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 Ken Baumann
November 7, 2025
I don’t want to write about teaching high school English. But I need to write about being depressed. And for me those experiences cannot be neatly cleft, like conjoined twins whose shared skin shelters so much blood. I once worked as a kid actor and kept at it until I was 23. I felt burnt…
November 5, 2025
It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day…
by Max Vadukul
November 3, 2025
I shot these portraits of Gay Talese in the spring of 2015 and they’ve been unjustly sitting in my archives ever since. I shot them for a small men’s magazine, but for some reason, they only ended up using two pictures, and I’ve always felt it was criminal these portraits never saw the light of…
by Gay Talese
November 1, 2025
Although the woman stood nearly a block away, he could see that she had spotted him, was waving at him from the corner of Lexington Avenue at Seventy-first Street, and so Angelo Janiero slowed down his taxicab even though, as he did so, he was not sure whether or not he would stop. He might…
October 29, 2025
It’s hard to wrestle with Gay Talese. At 93, he is old but spry, and his sentences are so quietly, consistently effective that you may not realize he has you pinned. Reading a new collection of his New York-themed reportage, A Town Without Time, I wondered if we had been taking Talese for granted, the way…
by Lou Bahet, Ross Barkan
October 27, 2025
It is the rarest of gifts to have lived long enough to survey both a life and a century in its greatest breadth; even rarer still to be both an active participant and shaper of the currents, to have walked alongside the titans of the age and brought them, somehow, to fuller life. This is…
October 26, 2025
What I find / speared / on my fork is not / what was on my plate. / I fear / there’s been a mistake, / a miscalculation. / Each morning / I fast-walk / past camouflaged shelters / where / yesterday’s heroes hide from us. / In a better world / I would…
by Gus Mitchell
October 24, 2025
Thomas Pynchon returns, let us hope not for the last time, to an America finally besieged by its own Gestapo, Ice also being the surname of the tech-lord villain of his last novel, 2013’s Bleeding Edge. Twelve years on, on my own side of the pond, we endure the resistible rise of our own British-grown wannabe…
October 22, 2025
In a 2018 interview with the Paris Review, László Krasznahorkai, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed to have finished writing novels. A peculiar thing, then, coming out of retirement on a long flat note, with a Kenny G-esque stunt performance of windy and pointless proportion. Herscht 07769, written after the end of his…