by The Editors
January 27, 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that…
by Blake Nelson
December 7, 2025
When storms approach, the deer / come down / from the mountains. They stand in / people’s yards, they walk / through the Chevron station. / The deer look childlike and / amateurish, ears twitching / in the public park. / Gangs of them, five or six or seven, / they sniff the air, how…
December 5, 2025
I spent the entire day at the Met and it wasn’t enough. Unsurprisingly, because of the sheer volume of pieces, and beyond that — endlessly more frustrating — because no later than lunch smoke was coming out of my ears. I was exhausted. I had tried to prioritize, to start easy on the second floor,…
December 3, 2025
About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind…
by Olivia Cheng
November 29, 2025
She had been telling me a story for most of our date, a story that seemed half-truth, half-lie. I wasn’t sure how we got on the topic, but I didn’t dislike listening to her speak. The woman was a lover, but she was not a friend. She existed in that hazy space between passion and…
by Annie Levin
November 28, 2025
In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the…
November 25, 2025
Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.“ I use it to work,” as he told Alex…
November 23, 2025
As Nassim Taleb had it, waiting for the ax, / a man stretching past the farthest tendrils of his ken, / lovers of liars, stargazers in the war, / candles burning bright and so on. / The truth is that we pity the Thanksgiving Turkey not for the ax / but for the easy life…
by André Aciman
November 20, 2025
The picture before me was taken from an unknown building looking out on an unknown street. The one bare tree visible from across the street is touched by recent snowfall, as is the large electric pole with its wires stretching high above ground. My father must have taken this photo at the very latest in…
by Henry Begler
November 18, 2025
Looking over my notes for this career-spanning essay on Janet Malcolm, I find many of them less helpful than I hoped, consisting as they do mostly of phrases like “hell yeah,” “absolutely beautiful,” “brilliant writing,” “so so so perfect,” “how does she do it,” and so forth. Practitioners of a certain type of literary nonfiction…