internet rather than of literature.” —Aaron Matz