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Martin Filler
Supersize That?

New supertall skyscrapers planned for Manhattan will reduce the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the scale of souvenir tchotchkes. With the current glut of unoccupied office space, they may be the last of their kind.

Quinn Slobodian
Safe Havens

The UK’s “second empire” of tax-free jurisdictions around the world persists despite the overwhelming evidence that it enables corruption, drains public budgets, and exacerbates inequality.

Christopher Byrd
‘A Long-Tongue Saga’

Over the course of more than a thousand pages, Leon Forrest’s novel Divine Days, reissued after three decades, elicits from the reader every emotion from awe to exasperation.

Gaby Del Valle
Death and Detention on the Texas Border

As Joe Biden and Greg Abbott escalate their standoff over border enforcement, migrants find themselves caught in the middle.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
More Real Than Life

In Jane Schoenbrun’s films, personal metamorphosis happens on both sides of the screen.

Translation Without Angels

a poem by 
Walt Hunter

I was given an idea of the good
and I was taken quickly from
the same idea, though at first it was as simple
as a tree I saw the ground, conserving summer,
populate with geese, some deer, the pachysandra.
The good was what I had without myself…

Free from the Archives

On June 3, 2020, a week after protests against police violence broke out across the US after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, Michael Shank wrote for the NYR Online an examination of how municipal law enforcement departments came to be in possession of “everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more.”

Michael Shank
How Police Became Paramilitaries

“Law enforcement has, in fact, been training for a moment like this—specifically by learning techniques and tactics from Israeli military services. As Amnesty International has documented, law enforcement officials from as far afield as Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the D.C. Capitol have traveled to Israel for such training. These programs, according to research backed by Jewish Voice for Peace, focus on exchanging methods of ‘mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent.’”

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