Writing
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A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? March 05, 2025
Tom Wolfe’s books are being reissued, in homage, by Picador. But he would never put the news so blandly.WHOOSH! Off the press they come, slicked bright and hot, ready to be grabbed by woke undergrads in Lululemon who’ve never heard of him but have a ...
Power Lifting Made Me a Better Writer March 05, 2025
One of the only ways I can find calm is by risking injury. I began learning this when, years ago, I tried rock-climbing. Bouldering, that is, which doesn’t involve rope and harnesses. Scaling 17-foot walls with no backup rope, balancing all my weight...
On Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists” March 05, 2025
Early on in Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, the narrator, Asya, remembers a college professor’s advice to consider the mundane routines of daily life as subject for anthropological study. A young documentarian expat living in an unn...
Cinematheque: Seeing and Being March 04, 2025
Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations...
The Winter of Civilization March 03, 2025
I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout S...
On Drake March 03, 2025
For perspective, it’s Nina Simone’s birthday and the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X as I write this—one of those travesties of serendipity when birth dates and death dates align to create an eternal loop or union between two souls and ...
The Importance of Writing in a Free Society February 25, 2025
Plato’s Republic, written in the 4th century BC, inaugurated political philosophy and paved the way for the creation of both the American government and Western democracy as a whole. However, while the Founding Fathers borrowed many of Plato’s ideas ...
The Curious Case of Curzio Malaparte February 24, 2025
Does a glorious prose style reflect a glorious quality in a writer’s soul? Two hundred years ago, the Romantics used to have an answer to that question, which consisted of saying that beautiful writing can flow only from someone who vibrates to the p...
Language as Rebellion February 21, 2025
To read a Yuri Herrera novel is to read a guide on how to set fire to the world and still come out alive. His newest novel, Season of the Swamp, moves like a strange fever—golden stopwatches keep hidden time for fugitives in attics, a piano weeps ins...
The Painter of Thought February 20, 2025
Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his...
The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah February 20, 2025
In attempting to assess the career of the American director Sam Peckinpah, the centenary of whose birth falls on February 21, 2025, the film critic Rick Moody, writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, got no further than the opening sequence of Pecki...
Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing February 20, 2025
Claire Messud’s novel This Strange Eventful History is being called her most autobiographical, and I’m sure it will resonate beautifully with many readers. It is a rich and detailed work, Bergmanesque in its stretching across time and exposing of eve...
On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu” February 19, 2025
During Germany’s Vormärz period, a resurgence of interest in the occult and supernatural merged with medical practice. One of the most famous case studies was of Friedrike Hauffe, known as the Seeress of Prevorst, who suffered from an array of sympto...
The Medical Outlook February 19, 2025
Although I have been writing for publication for more than forty years, it always pleases (and surprises) me when someone writes to tell me that he or she has read something that I have written. It is reassuring to know that I have not been merely se...
It's Always High School February 18, 2025
The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, fo...
Why I Hate Substack February 17, 2025
Earlier this week, the online magazine Current announced it will be shuttering in April. A small magazine run by a dedicated team of editors volunteering their time, Current was a lovely diamond in a whole mess of internet rough. I was only able to p...
The Moral Myopia of Ta Nehisi Coates February 17, 2025
Ta Nehisi Coates is both a darling of the country’s Black intelligentsia (John McWhorter being a notable exception) and America’s cultural elite of all races. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, for instance, has lavished praise on Coates’s writing calli...
A Conversation with Novelist Andrew Lipstein February 14, 2025
Something I’m looking forward to doing more of in 2025 is showing love to books and authors making their way out into the world this year. One way I plan on doing that is to run some Q&A’s with authors whose work I appreciate.Andrew Lipstein is one o...
How Blurbs Became a Flashpoint February 14, 2025
For the past few months, publishing has been consumed with debate over that ever-divisive topic: blurbs, those breathless little testimonials from other writers that appear on the back of a book’s cover, which hardly anyone likes to write and even fe...
Decisions, Decisions February 13, 2025
Recently, at a wedding, my boyfriend and I were asked rather abrasively about the prospect of children. The bride, a mother of two, first posed the question to me. I told her I did not want children. She asked me why. I said, because I do not want ch...
Tradition and the Individual Talent February 13, 2025
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “tradi...
Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language February 11, 2025
While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattra...
A New, Unbearably Honest Kind of Writing February 10, 2025
Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. We can’t know what In Search of Lost Ti...
Writer's Diary February 10, 2025
It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like memorizing all the moves of chess grandmasters, like memorizing Fischer versus B...
