On the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Ben Rhodes, Suzy Hansen, and Pankaj Mishra discussed the devastating violence of the year since, and America’s role in the conflagration. Watch the first conversation of The New York Review of Books’s series on the 2024 Elections below.   You may view all available recordings in […]

In Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a pub named Grendel’s Den, after the monster in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. It prominently displays a comedic circular crest claiming that it was established in 1271. Long known for its microbrewed beer and convivial atmosphere, the modest bar and grill in fact opened seven […]

In 2016, during the surreal presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in a swing district in the Hudson Valley. The incumbent was a retiring Republican, but Barack Obama had won in the area by several points in 2012. A Democratic pickup seemed within reach.  In the […]

Andrei Ujică’s new film takes its title from a Beatles song that Paul McCartney once said was meant to evoke “a future nostalgia.” Similarly paradoxical, TWST/Things We Said Today is a concert documentary that barely shows the concert it commemorates. It treats the Beatles’ August 1965 appearance at Shea Stadium in Queens—the biggest live concert […]

“There is possibly too much emphasis on the ‘wackiness’ of medieval life and thought. How easily we chortle at the goings-on in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, as if the pages were meant only to be silly.”

There are at least two ways for mutual deterrence between states—also known as mutually assured destruction—to come to an end. As the Cold War taught us, one side in the conflict can simply collapse. But deterrence can also break down when one party decides to upend the equilibrium. For more than nine months after Hamas’s […]