THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE- APRIL 5, 2026

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘How the generation raised on smartphones is imagining life without them” by Matthew Shaer

The Novel Will Never Die. Ben Lerner’s Latest Book Shows Us Why.

With “Transcription,” the writer makes a case for the vitality of the form.

The Unlikely TV Show Restoring Everyone’s Faith in Dating

Without exploitation, “Love on the Spectrum” captures the triumphs and travails of dating. It has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows. By Anna Peele

Worried About A.I. Taking Your Job? That’s Not Very ‘Agentic’ of You.

Today’s spin on the idea of personal agency is convenient for tech C.E.O.s, who boast that their models work just fine without us. By Nitsuh Abebe

What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.

    THE NEW YORK TIMES – FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2026

    Drone Hits Kuwaiti Oil Refinery in New Attack on Gulf Energy Sites

    The strike set several refinery units ablaze, its operator said. President Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s infrastructure but there was no sign of a deal to end the war.

    White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Military Spending

    The massive proposed increase would be offset in part by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the administration describes as wasteful.

    Strong Showing for Job Market in Latest Report

    U.S. employers added 178,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent, a robust showing after a run of weakness.

    Jobs and Workers Are in Balance. Nobody Is Happy About It.

    Lower immigration has brought labor supply in line with shaky demand, but economists worry that such a slow-moving job market is at risk of toppling over.

    Bondi Wanted a Graceful Exit, but Trump Wanted Her Gone

    Pam Bondi had a feeling her days as attorney general were numbered. But she didn’t expect President Trump to drop the curtain quite so soon.

    4 min read

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – APRIL 4, 2026 PREVIEW

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue features How China hopes to win from the war

    How China hopes to win from the war

    Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

    The perils of a ground war in Iran

    Donald Trump may send in troops. Does he know what to do with them?

    Lessons for the world from tiny Hungary

    A regime loved by MAGA may soon lose power. That matters

    How worried should you be about private credit?

    Its humbling could raise borrowing costs

    Index providers should not bend the rules for Elon Musk

    They will only expose ordinary investors to unnecessary risks

    THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026

    THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features a dispatch from Tehran, Jed Perl on Morgan Meis’s funky kind of art criticism, Francine Prose on MAGA fiction, Caroline Fraser on the dump, Michael Gorra on Civil War diaries, David Cole on the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf’s letters, Trevor Jackson on American “retirement,” Kathryn Hughes on Tennyson’s cosmos, Colm Tóibín on Irish reunification, a collage by Lucy Sante, poems by Andrea Cohen and Timmy Straw, and much more.


    From the Rooftops of Tehran

    We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

    Living Through the Civil War

    George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.

    George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries edited by Geoff Wisner

    ‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’

    In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

    Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City, January 28–May 24, 2026

    The Aging Class

    Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

    Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel

    Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy by Teresa Ghilarducci, with a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.

    TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW

    TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features Claude Rawson on the British Imagination; ‘Trump’s Whisperers; Hardy’s breakthrough novel; Thomas Mann today…

    Cultural superpower?

    An argument for ‘British is best’

    The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.

    English virtue battles the pagan

    The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd

    The texture of etcetera

    What smartphones can’t record

    Freeing Thomas Mann

    Modern English translations that do justice to the work

    THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW

    THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘The Tipping Point’ – A watershed moment for big tech’…

    In a landmark case, a California jury last week found social media companies Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products. The ruling came the day after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms.

    Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, while governments around the world are starting to introduce measures to curb social media’s grip on children’s attention.

    Guardian technology editors Dan Milmo and Robert Booth assess whether what has been called a “big tobacco” moment for the industry will lead to significant change. And in our opinion section, Jonathan Freedland argues that the court verdicts must be just the start of a global fightback.

