Today in The New York Review of Books: Tanvi Misra on America’s betrayal of Afghan asylum seekers; Nate Wooley on an avant-garde score of Manhattan’s birdsong; Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s lilliputian greatness; Michael Gorra on literary agents; Andrew Arsan on what really went wrong in the Middle East; and, from the archives, remembering the Stonewall Uprising.

Tanvi Misra
The Unraveling of Afghan Asylum

Afghan asylum seekers fled a crisis the US had a direct role in fomenting—only to become targets in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Nate Wooley
Resistance Choirs

The composer Raven Chacon has long sought ways to combine narrative and political clarity with avant-garde, nonlinear form.

Fintan O’Toole
Gulliver’s Warning

Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.

Michael Gorra
Call My Agent

With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.

Andrew Arsan
Unmaking the Middle East

In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.

Free from the Archives

Today is the 57^th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and the 56^th anniversary of the first Pride march in New York City.  In September, 2012, Charles Kaiser wrote an essay for the NYR Online reflecting on a Sunday morning in 1971, less than two years after the landmark events on Christopher Street, when he woke up to find a defense of homosexuality by the novelist and journalist Merle Miller in The New York Times Magazine.

Charles Kaiser
When The New York Times Came Out of the Closet

If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday morning in January 1971 to discover “What it Means to be a Homosexual,” a deeply personal and beautifully written piece in defense of homosexuality. Nothing like this had ever been printed in a newspaper like the Times before.

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