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Rachel Aviv’s new book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, published this week by Knopf, takes its title... Read More

In The Flame, Leonard Cohen’s posthumously published collection of late lyrics and poems, I came across this lone stanza: and Nico was... Read More

In November 1964, the U.S. Government Printing Office released what might be the most specialized reference set ever published. At 18,000... Read More

Upon turning forty, I gained a new appreciation for the classic mid-century affair novel (e.g. John Williams’s Stoner). You know the... Read More

Coffee rules the world, it built modern society and allowed us to push the boundaries of what’s possible. In the northeast we have no... Read More

Last year in December, Compact published Jacob Savage’s piece “The Lost Generation.” The polemic went viral. He was... Read More

Where am I from? I’m from New York City. But I never felt more like a New Yorker than during the year I moved to New Orleans. Every... Read More

Seventy-five years ago this week, a book was released which, according to one exasperated parent, included 237 uses of the word... Read More

When I first moved to Brazil, I was overwhelmed by its vastness and diversity. Brazil is physically larger than the 48 states, and includes... Read More

There are people who go for runs, and then there are runners. Going for a run requires a pair of running shoes. Being a runner is a... Read More

Should this review be scrawled in invisible ink? Should it self-destruct? Will you self-destruct when your “secret life” is... Read More

We first meet Lucy, the bright (but sometimes misguided) narrator of Emeline Atwood’s debut novel A Real Animal, dangerously high up in... Read More

The sleepy city of Exeter has become the locus of the country’s fraught battle over universities. Three weeks ago ago, its local... Read More

In his influential 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, sociologist Christopher Lasch argued that while human beings have always feared... Read More

Like a lot of people, I was dubious about Edward Snowden from the first time I heard his name. I make the usual — and usually correct... Read More

For years I dreamed of silence. Between a home with three young children and a pediatric clinic crowded with restless kids, the noise at... Read More

As announced by his family in a social media post this morning, acting legend Sam Neill has died at the age of 78. Of the heightening pile of... Read More

Blue diamonds. Vermeer paintings. Gold bars. These are the treasures of great heist novels. But Nathaniel Rich’s new thriller... Read More

Citizenship requires an understanding of how government works, particularly the poorly covered and oft-maligned judicial branch. Few people... Read More

I told a friend once that my two favorite cities in the world are London and New Orleans, but I couldn’t see what they have in common.... Read More

Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror. Some... Read More

On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis. Minutes earlier, he had... Read More

A hint of bluster met me as I biked to catch the Northeast Regional from DC to New York. It was still hard to believe that I was going: I had... Read More

WHEN SAUL BELLOW’S RAVELSTEIN came out in 2000, some took it personally. The character Abe Ravelstein, a gay man who dies of... Read More

Less than a week after David Hockney dies, I am watching him answer questions on the BBC in 1977 on YouTube. My kitten Pliny is sitting next... Read More

Although our cultural discourse has for years been preoccupied with the idea of intelligence—claims that younger generations... Read More

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote, “Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical,... Read More

THE BRITISH AUTHOR J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) was one of the most brilliant and incisive, but also one of the most perplexing,... Read More

We called it, simply, The Service. The first time I entered its stash house—a $14,000-a-month penthouse near the Williamsburg... Read More

Before the subway had even left the station near my apartment—a short walk from where Jay-Z grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant—the car... Read More

I began writing on Substack in March 2022, during what most veterans now see as a halcyon time. There was a lot of hype then about how you... Read More

In 2012, as a 33-year-old staff writer at The American Prospect in D.C., I had the opportunity to travel around the country, looking for... Read More

I recently went to a group exhibition put on by New York City’s Arthouse 2B, a Catholic artist collective. Now I need to admit that, as... Read More

As many DEI initiatives scale back and some public perception changes, many believe the era of "wokeness" has come to an end. Has it? A new... Read More

It would be tragic if China defeated America in the race for AI dominance, but America may suffer a more severe loss—losing its... Read More

On March 13, 1995, at a celebration of the centenary of cinema in Paris, Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg announced... Read More