    The big story | A war of regression
    Weeks into a war that was going to take days and has cost billions, Donald Trump has bombed the US into a worse position with Iran, writes Patrick Wintour

    Science | ‘On the shoulders of giants’
    Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin have been unearthed and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany, Donna Ferguson reports

    Feature | Circuit training
    After touring 11 Chinese companies making humanoid robots, Chang Che asks: just how close are we to a robotic future?

    Opinion | Labour needs a thinker
    Ed Miliband’s stock is rising in a party in need of an old-style intellectual heavyweight, argues Gaby Hinsliff

    Culture | Gimme shelter
    Catherine Slessor visits Henry Moore’s former countryside home Hoglands, now home to studios and a vast sculpture garden, to learn about a new exhibition of the drawings he made as a war artist, capturing people as they took sanctuary from the blitz

    THE NEW YORK TIMES – THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2026

    Oil Prices Surge After Trump Threatens to Escalate Attacks

    In his address, President Trump also insisted that the military campaign was an overwhelming success but failed to offer a clear exit strategy.

    House Takes No Action on Bill to End D.H.S. Shutdown

    The Senate’s bipartisan bill to fund the agency is now formally back with the House, and the shutdown will continue at least through Monday, when the chamber will hold its next session.

    How Bondi’s Missteps on the Epstein Files Jeopardized Her Job

    Markets Recoil After Trump Threatens to Escalate Attacks Against Iran

    In his address, President Trump also repeated his threats to hit Iranian infrastructure, including electrical plants, unless a deal was struck.

    LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – APRIL 2026 PREVIEW

    Relative Failures: The Lives of Willie Wilde, Mabel Beardsley and Howard  Sturgis by Matthew Sturgis - review by Thomas W Hodgkinson
    LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Piers Brendon on Jan Morris * Richard Norton-Taylor on the Cambridge Five * Jane O’Grady on Wittgenstein * Wendy Holden on royal fashion * Martin Vander Weyer on Patrick Radden Keefe * Jeremy Treglown on Shakespeare in translation….

    Jan Morris: A Life By Sara Wheeler

    The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…

    Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By Antonia Senior

    It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …

    We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware By Anja Shortland

    Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..

    THE NEW YORK TIMES – WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2026

    Trump Berates Allies While Signaling He Will Wind Down the War

    President Trump said that he was considering leaving NATO over allies’ failure to support his Iran offensive, and suggested the closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be a problem for others to solve.

    Iran Maintains Nuclear Capacities Despite Trump’s Claim of U.S. Success

    Supreme Court to Hear Landmark Challenge to Birthright Citizenship

    President Trump said he planned to attend arguments in a case that tests whether he can limit the principle of automatic citizenship for nearly anyone born in the U.S.

    Bomb Shelters and a Drone-Proof Roof: Trump Seeks to Justify Ballroom as Security Measure

    President Trump spoke about his ballroom’s security as he argued against a judge’s orders to stop construction.

    Trump Seeks Federal Control of Mail Voting as He Promotes False Claims

    Election experts and Democratic officials called the order legally invalid, and Arizona and Oregon pledged to immediately challenge it in court.

    THE NEW YORK TIMES – TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2026

    After Month of War, Pete Hegseth Says Iran Retains Ability to Strike

    The defense secretary conceded that the conflict had not thwarted Iran’s missile capabilities. He said only President Trump could decide when to end the war.

    Trump Faces a Decision on Whether to Start a Ground War in Iran

    President Trump wants a negotiation, but the Iranians say they are refusing until a cease-fire is declared. The risks are escalating.

    Justices Reject Colorado Ban on ‘Conversion Therapy’ for L.G.B.T.Q. Minors

    Colorado and 20 other states restrict therapists from trying to change the gender identity or sexual orientation of clients under the age of 18.

    Average Gasoline Price Hits $4 in U.S., a ‘Headache’ for Drivers and Trump

    A month since the first U.S.-Israeli attacks and Iran’s response effectively shut off Persian Gulf oil, drivers are paying significantly more to fill up.

    News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious