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In 1998, Patrick O’Brian had reached the height of literary eminence. During the preceding decade, he had been elected a fellow of the... Read More

We want to have an honest conversation about how publishers are feeling about and using AI. These tools are in their infancy, and while the... Read More

There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement... Read More

Let’s get this out of the way: the last Marvel movie I was into—like, really dug—was Sam Raimi’s Dr. Strange in the... Read More

We are three weeks past Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s “royal wedding.” The venue of choice was Madison Square Garden, the... Read More

Seeing is believing. An Exquisite Eye, the new summer exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., premieres the majestic... Read More

In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football... Read More

Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed.... Read More

Mankind now makes most things better. There are some possible exceptions: much music and art, perhaps, and maybe also functioning liberal... Read More

The Dutch long had great confidence in their state, whose army of social and physical engineers could be trusted to shield citizens from... Read More

My Sylvia Plath fandom dates back to the early nineties, when I was in my late teens and randomly pulled The Bell Jar off the shelf at my... Read More

There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends,... Read More

For centuries, we have been encouraged to meditate on death. From Stoic practice to Victorian jewelry to contemporary tattoos, the idea of... Read More

Wilfred M. McClay has written a characteristically thoughtful and eloquent reflection on the daunting moral and cultural ills that plague... Read More

As far as I was concerned, it had never not been there – that gaping black hole in the side of the gorge. I was a... Read More

Where to begin? At the end. At the close of The Golden Age, the last novel in his long series of American history, Gore Vidal performs a... Read More

If you’re in academia, you’ve probably already heard about the report. In April 2026, a panel of academics from different fields,... Read More

“Get a room. There’s kids around.” The camera advances toward a finely dressed couple kissing in Central Park. They smile,... Read More

People like working from home. It lets us avoid commutes. It lets us live closer to family. It seems especially good for the parents of young... Read More

I held off on seeing The Odyssey. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I was flinching from the thunder of publicity — crammed with promises... Read More

About three years ago I pulled up stakes and moved to the far side of the world. My reasons for this were so personal and idiosyncratic that... Read More

Among the swelling collection of books confronting our imperiled planet, Claire Vaye Watkins’s fiction remains defiantly alive. Her... Read More

UNLESS YOU’VE EXPERIENCED one, it can be hard to describe what it feels like to be at a mass protest. It becomes even harder to convey... Read More

The summer’s most talked-about novel, the debut Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, has a tantalizing premise: a tradwife influencer wakes... Read More

The incident involves an old pink and silver ribbon that has gone missing. In The Confessions, this is Rousseau’s central admission of... Read More

“Loved the book, didn’t care for the movie.” A truly good book is not easily compressed into a two- or three-hour format.... Read More

César Aira has published over a hundred works, and this number alone tells you something about his method. He calls it la fuga hacia... Read More

Summer breeze makes me feel fine . . . Anytime I hear that 1972 song by Seals and Crofts, I’m transported. Not to the 1970s—I... Read More

The 2021 blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home ushered in a pile-up of villains from the superhero’s past, multiplying the title... Read More