Today in The New York Review of Books: Helen Epstein assesses the toxic pollution Israel has left in Gaza; Sophia Goodfriend looks at Israel’s use of AI in its subjugation of Palestinians; Anthony Roth Costanzo reads an essay by Daniel Mendelsohn for the latest episode of our podcast Private Life; Merve Emre interviews two interviewers; and, from the archives, Brad Leithauser on Junichiro Tanizaki.

Helen Epstein
Gaza’s Deadly Soil

Amid tight Israeli restrictions, new remote research is starting to help us understand the scale of toxic contamination across the Gaza Strip.

Sophia Goodfriend
Target Practice

Artificial intelligence systems—now an integral part of the Israeli war machine—began as tools developed to surveil every aspect of Palestinian life.

Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

This episode features a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo.

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The Art of the Interview, with Merve Emre

Chana Joffe-Walt, interviewed by Merve Emre
The Best Tape You Can Get

“I’ve been listening to Chana Joffe-Walt for a long time now on This American Life, where she often takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and education.… But it was her conversations with men, women, and children in Gaza—which won the team at This American Life a Peabody Award in 2025—that made me want to open the fourth season of The Critic and Her Publics with her, and to explore how the interview can preserve the dignity and the complexity of ordinary people in a time of genocide.”

Sheila Heti, interviewed by Merve Emre
Consulting the Oracle

“A few months after OpenAI released Chat-GPT 5 last year, Heti and I spoke about the role of interviewing when human thought and feeling are impinged on by artificial intelligence, and whether machines can help us to unlock the mysteries of consciousness.”

Free from the Archives

The Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki was born 140 years ago today. In the Review’s November 21, 1985, issue, Brad Leithauser wrote about his 1924 book Naomi—“commonly known as his “first important novel’”—which had finally been published in the United States sixty-one years later.

Brad Leithauser
Irresistible Demons

For Tanizaki, the power and mystery of shadows ultimately lay in their elusive alliances with the past. Through their very obscurities, they seem to offer liberation from the brutal fixity of the present moment. He praised the “elegance of age” in tin tableware that has become tarnished, the “sheen of antiquity” in Oriental pottery, the “accumulation of the long Chinese past” discernible in the cloudiness of jade. Not surprisingly, given the torment found in so much of his writing, this invitation to a kind of time travel held for Tanizaki a bit of terror.

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