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Jed Perl
A Century of Surrealism

One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying to make sense of its aims and effects.

David Cole
From Evasion to Silence

As the courts resist his deportation orders, Trump has responded with shockingly bad-faith arguments—and brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Indian Ocean island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

Sam Needleman
‘On the Brink of Erasure’

Tacita Dean’s mesmerizing, elegiac drawing and filmmaking spring from both broad exploration and acute focus.

Nathaniel Rich
Writing Like a Mountain

In the novels of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, people become ants and mountains become menacing gods.

Climate Action

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Free from the Archives

On May Day 1971—and for three days after—tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C., in order “to block with our bodies the traffic headed for the White House, the Justice Department, the Executive Office Building, the Internal Revenue Service…in a program of militant nonviolent civil disobedience that will attempt to close down the governmental agencies of war and oppression.” As one of the protesters’ slogans had it, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” In the end more than 12,000 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in American history.

In the Review’s June 17, 1971, issue, Noam Chomsky, who had been on the ground in Washington, wrote a forceful defense of the protests and a call to civil disobedience more generally, arguing that public disruptions were necessary to counter the sense of public apathy that the Nixon administration hoped to manufacture in order to continue its savage bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Noam Chomsky
Mayday: The Case for Civil Disobedience

“What is important is not whether one who commits civil disobedience thinks that he is right, but rather the harder questions: Is he right? Will the act help to achieve a just end? Would strictly legal means be ineffective?”

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