New York Review of Books

Writer and artist Molly Crabapple tells the story of her late great grandfather, self-taught artist Sam Rothbort, and of the Bund, the revolutionary anti-Zionist Jewish political party he joined in Vilna in 1898.

A show currently on exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art highlights mid-twentieth-century African-American photographs.

Historian Jackson Lears revisits the breadth, underpinnings, and outcomes of the radical movements of the late 1960s.

“When my media stream fills with the sound of children crying out for their parents, that distinct wail that only a broken-hearted child can make… it’s then that I reach for the food of my youth. Corned-beef hash. Spam. Fried Bologna sandwiches.”

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.

Molly Crabapple retraces the life of the great twentieth century Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria.

“If sex had a defining feature in the 1990s, it was ubiquity.” Laura Marsh unravels the two-decade fallout of the way sex was perceived, reported on, and delighted in during the 90s, an era when pornstars, Sex and the City, Monica Lewinsky, Harvey Weinstein, dominated the news.

The historic buildings around New York’s Union Square are not protected by landmark status, and the rise of the city’s tech industry now threatens them.

A look at the English choral tradition, a form of music that has spread more widely that you’d imagine.

A personal essay in which Russian emigre Masha Gessen ruminates on the culture’s tendency to privilege those who’ve suffered for a lack of choice — in becoming refugees, in picking their gender — and the choices (her own, and those of her parents and ancestors) that have impacted her life.