Ben Tarnoff
The Labor Theory of AI

Artificial intelligence may be the first attempt to automate and discipline human labor that even its creators don’t fully comprehend.

Jacob Weisberg
The Lucky One

Who was the “real” Reagan behind the carapace of vagueness, self-delusion, and contradiction?

David Oshinsky
Vaccines at Warp Speed

The development of the Covid vaccine relied on a public–private partnership that built on years of research into synthesizing RNA molecules. Will the next generation of RNA-based pharmaceuticals have the same basis in careful study and experimentation?

Nell Irvin Painter
‘This Land Is Yours’

Two recent books recover the missing Black history of upstate New York, challenging the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.

On the NYR Online

Caitlyn L. Chandler
War and Peace in Munich

At the city’s annual international security conference, European leaders vowed to double down on national defense. At what cost?

Jean Dykstra
‘Routine, Ordinary Care’

The photographs in Carmen Winant’s latest book remind us how unsensational abortion access is, and how necessary.

Ocracoke

a poem by
J.T. Townley

On Ocracoke I sit in the sand & smoke,
Sipping an okra Coke. Only in the South,
I say, missing my mouth. At least
I don’t choke

On the flavor, cough syrup meets
candied moth.
Stupefying as clustered houses on stilts,
Collapsing at water’s edge, sea-surge
no sloth…

Free from the Archives

Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published 249 years ago today. In the Review’s February 9, 1978, issue, Garry Wills wrote about a selection of new scholarship about Smith that had come out around the two-hundredth anniversary of the book’s publication, work that drew on “advances in textual scholarship, and on a fortuitous discovery—that of a new (and fuller) set of student’s notes from Smith’s course on jurisprudence.”

Garry Wills
Benevolent Adam Smith

“Modern corporate procedure stands closer to the things Smith attacked—e.g., to prerogative exclusion, joint-stock impersonality, guild rules—than to the kind of divided labor Smith offered as an example of human cooperation.”

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