Today in The New York Review of Books: Neal Ascherson searches for Hitler’s body; Jonathan Mingle measures the methane in our atmosphere; David Blight reclaims American history from the jingoists; Greg Grandin profiles Pope Leo XIV; Harrison Stetler profiles un milliardaire; and, from the archives, Alfred Kazin on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Neal Ascherson
Hitler’s End

After the fall of Berlin the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he was dead.

Jonathan Mingle
Our Climate’s Wild Card

Methane’s part in the climate crisis remains largely overlooked, even though it is responsible for 30 percent of all global warming to date, and despite the fact that it’s still possible to purge it from our skies.

David W. Blight
Dreams of Our Nation

Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.

Greg Grandin
The Education of Pope Leo XIV

As a young missionary in Peru, the pope witnessed a war on liberation theology—and was indelibly stamped by the movement’s commitment to the poor.

Harrison Stetler
Bolloré’s Way

For years a right-wing billionaire has been steadily expanding his empire of media holdings, with dire consequences for the future of French publishing.

Minority Opinion:
The End of Voting Rights and the Future of Elections

June 1, 2026, at 5 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register Now

Free from the Archives

One hundred and forty-three years ago today, the East River Bridge—later renamed the Brooklyn Bridge—opened in New York City. It was the first bridge to connect Manhattan with Long Island and, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world.

In the Review’s July 15, 1965, issue, Alfred Kazin wrote about the symbolic power of “the biggest and most useful nineteenth-century structure still standing in New York.”

Alfred Kazin
The Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge still represents, in all its massiveness, the American power that was fully to burst upon the consciousness of Americans only in the years after the Civil War. And because it is so beautiful in its power, complex but unadorned, it has become the symbol of the American longing to wrest beauty out of a purely industrial environment, to find in the skills of our native capitalism and the hardness of our cities some hint of a more humane order, even of the spiritual fruition that the churchless individual might yet find in this country; so dreamed the transcendentalists in the nineteenth century, and many a liberal and utopian mind in the twentieth.

Edward Steichen: Brooklyn Bridge (1903)

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