“Prigozhin’s rise from street criminal to billionaire….dovetailed with Russia’s transformation into a rogue state with revanchist dreams and a determination to extend its reach—often by force—around the globe.” —Joshua Hammer

NYR: The End of Equity By effectively sanctioning ICE’s raids in Los Angeles, the Supreme Court is showing its readiness to discard centuries of equitable tradition in law. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/... "constitutional law as glib reassurance."

Writing Their Prison’s History A recent study by a group of incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison reveals how progressive reforms turned into profitable abuse. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

On the cold-blooded execution of alleged drug smugglers. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Pacificists, fascists, Communists, New Dealers, Abstract Expressionists, mobsters, émigrés, antiquing philosophers, Frank Sinatra—wartime New York was “a teeming, heterogenous place…[a] boisterous assortment of characters.” —Brenda Wineapple

Catherine Nicholson on King Lear in China

“I went to college to do illustration, because I wasn’t brave enough to paint. Coming out the other side as a graphic designer felt a little accidental.” —Matt Willey, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

Thea Riofrancos on lithium mining and the contradictions of “green capitalism”

Thea Riofrancos on lithium mining and the contradictions of “green capitalism”

“To encounter an octopus is to be implicated in a question about being that engulfs you both.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg

“The popular novelist in Charlotte Brontë ignited the popular novelist in Elizabeth Gaskell: in this sense they invented each other.” —Frances Wilson on Brontë and her biographer

“Khamenei is the regime’s most important unifying force, and he looks likely to exit the scene when the Islamic Republic is at its most vulnerable.” —Christopher de Bellaigue on Iran’s future

“With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some 30 meters long.” —Neal Ascherson on a daring escape during the Holocaust

“That plaintive question, ‘Do you like me?,’ underlies almost all manosphere discourse.” — @harikunzru.bsky.social on Adolescence

"Rating me 6.8 (“above average, solid base with clear room for enhancement”), it warned that I was “slightly soft around the mandible area” and could benefit from “mewing daily to engage your maxilla and strengthen jawline projection.” My time in the manosphere: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

For the NYRB, I wrote about Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a once-neglected modernist monolith and the 20th century's top opium fever dream. My thoughts on what makes it both fascinating and frustrating, as well as the phenomenon of the Great Big Novel. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The octopus, man. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

‘Dear Mom…. The hope of visiting you [in prison] lasted until I was a teenager. But they never transferred you to a normal prison, you never got out, and I never met you.’ — @marcelaturati.bsky.social on one daughter’s search for a disappeared mother

"To encounter an octopus is to be implicated in a question about being that engulfs you both." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Check out my latest in @nybooks.com! It's a review of a brilliant book - a history of the nation's oldest women's prison, written by inmates in that same prison. It was a true privilege to engage with their scholarship. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"The Naked City is not, however, just a noirish police procedural but a love letter to an ineffable place alternatively known as the modern Babylon, the city that never sleeps, and Baghdad-on-the-Subway." Brenda Wineapple on New York in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Verlyn Klinkenborg on the otherness of an octopus

“Throughout Latin America, poor urban youth, union organizers, land defenders, and other social groups are criminalized, threatened, and worse by the government’s often specious efforts to associate them with the drug trade.” —Dawn Marie Paley

“From the US–Mexico border all the way down to South America, activists and drug users are organizing, promoting harm reduction, and fighting for alternatives to punitive policies.” —an interview with Dawn Marie Paley

Frances Wilson on the unparalleled Charlotte Brontë

Marcela Turati @marcelaturati.bsky.social on the Mexican state's death flights in the 1970s, and one daughter’s search to uncover the truth (translated by Will Noah)

The latest dispatch from our Art Editor, Leanne Shapton

“Anyone who has learned a language till they no longer hesitate feels liable for it, tends to it with care,” writes Ilija Trojanow. “It may have come to them by chance, but they have made it their own.”

“If the definition of a bad king is one who brings his country to the brink of destruction, Khamenei will be counted among the worst.” —Christopher de Bellaigue

Our 10/9 issue is now online, with Frances Wilson on Charlotte Brontë, @harikunzru.bsky.social on Adolescence, @scottwstern.bsky.social on women’s prisons, Dorothy Sue Cobble on home work, Joshua Hammer on Prigozhin & the Wagner Group, and much more.

This review by Nathaniel Rich of a new book about Mars canal prognosticator Percival Lowell is an absolute joy to read. Lots of fun details about America's fascination with the Red Planet, but Rich's writing is the real draw. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

'Lithium, an essential ingredient in rechargeable batteries, epitomizes the contradictions of “green capitalism”. ' What’s Underground - by Thea Riofrancos #environment #batteries www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Writing Their Prison’s History: A recent study by a group of incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison reveals how progressive reforms turned into profitable abuse. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

For @nybooks.com I wrote about the TV drama Adolescence, teenage boys and the Manosphere. Includes looksmaxxing, mewing, Fresh & Fit, Sexual Market Value ... www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Hari Kunzru @harikunzru.bsky.social on how Adolescence captures the teenage anxiety that leads boys into the manosphere

Brenda Wineapple on the Big Apple during wartime

Neal Ascherson on the buried history of the Holocaust in Lithuania

“Outside of their cookie-cutter plans for elections, diplomats have little appetite for actually engaging with South Sudan.” — @joshuacraze.bsky.social

Department stores were once the “epicenter of the so-called Saturday Generation…. [They] descended on ‘Bloomie’s’ to see and be seen while they browsed through the newest of the best of everything and spent, spent, spent.” —Martin Filler

“Patrick Modiano exists in the shadows,” Ruth Margalit writes. “His grand theme is memory in unsettled times.”

“After [the 1999 protests in] Seattle the World Trade Organization never quite recovered its authority. Neither did the antiglobalization movement—not the left’s version of it, anyway.” —E. Tammy Kim

So pervasive is the suspicion that Mossad has penetrated all aspects of government that one post on X declared, “Call the Tehran gas company right now and someone picks up saying ‘Shalom, how can I help you?’” Christopher de Bellaigue in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Christopher de Bellaigue on Iran’s murky future

From the archives of the New York Review of Books (non pay-walled): why are pepedestrian fatalies rising in the US? @johnmunro.bsky.social www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"If you want to know what a technological republic might look like, forget Alexander Karp’s insipid book; consider what is being constructed around you, and how little it resembles any kind of republic at all. Consider the bad times, and who they are good for." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Check out @dawnpaley.bsky.social's interview in @nybooks.com about drug policy in Latin America and the future of the transnational drug war. Dawn is the author of "Drug War Capitalism" and the founder of the feminist bilingual newsletter @ojalaeditorial.bsky.social.

"I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta, in Guerrero, to find you. I looked out at the sea that probably swallowed you and I sense a storm: it’s you. For you I would cover the sea in white flowers." @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

L'honorable @nybooks.com mitraille le dernier livre d'Alex Karp, le président de Palantir, 'The Technological Republic' : "un post LinkedIn impitoyablement étiré sur 300 pages". www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh: A Requiem, writes Anahid Nersessian, is “a bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel.”