Sponsored by Reaktion Books

Francisco Cantú
An American Story

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s latest book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.

Liza Batkin
Men Explain Abortion Drugs to the FDA

In a Texas lawsuit, Christian medical organizations are asking a hand-picked judge to make the FDA rescind its approval of mifepristone. They might succeed.

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Verlyn Klinkenborg
Trees in Themselves

The oldest trees prompt us to think about how embedded we are in time and could help us recalibrate our perspective on the geologic past.

Meghan O’Gieblyn
The Life of the Mind

The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker’s new novel, dramatizes with rare vibrancy an economist’s preparation for a talk on John Maynard Keynes.

Carey Baraka
The Political Education of William Ruto

Kenya’s new leadership got their start in the 1980s in the youth ranks of Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian regime. Will they repeat the sins of their mentors?

Regina Marler
‘Joan Doesn’t Give a Damn’

The San Francisco painter Joan Brown snubbed success at every turn.

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Free from the Archives

Today would have been Bobby Fischer’s eightieth birthday. In March 2011, three years after Fischer died in Iceland, World Chess Champion emeritus Garry Kasparov wrote for the Review an analysis of his predecessor’s genius for chess and puzzled at his often bizarre life. But no matter Fischer’s erratic behavior in his private and public life—anti-Semitic rants, baseless accusations of cheating—he was, Kasparov wrote, “scrupulously correct” at the board: “It was simply that Fischer played every game to the death, as if it were his last. It was this fighting spirit that his contemporaries recall most about him as a chess player.

Garry Kasparov
The Bobby Fischer Defense

“Occasionally I felt as though I were playing a one-sided match against a phantasm. Nobody knew where Fischer was, or if he, still the most famous chess player in the world at the time, was out there plotting a comeback.”

Today at 1:00 PM EST
Words for Relief:

A Reading for Victims of the Turkey–Syria Earthquake

An online event and benefit

This online benefit, organized by Words Without Borders and cosponsored by The New York Review of Books, will feature readings by authors and translators from around the world to raise funds for relief efforts for the Syrian, Turkish, and Kurdish people affected by the disaster. You may register and pledge a donation at the link below.

Register Now