15 stories from The New York Review of Books
The new Guide for Grand Parisians "is a guide to the present and the future," says Rémi Babinet, the president both of BETC and of the Endowment for Art and Culture of the Grand Paris Expre…
"The history of each branch of science can be divided into three phases. The first phase is exploration, to see what nature is doing. The second phase is precise observation and measurement,…
Buildings long deemed passé and unsuccessful can suddenly seem fresh and intriguing to a new generation, just as yesterday's tacky decorative designs can become tomorrow's next cool thing. …
"Thirteen black film companies were operating by the end of World War I, although most of them released only one film. ... Black producers and directors founded their own film companies out …
These days, virtually every aspect of day-to-day life is fed into corporate databases and used to predict and influence all kinds of behavior. Surveillance corporations don't just respond to…
It's a truism that no one accepts anyone else's reading of Hamlet. And for at least two hundred years, no generation has been comfortable with its predecessor's take on the play. It's …
Tim Parks: "Every few days, working on my new novel, my thoughts flash back to something Colm TóibÃn said at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival nine months ago: that flashbacks are infur…
In the years they occupied Iraq's second city, the extremists burned tens of thousands of books and torched the widely admired university's library. NYRB's reporters meet with librarians, la…
Though 21st century art history majors might not realize it, the entire second half of the 20th century was covered by the shadow of WWII. "The war, Nazi crimes, and their legacy inevitably …
As Israel lives under the most openly right-wing nationalist government in its history and as tensions rise with the Palestinians in the territories (and with many countries overseas because…
Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the "what-it-is-like" of experience. Next to this denial"I'll call it "t…
John Banville considers the writer's last years - and whether (and in what ways) he willed his own destruction.
"Juan Rulfo (1917"1986), rightly revered in Mexico and outside, is regarded as one of the most influential Latin American writers of all time. ... One reason for the surprising neglect of Ru…
Memories of Chekhov, from which this excerpt is drawn, is the first documentary biography of Anton Chekhov to be based on primary sources: the letters, diaries, essays, and memories of Chekh…
As it happens, a recent work for the popular theater puts both Spider-Man and Arachne on the same stage. I am referring to Julie Taymor's ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a w…
