Rachel Nolan
The Forest Eaters

In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.

Robyn Creswell
Reimagining al-Andalus

To modern Arab thinkers, the Andalusian experiment has represented everything from the perils of factionalism to the benefits of cultural openness to the pain of exile.

After Michael Longley,
After Amergin Glúingel

a poem by Jim Moore

I am the bat that vanishes
under the bridge in late September.
I’m the little dancer in night air, drunk
on insects. See me over there by
the couple drowning
in each other on the bench under
the pine tree?
I am the velvet thing that brushes
your earlobes…

Jérôme Tubiana and Joshua Craze
Darfur: The New Massacres

As war rages across the country, Arab forces are attacking non-Arab communities in Sudan’s periphery.

Lauren Michele Jackson
Tired of Pink

The original Mean Girls documented a widespread angst about the perils of “Girl World.” What happens when we keep bringing it back?

NYRSeminars:
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Join Daniel Mendelsohn as he leads a seminar on W. G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, which follows the footsteps of a nameless narrator as he takes a long and erratic walking tour of Suffolk—a journey that becomes a vehicle for ruminating on history and literature, the passage of time, and cultural decay.

Four weekly sessions beginning March 6. Purchase your membership here!

Free from the Archives

On Sunday, February 12, 2023—last year’s Super Bowl—Jake Nevins wrote a history of football’s fortunes in the United States for the NYR Online. Starting in 1905—the year Teddy Roosevelt interceded to ensure college football would continue despite the deaths of nineteen college athletes who were killed playing the game—Nevins documented the sport’s rise to national ubiquity, from the cold war when investment in the game constituted “a struggle over the American family and, more pointedly, American boys” to the modern, televised game, where the spectacle of “limbs bending awkwardly in the pileup, cold breath wafting through facemasks, the distinctive crunch of one helmet hitting another” have made the sport an ideal “theater for muscular nationalism.”

Jake Nevins
‘Hit the Line Hard’

“Cast against the threat of communism, football became the site of a struggle over the American family and, more pointedly, American boys, whom politicians often crudely identified as the last bastion of defense against Soviet risks to the ‘American way of life,’ a euphemism for the free enterprise system and the nuclear family unit.”

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