Our April 18 issue—the Spring Books Issue—is now online, with Walter Shaub on Donald Trump’s corruption, Laura Marsh on Adelle Waldman, Nathaniel Rich on flying saucers, Tim Judah on despondency in Ukraine, Merve Emre on marriage and funeral plots, Colin Grant on Colson Whitehead, Francine Prose on Kaveh Akbar, Héctor Tobar on the US’s grim legacy in Central America, Brenda Wineapple on Louisa May Alcott, Michelle Nijhuis on environmentalism 2.0, Andrew Delbanco on Norman Mailer’s letters, a poem by Bei Dao, and much more.

Walter M. Shaub Jr.
The Corruption Playbook

Donald Trump’s plans to destroy civil service protections if reelected is more than an employees’ rights issue. What’s at stake is democracy itself.

Francine Prose
Poem & Prayer

Despite the gravity of subjects in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which include addiction and an obsession with the metaphysical, what makes the novel feel light is its bravado, buoyancy, and innovative form.

Laura Marsh
Human Resources

In her new novel, Adelle Waldman gambles that it’s possible to draw out the interiority of her characters mainly by sketching their working conditions.

Tim Judah
Gloom in Ukraine

Two years after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian morale has plummeted.

Geoffrey O’Brien
Furious Stasis

Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.

NYRSeminars: Merve Emre on Lolita

Join Merve Emre as she leads a seminar on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In this series of four weekly seminars, Emre will guide participants through the story of a brilliant, cruel, and obsessive man’s love for a twelve-year-old girl, touching on debates about freedom and morality, high art and mass culture, Old Europe and young America, and the entwined fates of comedy and romance in the postwar novel. Register today!

Free from the Archives

Forty-five years ago today, one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station—on the Susquehanna River, twelve miles from the Harrisburg city center—had a partial meltdown, after which radioactive xenon and krypton gases were vented into the atmosphere.

Two months later, in the Review’s May 17, 1979, issue, the energy policy analyst Charles Komanoff made the economic case for doing away with nuclear power.

Charles Komanoff
Doing Without Nuclear Power

“The environmental movement has concentrated single-mindedly on the dangers of energy projects to health and to nature. With only a few exceptions,…it has done little to promote new policies that would shift economic incentives from increasing the supply of energy to improving its use.”

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