Essays
Story Stream
Richard Weaver’s South December 06, 2024
Recently, over drinks, Wilfred McClay voiced disappointment about the absence of a distinctly Southern perspective in today’s conservative movement. “Where is the next Richard Weaver?” he asked me, the only Southerner at the table....
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves December 04, 2024
Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.“In Grim Times, Art Finds a Way” is a pious, flowery, and tiresome essay about how “the arts com...
When Stephen Sondheim Transformed Theater December 02, 2024
In the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of man...
Lauren Oyler's Favorite Collection of Essays March 20, 2024
'The Professor and Other Writings' by Terry Castle (2010)This collection of memoiristic critical essays is by far my most successful book recommendation. It includes a hilarious portrait of Susan Sontag — "Ours was on-again, off-again, semi-friendshi...
Lauren Oyler Cares a Lot, Actually March 18, 2024
“You’ll be happy to know I have beautiful makeup on,” Lauren Oyler told me, “when we’re talking on the phone like old people.”This is a fair lede because it nods to self-presentation and modes of communication, both of which come up in No Judgment (H...
The Arts Have Been Captured March 15, 2024
This week, a scandal rocked what’s left of the literary world. Guernica, a long-respected journal, bowed to pressure from its all-volunteer staff and on Monday retracted an essay it had published on March 4 (an archived version can be found here). “F...
Why People in Sweden Do Nature Right March 13, 2024
Back in the 1980s, my left-leaning dad used to joke at the dinner table that if a certain right-leaning President were re-elected, we would be moving to Sweden. In his mind, the country of his forebears was an egalitarian society of hale and hearty o...
Lauren Oyler’s Defense Mechanisms March 13, 2024
The American critic Lauren Oyler is fun – very fun – to read. Not just because she is funny, although she is, nor because she is mean, which she can be, though her reputation for viciousness is overstated: her fabled takedown of the New Yorker writer...
'Reacher' Loses Its Charm March 13, 2024
When the first season of Reacher came out in 2022, it truly felt like a breath of fresh air. At a time when the world was still recovering from the Covid lockdowns, superhero fatigue had set in, and woke storytelling and diversity quotas ruined most ...
My Anxiety March 11, 2024
In her short story “Five Signs of Disturbance,” Lydia Davis writes of a woman who is “frightened”:She cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking a...
The Battles Over Beginnings March 11, 2024
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Ga...
The Slick Lauren Oyler March 11, 2024
Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment is the kind of book that comes with certain quality assurances that read like wine-tasting notes. The essays contained therein will “bring to mind” the oaky aromas of Sontag, the citrusy tang of Kael, and the sharp chocolat...
On Lauren Oyler's 'No Judgement' March 07, 2024
Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished es...
An Interview with Emmeline Clein March 06, 2024
“Writing about my body is like breaking that mirror, cathartic and chaotic and unclean,” writes Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In her debut essay collection, Clein braids together scientific and academic writing, original r...
An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld March 06, 2024
I first met Becca Rothfeld when I pitched her back at the end of 2020. She had just joined The Point Magazine as a contributing editor, but I reached out because I loved her essay “Same As It Ever Was,” published in a magazine called Cabinet. The pie...
Life, as Pasolini Saw It March 06, 2024
In addition to nineteen novels, British writer Tim Parks is the author of several books of nonfiction and numerous critical essays. A resident of Italy since 1981, he has also translated classics of Italian literature, including works by Niccolò Mach...
And It Was Good March 06, 2024
Marilynne Robinson is a writer who requires little introduction. Her novels Housekeeping and Gilead, at this point certifiable classics, are staples in recommended reading lists. It’s relatively uncontroversial to say that Robinson is one of our grea...
Alaska March 06, 2024
As I made my way into Anchorage, a hunchbacked Indimo woman called out. Apparently, I was the spitting image of her son. She told me she had eleven children with a German. Every single one blonde-haired and blue-eyed, despite all evidence to the cont...
How Not to Get Lost in Translation March 06, 2024
In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, pol...
How the Story Turns Out March 06, 2024
In memory of Victor Navasky (1932–2023) Edwin Frank, born in Colorado in 1960, is the editor of New York Review Books and NYRB Classics. Since 1999, he and a handful of colleagues have published more than five hundred titles noteworthy for their exce...
It's Obviously the Phones March 06, 2024
A year ago, I published an opinion essay for the New York Times that changed the trajectory of my career. It was about how fewer Americans are having sex, across nearly every demographic. For any of the usual caveats — wealth, age, orientation —the d...
Leslie Jamison on Finding Peace March 05, 2024
When Leslie Jamison began publishing non-fiction books, she entertained a certain fantasy about what would happen when she allowed her work out into the world. “There was a part of me that imagined that I would, at some point, become a person who did...
“Original Intentions” Now March 05, 2024
Thirty years ago, the last of M. E. Bradford’s books was published—a collection of essays titled Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. Bradford had passed away several months earlier, but he left behin...
Living in the Confederacy of Dunces March 04, 2024
When A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole came out nearly 45 years ago, it must have been one of the strangest books ever written. Its protagonist, Ignatius C. Reilly, is truly unique: a highly educated philosophical social critic who happen...
