David Cole
The Wrong War on the War on Drugs

The war on drugs has failed, but so has the constitutional counteroffensive in the courts. What should reformers do instead?

Colin Grant
Hiding in the Front Room

The BBC series Mr Loverman, about a closeted West Indian grandfather and his family, explores the submerged emotional lives of the Windrush generation in Britain.

Ode to February in New York

a poem by
Jessica Greenbaum
from our February 10, 2022, issue

Even in week
one you show up
scuffed and muddy
it’s just your nature
and no one
likes you
but we drive
through your town
of boot and
bouillon factories
into March with
its shoe store . . . 

Langdon Hammer
Grandfather’s Bible

In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.

Moira Donegan
Patriarchal Bargains

In her long-out-of-print study of conservative gender politics, Andrea Dworkin reflected on how right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them.

NYRSeminars: Merve Emre on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Merve Emre continues her series “What Will She Do?” in April, with a seminar on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, the first of two extraordinary novels that she published. The seminar will track how Quicksand roots questions of action and identity in the overlapping crises of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation that came to a head in the 1920s.

Register today!

Free from the Archives

This week a child in Lubbock, Texas, died of measles, the first confirmed death from the disease in ten years. The child was unvaccinated. Today also happens to be the anniversary of the Vaccine Act of 1813, which was the first piece of legislation passed by Congress to encourage immunization—in that instance, against smallpox.

In the Review’s May 23, 2019, issue, shortly after a measles outbreak among hundreds of unvaccinated Orthodox Jews in New York City, Gavin Francis wrote about the history of anti-vaccine campaigns, which date to the advent of the smallpox vaccine at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Gavin Francis
Resistance to Immunity

“One in twenty children with measles develops pneumonia. Only about one in a thousand develops the most serious complication, encephalitis (a viral infection of brain cells). About two in a thousand will die…. When fears about vaccine safety cause a drop in vaccination rates, cases of serious infectious disease start rising. Parents who decline to vaccinate their children sense a growing opprobrium toward their choices. They have a consequent incentive to lie or, perhaps worse, stay away from the emergency room for fear of having their parenting challenged by medical professionals.”

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