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Today in The New York Review of Books: Sari Bashi inspects the UN’s “peace plan” for Gaza; Ferdinand Mount reevaluates the wartime Tories; Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson discuss the Trump administration’s senseless economic planning; Sophie Pinkham goes to Uzbekistan’s inaugural art biennial; Ai Xiaoming retraces the life of a political prisoner in China; a poem by Sylvie Kandé; and, from the archives, Greil Marcus on Robert Johnson.

Sari Bashi
Gaza: The Threat of Partition

By putting the possibility of reconstruction out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the current UN-endorsed “peace plan” may make it impossible for them to remain.

Ferdinand Mount
Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script

Understanding Britain’s postwar reforms like the National Health Service requires peering into the “lost world” of wartime conservatism.

Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson
Runaway Short-Termism

How has the Trump administration broken from the past century of American political economy?

Sophie Pinkham
Mixed Blessings

Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism?

Ai Xiaoming, translated by Ian Johnson
The Road to Miaoxi

Ruins of Mao-era “reform-through-labor” camps remain scattered throughout the mountains of Sichuan. Five years ago I decided to retrace one former prisoner’s path.

Call of Air

a poem by
Sylvie Kandé
translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

Accursed would you go as far as to covet
your neighbor’s long-gone past…
Melancholy this sixth sense!
No the appetite for things ebbing
already leaves a vast beach for the signs
and I go and turn over one by one…

Free from the Archives

Eighty-nine years ago today the blues musician Robert Johnson commenced the first of the two studio sessions that produced the entirety of his recorded output. Over three days at a hotel in San Antonio, he laid down sixteen tracks, including “Terraplane Blues,” a modest hit at the time, and “Sweet Home Chicago.”

In the Review’s December 3, 2020, issue, Greil Marcus wrote about Johnson’s life and music, from Mississippi, where legend holds he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical genius, to Depression-era Chicago and Harlem, where he proved that genius, and finally back to Mississippi, where he “was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint.”

Greil Marcus
The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

Recently in the Review

Jonathan Lethem
Frantic Realism

“The amplitude, the riot and hoot…of One Battle After Another make for cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially unconfronted.”

FT
Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

“Beckett pared language down and reconfigured it into a strange new register to produce effects of absurdity and alienation: too intensely sincere to be ironic or parodic, but too bizarre and blasé to be tragic.”

A New York Review Online Event

The State of the Left
Fintan O’Toole in Conversation with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal

December 8, 2025, 5:00 PM EST

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