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.

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features geopolitical analyses of the Iran conflict by Fintan O’Toole and Pankaj Mishra, alongside cultural explorations of literature and art. Key contributions include discussions on the economic dualities of Shenzhen, China, and critiques of historical narratives regarding the Allied firebombing of Japan. 

A Bitter Education

In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.

Shenzhen Express

In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou

Who Built France?

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire by Mélanie Lamotte

A Man-Made Disaster

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell