The Best of The New York Review of Books

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science…

Who—or perhaps we should say what—has a more developed moral sense: the Supreme Court of the United States or a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence

Newspapers are dying. Can journalism be saved?

“Painting Edo,” the ambitious jewel of an exhibition currently on view for no one at the Harvard Art Museum, is perhaps arguably experiencing its most historically authentic moment in the strangeness…

Freud himself equated psychoanalysis with the plague.

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight […]

However well-intentioned, talk presuming Trump's good faith assumes that he is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one. It might be worth considering the rules I've learned for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.

Drawing borders around people might give us a more orderly and predictable world. But for all the promised benefits of a frictionless experience of journeying, it may not be a more humane one. Passports might disappear in the next decade, but they’ll be replaced by something much more invasive: a digital shadow representing our bodies, our families, and our pasts, following us like little rainclouds everywhere we go.

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about…

Jill Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and her new book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future is a remarkable saga,…

The Covid-19 pandemic lays bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system.

Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again. But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly o