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The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, by Don Miguel Ruiz, is a self-help book that was a true publishing phenomenon:... Read More

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.  A 404 Media... Read More

The British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner used to tell an anecdote about visiting Poland during the last years of communist rule. When he... Read More

Mario Vargas Llosa was 10 years old when his mother revealed to him, on a walk along the riverside promenade of the Peruvian city of Piura in... Read More

A pathography is a particular kind of biography. Composed by an angry scold, it’s apt to be short on facts and detail. In place of... Read More

I’ve been working recently on a long essay about, basically, why all the things I like in the world seem to be losing out and the... Read More

It’ll probably never happen to you. Maybe I should pretend it will: try to grab you by the self-interest and say, look, consider that... Read More

In the 2013 mumblecore romcom Drinking Buddies, Chris (Ron Livingston) gives his girlfriend, Kate (Olivia Wilde), a gift. It is a copy of... Read More

I like Cassandras and angry outsider losers. I feel I can trust them. I know they are not working one over on me; or if they are maneuvering,... Read More

Stories are predicated on journeys of all kinds, and sometimes, destinations. For the displaced, however, a homecoming is a perpetual state... Read More

Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most... Read More

To great public shame and personal consternation, I’ve decided to punt The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy back to the TBR for a... Read More

America’s 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, was famously so taciturn that he earned the nickname “Silent Cal.” Yet this... Read More

“This is the book that broke the spell of French progressivism,” says Nathan Pinkoski in his foreword to Éric... Read More

An hour into Whit Stillman’s 1994 film, Barcelona, the protagonist, Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols), considers using “maneuver... Read More

Chang-rae Lee is one of our great writers of dislocation and doubt. In novels like Native Speaker and The Surrendered, Lee deployed fairly... Read More

The impulse to separate the literary critic from the mere consumer, the serious reader from the lightweight, is abiding. Several means of... Read More

In 12th-century Italy, physicians at a medical school in Salerno described the symptoms of plethora, or an excess of blood in the balance of... Read More

For most academics, professional success extends to citations and conference invites. Eric Hobsbawm was different. His towering Ages series... Read More

My first encounter with a literary agent was in 1970, the year I worked in publishing for Quadrangle-New York Times Books. The agent was a... Read More

For some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends.... Read More

With the rise of AI, most people feel compelled to ask: How should I be using it? But this question assumes too much. We should instead be... Read More

There's something primordially satisfying about watching a big-screen dinosaur get the what-for from the business end of a just-loaded... Read More

In early September 2019, the former Prime Minister of Belgium tweeted: “This week, the most important event was … the discovery... Read More

Naomi Kanakia was exposed to the Great Books as a teenager. She went to Catholic schools and even learned Latin. She recalls being... Read More

I don’t know exactly the first time I heard a baseball game on the radio. It was probably some time in elementary school. My family did... Read More

New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv has built a reputation writing probing profiles of overworked nurses, wronged women, and toxic... Read More

I translated this book, I love it a great deal, and it has a bit of a story behind it. It got a lot of maybes and almosts over the course of... Read More

In 1992, David Foster Wallace published “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, marking an early foray... Read More

Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur tells a story from the perspective of an adult looking back at a decades-old pivotal event she sometimes... Read More

Here’s an interesting question: how many white American men born after 1984 have had a literary piece published in The New Yorker? The... Read More

“Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red... Read More

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democrats’ U.S. Senate primary in Michigan last Tuesday was the latest sign of an emerging... Read More

On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word marketing pitch tarted up as a manifesto. “We propose a philosophy based on... Read More

Dory Funk Jr.—pro wrestling champion, trainer, and international icon—died earlier this month at 85. Although less famous here,... Read More