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On a recent visit to Atlanta, my sister and I took a walk along the city’s Beltline, the project that represents the crowning... Read More

This week I’m not venturing far, so I’ll write about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, a little... Read More

David Foster Wallace’s famously long novel, Infinite Jest, turned 30 this month, and an old specter came back with the... Read More

When Michel Houellebecq turns seventy this Thursday 26th February, the occasion marks far more than a biographical milestone, as it also... Read More

I’m going to start this essay on sportswriting in what might seem an unusual place, not in a stadium, ballpark, or arena, but at the... Read More

I spent the summer of 2004 working at a food establishment that sold “subs, wings ‘n’ things.” My employment was a... Read More

Parents are often relieved when their child who has trouble reading is finally diagnosed with dyslexia. At last, the problem has a name and... Read More

The modern world can seem disenchanted and meaningless. Tempting, then, to find mystery in the fact we experience anything at all. A new book... Read More

The future was supposed to have arrived this year in a cluster of counties just east of Atlanta in the form of a state-of-the-art factory... Read More

In February 2019, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri promised that the platform would ban any graphic content depicting self-harm. “It... Read More

There are so many digital platforms through which we interact these days that it’s hardly surprising that we’ve nearly forgotten... Read More

Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, is usually remembered for... Read More

“I’m glad you didn’t forget about our date,” says John with a slight smile, then pauses, his eyes fixed unblinkingly... Read More

(I leave in eight days for Asia, where I will be for six weeks—Seoul, Qingdao, Taipei, Taitung, Okinawa, and hopefully Yangon if I can... Read More

I’m on the Northeast Regional and as I cross Hell Gate Bridge and look to the left at Manhattan in all its grandeur, I am overcome with... Read More

Before the lights dimmed for the film, “The Lady from Shanghai” at Vidiots, Aidan Gannon and Jason Fine were busy perusing... Read More

Aaron Timms, a writer and critic, was standing in a corner at TJ Byrnes, an Irish pub in New York’s financial district, explaining the... Read More

This post at The Athletic is making the rounds, drawing criticism on the right. I think it’s easy to mock this column, but... Read More

At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend:... Read More

It is a major part of Mario Puzo’s story about himself, the myth of The Godfather if you will, that before writing this piece... Read More

If anti-Communism was the ruling passion of the neoconservatives in foreign affairs, opposition to the counterculture of the 1960s was their... Read More

1. Michael Silverblatt, who died on Valentine’s Day, was the greatest literary influence of my life. He hosted Bookworm, a radio... Read More

You don’t need a crystal ball to divine Gavin Newsom’s ambitions. “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” he told CBS... Read More

For a brief moment on Sunday, America was united. After the final Olympic hockey showdown between the United States and Canada went into... Read More

If you’re like me, you spent all Sunday evening watching clips of the United States men’s hockey team clinching, then receiving,... Read More

Last fall, Harper’s magazine published a much-discussed dispatch about an online cult of porn obsessives. These... Read More

In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was... Read More

Let me tell you the tale of the ungrateful creatures who crawled out of Eden. They murdered their own mothers. They slaughtered their own... Read More

I’m going to start with a spoiler, because we’re talking about a nearly 200-year-old novel with more than a dozen film... Read More

Last summer, I visited family in Seattle. Fresh off antidepressants, a few glasses of rosé, and a day at the Chihuly Museum pushing my... Read More