Category Archives: Reviews

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

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 YORKER MAGAZINE – APRIL 6, 2026 PREVIEW

The cover of the April 6 2026 issue of The New Yorker in which construction workers toil under a city street as people...

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Parallel Lives” – Around and under construction.

What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?

The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects: DOGE and the mind-bending expansion of ICE. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Trump’s War Hits the Chaiwalas

Restrictions and attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have made fuel prices rocket. Just ask the roadside tea venders in New Delhi. By Nathan Heller

He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb

A former C.I.A. officer says that he recruited scientists as part of the United States’ effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. By David D. Kirkpatrick

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE- MARCH 29, 2026

Current cover

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 3.29.26 Issue features Blair Braverman on leaving her life of dog sled racing; Maggie Shipstead on bringing her mother’s ashes to Antarctica; Kevin Fedarko on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim; Taffy Brodesser-Akner on teaching her son to take a vacation; and more.

The Iran War is Revealing the Messy Middle of Our Renewable Energy Transition

When the world map of literal power changes, the political hierarchy shifts, too.

Every Pentagon Has Its Buzzword. For Hegseth’s, It’s ‘Lethality.’

It’s blunt instead of vague, brash instead of evasive, bold instead of cautious. And yet the word obfuscates as much as old defense jargon. By Nitsuh Abebe

‘A Mass Disaster Nonstop’: Inside the Turmoil at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s C.D.C.

Forty-three current and former C.D.C. employees on the changes they say are replacing science with ideology — and making Americans more vulnerable. By Jeneen Interlandi

The Epstein Scandal Has Reached the Far-Right Meme Stage

Once the Epstein files transitioned from an abstract concept to a real-world event, it became more difficult for fringe conspiracy theorists to control the story.

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – MARCH 27, 2026 PREVIEW

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘Strategy Backfires’ – Can Trump undo the mess he’s made in the Gulf?

Brinkmanship, the ability to take countries to the edge of conflict, was a staple of cold war diplomacy. The remnants of that finely balanced standoff, bound by a rules-based order and spheres of influence, has given way to a world in freefall; to an ever-widening war in the Gulf where the aims are as unclear as the endpoint.

It is approaching a month since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, arguing they were acting to remove the country’s nuclear threat, destroy its ballistic missile capability and free the populace of a tyrannical theocratic regime. Yet it seems it is these civilians and neighbouring Gulf countries who are bearing the brunt of the campaign while the Iranian regime’s willingness to escalate the war seems undimmed.

Spotlight | The ‘anyone but’ election
Pippa Crerar looks ahead to local elections in the UK, where voters seem more concerned with who they want to keep out of political office than who they vote in

Science | Not-so silent nights
Can a “vacuum cleaner turned the other way” become a popular solution to snoring disorders? Natasha May explores the rise of Cpap machines

Feature | Gamifying government
Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture, Elon Musk’s Doge team set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people, write Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian

Opinion | Collateral damage
Attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops in the UK, Europe and the US don’t hurt Benjamin Netanyahu, says Jonathan Freedland, they just hurt ordinary Jews

Culture | Rock return
“Validation was an insatiable monster”: Dave Grohl talks to Ben Beaumont-Thomas about Foo Fighters, life after his infidelity and grief for bandmate Taylor Hawkins

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – MARCH 28, 2026 PREVIEW

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue features Advantage Iran

Advantage Iran

A month of bombing has achieved nothing. Will Donald Trump escalate, or talk?

Europe should think twice before weakening its merger rules

A strict competition policy is not the barrier to bigger firms

The case against energy bail-outs

As war rages in Iran, governments must not repeat the mistakes of 2022

Mexico must unleash its private sector

Claudia Sheinbaum’s biggest problem is weak investment and growth, not Donald Trump

England has shown the world how to replace farm subsidies

A rare Brexit dividend

NATURE MAGAZINE —–MARCH 26, 2026 PREVIEW

Volume 651 Issue 8107

NATURE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Old Friends’ – Ancient genomes reveal early relationship between dogs and humans…

A single course of antibiotics can cause lingering changes in gut microbes

Microbial diversity loss seen after a course of some commonly prescribed antibiotics can persist for years.

Mighty mini-magnet is low in cost and light on energy use

A compact device can produce a magnetic field that is more than 800,000 times stronger than Earth’s.

Chemical pollutants are rife across the world’s oceans

Compounds that are used to make plastics and personal-care products were found in all types of marine environment, a meta-analysis shows.

Strength persists after a mid-life course of obesity drugs

Muscle mass increased or remained stable relative to body weight in middle-aged mice and humans on GLP-1 drugs.

The Spectator World Magazine – March 30, 2026

THE SPECTATOR WORLD: The latest issue features ‘The End Of Trumpism’….

The end of Trumpism

Having Donald Trump as President probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China mercifully let the matter drop. Then came the even more reckless decision to join Israel in bombing Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation; Iran agreed to halt hostilities just as it was figuring out how to penetrate Israeli airspace with its missiles. By Christopher Caldwell

Why Iran will hasten MAGA’s demise

Readers may disagree with the cover line of this issue. Pronouncing “the end of Trumpism” feels somewhat similar to declaring “the end of history” – a provocative, albeit less grandiose, statement that risks being mocked in the near future. We should start by saying we hope that we are wrong. Trumpism, as this magazine understands….

How Trump and FIFA’s Gianni Infantino teamed up to rebrand peace

When you attend the court of King Donald, it’s important to genuflect. Unfamiliar foreigners in need of pointers can look to the man who is currently the most assiduous non-American flatterer: FIFA president Gianni Infantino. By Matt McDonald

El Mencho’s last stand

Jalisco, Mexico No one seems to know exactly how El Mencho was killed. We are told the feared leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was captured by the Mexican army during a firefight in late February, and subsequently died of his wounds. Beyond that, there is very little information. Why are the Mexican and