Ideas

History

An Uncertain Triumphalism

America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of national unity and inventiveness in the anxious aftermath of civil war and recession.

July 23, 2026 issue

Omer Bartov

The Judeo-Bolshevist Target

July 23, 2026 issue

Jenny Uglow

Wonder & Disillusion

The naturalist George Forster was fascinated by plants and animals, but he was also driven by a passionate belief in the rights of all people regardless of race, gender, or social status.

July 23, 2026 issue

Andrew Arsan

Unmaking the Middle East

In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.

June 25, 2026 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Paper Trail

The investigation into the origin of papyrus fragments that the owners of Hobby Lobby purchased from an Oxford scholar underscores papyrology’s long history of shady deals and ulterior motives.

June 25, 2026 issue

Neal Ascherson

Hitler’s End

After the fall of Berlin the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he was dead.

June 11, 2026 issue

Lynn Hunt

Counting Heads

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination transformed the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness into the revered martyr of the people’s cause.

May 28, 2026 issue

Adam Hochschild

A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth

Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.

May 28, 2026 issue

After Weimar

Elke Schulze

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Anka Muhlstein

The Genius in Exile

“You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.”

November 6, 2014 issue

J.M. Coetzee

The Man with Many Qualities

“From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.”

March 18, 1999 issue

John Willett

Art of a Nasty Time

Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York.

June 26, 1980 issue

Circling the Drain

Andrew O’Hagan

The Darkroom of Propaganda

“It now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Trump at the Supreme Court

“The amateurish nature of many of the first Trump administration’s encounters with the Supreme Court is highly likely to be replaced by a more disciplined and strategic approach.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Antisystemic Times

“Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Christine Henneberg

On Abortion Rights

“I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Aryeh Neier

The Rise of Authoritarianism

The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats all over the world.

December 19, 2024 issue

Wesley Lowery

The Task of the Journalist

“Our highest calling is not short-term persuasion or immediate influence but diligent documentation.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Susan Neiman

Nemesis

“Will workers be served by a president who openly praises union-busters? Of course not, but Trump’s promise was to be their retribution, not to solve their problems.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Hofmann

Words Without Consequences

“How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner?”

December 19, 2024 issue

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997)

Isaiah Berlin

A selection of Isaiah Berlin’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

Isaiah Berlin

A Message to the 21st Century

October 23, 2014 issue

Isaiah Berlin

Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism

September 27, 1990 issue

Isaiah Berlin

A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli

November 4, 1971 issue

Isaiah Berlin

Notes on Prejudice

October 18, 2001 issue

Isaiah Berlin

On Political Judgment

October 3, 1996 issue

Isaiah Berlin

The Arts in Russia Under Stalin

October 19, 2000 issue

The Latest

Julia Preston

The New Ellis Island

A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.

July 23, 2026 issue

Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack

Broken Promises in Cuban Miami

Donald Trump has reversed the government’s longstanding benevolence toward Cuban asylum seekers, even as his administration exacerbates the crisis they fled.

July 23, 2026 issue

Christian Donlan

The Archbishop’s Library

An audit against entropy

June 10, 2026

Erin Maglaque

Their Own Private Genesis

What if Augustine’s idea of original sin was wrong? Testimony from the Inquisition reveals freethinkers using their sexual experience to dispute the reign of shame and otherwise critique Church doctrine.

June 25, 2026 issue

David S. Reynolds

Image Crazy

In the decades before the Civil War, innovations in printmaking and photography created a “rage for pictures” that transformed American visual culture.

June 25, 2026 issue

Magda Teter

A Different Country Came to Them

Until Greece annexed Salonica in 1912, it had long been a city where “all peoples” used to pass. How did its Jews come to be eliminated and their history erased?

June 25, 2026 issue

Sanford Schwartz

The Fairy-Tale Hour

An exhibition of Paul Klee’s late works focuses on his depictions of the atmosphere of violence and intimidation in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

June 11, 2026 issue

Prudence Peiffer

Don’t Call It Entertainment

In Everything Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde’s attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.

May 28, 2026 issue

Samuel Earle

The Sage of Washington

Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.

May 28, 2026 issue