A Needle in a Substack

Criticism in your inbox

Dec 12, 2025

“‘The Web,’” James Fallows explained to readers of The New York Review of Books in February 1996, “is shorthand for the World Wide Web, a system allowing users to move from one Internet site to another.” But, he went on, “many people and companies experiment with the Web more because it’s a novelty than for immediate practical benefit…. Web-based shopping experiments have generally proven disastrous, since people find it easier and more satisfying to call a 1-800 number if they don’t want to go to the store.”

Nearly thirty years later it is a novelty to be off the Web, or even to dial a number into a telephone. And the Review, which first appeared on newsstands to much fanfare in the winter of 1963, now publishes online more frequently than it does in print: dispatches, commentary, conversations, investigative reporting, and criticism, alongside the rigorous reviews and essays that are our trademark.

We are proud to be an independent magazine committed always to the conviction that the world can be understood through what is written about it. We have long endeavored to publish the most interesting, lively, and erudite writers of the day, from Susan Sontag and James Baldwin and Joan Didion to Zadie Smith and Timothy Garton Ash and Lucy Sante, Aryeh Neier, Daniel Mendelsohn, Merve Emre, Osita Nwanevu, Susan Tallman, Hilton Als, Ben Tarnoff, Sally Rooney, and many more.

Here on our Substack, we will post essays from the magazine; interviews with our writers; free articles from our archives; a behind-the-scenes look at the art and illustrations in the magazine; dispatches from our editors; conversations with our Advising Editor, Fintan O’Toole; and a range of other ephemera, essays, investigations, and criticism.

We look forward to joining the writers and publishers on Substack who are dedicated to thoughtful, human writing.

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