The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a semi-monthly magazine[2] with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs.

In 1959 Hardwick had published an essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing", in Harper's,[6] where Silvers was then an editor, in a special issue that he edited called "Writing in America".

"[9] The group was inspired to found a new magazine to publish thoughtful, probing, lively reviews[10] featuring what Hardwick called "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting".

"[16] Salon later commented that the list of contributors in the first issue "represented a 'shock and awe' demonstration of the intellectual firepower available for deployment in mid-century America, and, almost equally impressive, of the art of editorial networking and jawboning.

"[17] The Review "announced the arrival of a particular sensibility ... the engaged, literary, post-war progressive intellectual, who was concerned with civil rights and feminism as well as fiction and poetry and theater.

[18] The first issue projected "a confidence in the unquestioned rightness of the liberal consensus, in the centrality of literature and its power to convey meaning, in the solubility of our problems through the application of intelligence and good will, and in the coherence and clear hierarchy of the intellectual world".

Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud.

[22] But, Silvers noted, it is a mystery whether "reviews have a calculable political and social impact" or will even gain attention: "You mustn't think too much about influence – if you find something interesting yourself, that should be enough.

"[7] Early issues included articles by such writers as Hardwick, Lowell, Jason Epstein, Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Truman Capote, Paul Goodman,[23] Lillian Hellman, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Lewis, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahv, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson.

The Review pointedly published interviews with European political dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Václav Havel.

[39][40] Other events included a program at the New York Public Library in April, called "Literary Journalism: A Discussion", focusing on the editorial process at the Review[41][42] and a reception in November at the Frick Collection.

Silvers said: An independent, critical voice on politics, literature, science, and the arts seems as much needed today as it was when Barbara Epstein and I put out the first edition of the New York Review fifty years ago – perhaps even more so.

Electronic forms of communication grow rapidly in every field of life but many of their effects on culture remain obscure and in need of new kinds of critical scrutiny.

[47] He left the position in September 2018 after backlash over publishing an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, who has been accused by 20 women of sexual assault, and defending the publication in an interview with Slate magazine.

As Philip Nobile observed in ... 1974 ... the Review returned to its roots and became "a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion."

In stark contrast to The New Yorker ... or The New York Times Magazine ..., the Review opposed the Iraq War in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified.

[56]Over the years, the Review has featured reviews and articles by such international writers and intellectuals, in addition to those already noted, as Timothy Garton Ash, Margaret Atwood, Russell Baker, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Bloom, Joseph Brodsky, Ian Buruma, Noam Chomsky, J. M. Coetzee, Frederick Crews, Ronald Dworkin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Masha Gessen, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Jay Gould, Christopher Hitchens, Tim Judah, Murray Kempton, Paul Krugman, Richard Lewontin, Perry Link, Alison Lurie, Peter Medawar, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bill Moyers, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Nader, V. S. Naipaul, Peter G. Peterson, Samantha Power, Nathaniel Rich, Felix Rohatyn, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Searle, Zadie Smith, Timothy Snyder, George Soros, I. F. Stone, Desmond Tutu, John Updike, Derek Walcott, Steven Weinberg, Garry Wills and Tony Judt.

[58] In the 1980s, a British commentator noted: "In the 1960s [the Review] opposed American involvement in Vietnam; more recently it has taken a line mildly Keynesian in economics, pro-Israeli but Anti-Zionist, sceptical of Reagan's Latin-American policy".

[61] John Updike, whom Levine drew many times, wrote: "Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease.

"[64] The New York Times described Levine's illustrations as "macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates" that were "replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o'clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles ... to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg".

[65] The Washington Post described the "lively literary disputes" conducted in the 'letters to the editor' column of the Review as "the closest thing the intellectual world has to bare-knuckle boxing".

[36][66] One lonely heart, author Jane Juska, documented the 63 replies to her personal ad in the Review with a 2003 memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman, that was adapted as a play.

[67][68] In The Washington Post, Matt Schudel called the personal ads "sometimes laughably highbrow" and recalled that they were "spoofed by Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall".

[69] Several of the magazine's editorial assistants have become prominent in journalism, academia and literature, including Jean Strouse, Deborah Eisenberg, Mark Danner and A. O.

[72] The Washington Post calls the Review "a journal of ideas that has helped define intellectual discourse in the English-speaking world for the past four decades.

... By publishing long, thoughtful articles on politics, books and culture, [the editors] defied trends toward glibness, superficiality and the cult of celebrity".

It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays ... and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour – even the letters to the editor are footnoted – with great clarity of language.

[83] In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "the pages of the 45th anniversary issue, in fact, reveal the actuality of [the paper's] willfully panoramic view".

"[57] In 2014, Rachel Cooke wrote in The Observer of a recent issue: "The offer of such an embarrassment of riches is wholly amazing in a world where print journalism increasingly operates in the most threadbare of circumstances".

"[84] Lopate adds that the Review "was and is the standard bearer for American intellectual life: a unique repository of thoughtful discourse, unrepentantly highbrow, in a culture increasingly given to dumbing down.