Books, Arts, and Culture

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...

1. We most often associate modern architecture with technological innovations that enabled feats of construction unimaginable before the late nineteenth century. But an equally central component...

As I was leaving Algiers for Constantine, an hour east by plane, my friend Djamel, a taxi driver, fixer, and social critic, warned me not to...

On Mother’s Day 1987, at the Exit Art gallery in SoHo, a new group called Bang on a Can presented a twelve-hour marathon concert of contemporary...

Dana Spiotta is a decade writer. Lightning Field (2001) is a dreamy yet precise study of lifestyle consumerism in Los Angeles in the early Aughts (Spirit...

In the decades after the Civil War, when white southerners created the mythology of the Lost Cause, they depicted slavery as a benign institution that uplifted...