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…
July 7, 2025
Mark Z. Danielewski started outlining his third novel in 2006 and these were its major characteristics: The novel would be 27 volumes long (the number is important). Each volume would have 880 pages (also important). By releasing roughly two volumes a year, for a dozen years, it would serialize the story of nine central characters…
by Grayson Wolf
July 6, 2025
You can change / with your last breath / and you can change / with your last breath / writes Bertolt Brecht / and in the book of change / you turn the page and turn / the page until there you are / a bus a train a short walk / into your life…
July 4, 2025
There’s this David Letterman line that sometimes runs through my head. It’s from a 1987 episode with Crispin Glover, an appearance the actor now cheekily avoids talking about. There’s a good reason for that: The segment ends with Glover trying to kick Letterman in the head. But I’m not interested in the kick. The line…
July 2, 2025
In 307 B.C., a young Macedonian in the mold of Alexander named Demetrius appeared with a large fleet in the sea before Athens. And this charismatic and beautiful young man made a name for himself, capturing cities and winning battles throughout Greece, becoming king of Macedon. And when he returned to Athens in 295 B.C.,…
June 30, 2025
In Sarah Manguso’s 2024 novel Liars, the talented and tireless Jane — a writer and professor as well as a wife and mother — suffers physical, verbal, emotional, and financial abuse at the hands of her mediocre, professionally aimless, and mean-spirited husband, John. Despite John’s utter awfulness, which runs both wide and deep, Jane stays with…
June 28, 2025
16 HOURS OUT IT WAS COLD as frozen shit outside; the gym heater in Lock Haven PA’s only Holiday Inn was broke; so at 6AM, with 5 pounds to cut before sunrise, cocooned in a black sweatsuit, terrifying the earlybird businessmen & hotel staff; jumping rope & shadowboxing like a raging bull in the hottest corner…
June 27, 2025
In the early nineties, my sister covered sports for the New York Post. Once, at Madison Square Garden, near the end of a Knicks game that the home team led by a large margin, she saw one of the New York stars sitting on the bench, smiling and exchanging banter with teammates, while turned slightly toward…
June 25, 2025
A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the…
by Peter James
June 23, 2025
“I have been on the road for the last five months . . . really thinking the worst of people.” This is how comedian Bill Burr opens his 2010 stand-up special Let It Go, right before he launches into a tirade detailing his disgust for the human biomass he regularly encounters at the airport. It’s a…