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 Emma Collins
January 2, 2026
A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I…
December 31, 2025
There’s a channel on Stingray Music, an online streaming service based in Canada, called All-Time Greatest Hits. A typical five-song set goes like this: Billie Eilish followed by Foreigner followed by Gladys Knight & the Pips followed by Rihanna and ending with the Lovin’ Spoonful. Contrary to the passivity that streaming often cultivates, All-Time Greatest…
December 29, 2025
You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product…
December 27, 2025
My mother wasn’t able to have children. She’d been diagnosed with a severely “bicornuate” uterus. Its deep top cleft would not permit a fetus’ implantation or habitation. This congenital irregularity has been called both “horned” and “heart-shaped” in the clinical literature, depending, I assume, on the observer’s temperament. My mother, pleasantly surprised at my safe…
by Tyson Duffy
December 26, 2025
Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle bookstall in New Delhi. India is an unexpected place to wind up reading, for the first time, this midcentury urban intellectual, comic dissector of America’s moronic inferno. But, as it happens, amidst the street chaos and…
December 24, 2025
A long lineage of Jesus films depicts Christ as almost otherworldly, serene, and calmly removed from the people around him. Movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) depict Jesus as bathed in a soft glow of light, and as he moves through Jerusalem he seems to barely touch the ground. While Christian doctrine professes…
by Greta Dieck
December 22, 2025
To be fair, it’s not like Patricia Lockwood doesn’t warn us. “I was having a Protagonist Problem,” she declares. “I could not move, or make anything happen.” Of course, by the time the reader of her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reaches this acknowledgement midway through the book, they’re likely already aware of…
December 21, 2025
Word like a dirt packed mouth, / tongue forced strike of roof in gasp, / throat impinged in resonance akin / to being buried alive: / Pteromerhanophobia. / Name as fitting as fear, chemicals / rush right past frayed nerve to terror— / There is no escaping an hour. / Who doesn’t watch birds stretch…
by Annie Dorsen
December 19, 2025
I’m going to start this essay with a timestamp: August 2025. It’s about a week since the disastrous release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, a couple of weeks since OpenAI claimed a valuation of $300 billion, and about three months since ChatGPT helpfully offered a 16-year old named Adam Raine advice about the best way to hang…