The New York Review of Books

I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?

The first essay by Lauren Michele Jackson that I ever read was published in the summer of 2020, a week or so into the protests following the death of George Floyd. Many media outlets and English departments had published an “anti-racist reading list” or “anti-racist syllabus,” and a swarm of more or less identical essays on the […]

In February satellite photographs of a new militarized buffer zone along Egypt’s border with Gaza circulated online. The Egyptian government was silent about the matter for a few days, then said that the area was being prepared so that aid trucks could enter the besieged Palestinian territory through the Rafah border crossing. Unnamed Egyptian officials also told NPR and […]

Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker’s review of a recent translation of The Wall, a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: “Why write? Why describe your life for others? Why do anything at all?” […]

Around 10:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 2, a handful of volunteer attorneys stood on a small lawn sandwiched between two jails, waiting for protesters arrested within UCLA’s Palestine solidarity encampment to be released from custody. One of the lawyers made a noise of disbelief and held their phone out to show the others […]

In 2016, near the end of his second term as president, Barack Obama was asked what he planned to do on returning to civilian life. He gave a one-word reply: “Uber.” The joke suggested two changes that had occurred during his presidency. First, Uber had become a verb; the idea of “ubering” was commonplace. Second, […]

When students set up the tents at Harvard on April 24, I was standing with the police on the steps of the building that houses the president’s office. The NYPD had already made its first round of arrests at Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment, and two days earlier faculty and students had been arrested trying to […]

It began as a small group: a few dozen travelers drifting towards the border, full of fear and hope, united in the belief that they could change their fates. Well-wishers along the route gathered to bid them good luck, to pray for them, to remind them that they were on a righteous path. The group’s […]

What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, besieged by “the ads, the tracking, the […]

“How do I capture what happened—and what moved me—during a performance that most of my readers will never have a chance to see?”