Life
Story Stream
My Brain Finally Broke May 06, 2025
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegib...
The Trauma Plot Has Lost Faith in Itself May 06, 2025
One of the hot books of 2014 was a novel by Jenny Offill called Dept of Speculation. This was one of those wikipedia realism books that interspersed little factoids (in Offill’s book the facts were usually about animals or science) with short, descri...
The Future of the American Novel May 06, 2025
There were surely critics, in the middle of the 1960s, who had no concept of what was to come. The counterculture could feel faddish; so could New Hollywood, sexually explicit novels, baroque pop, and acid rock. If history is a procession from A to B...
Glass Century by Ross Barkan May 05, 2025
It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife ...
The Strategic Ascent of Kai Trump May 05, 2025
In the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and the manicured greens of exclusive golf courses, a new Trump is quietly ascending. At just 17, Kai Trump – the eldest of the President’s grandchildren – is executing what appears to be a carefully orchestrate...
Dissident Blessings in the Negative World May 05, 2025
Aaron Renn's Life in the Negative World offers a new vocabulary and framework for understanding Christianity’s apparent collapse in American public life....
The Social Stock Market May 05, 2025
There’s a paragraph in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, his polarizing if riveting account of a life in letters in midcentury America, that’s always stuck with me. “Every morning,” he wrote in the 1967 memoir, “a stock-market report on reputation comes ...
Do We Really Need More Male Novelists? May 05, 2025
‘Where have all the literary blokes gone?” is a question that has popped up in bookish discussions and op-eds from time to time in recent years. Who are this generation’s hotshot young male novelists, the modern incarnations of the Amis/McEwan/Rushdi...
The Word Is Not Enough May 05, 2025
In the beginning, and recurrently, the Earth is a formless void. God declares, “Let there be light,” and the world starts to articulate. Light is separated from darkness, sky from water, land from sea. Plants appear on the land, birds in the sky, and...
The Bloody Blues of 'Sinners' May 02, 2025
Ryan Coogler slips a deliberate anachronism into an early scene of his new movie, Sinners. In 1932, on a back road near Clarksdale, Mississippi, two twins disagree over when they should open up their new juke joint. They’ve just bought a property fro...
The Great American Novel Will Not Be Substacked May 02, 2025
There’s been a recent trend of writers, mostly men, asserting the need for a new kind of fiction writing that will supposedly fix the publishing industry and draw in new readers. I am sympathetic to this movement, which I have been informally labelin...
