Against Doom: On Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

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 encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”

This Is Top Forty: On Chris Dalla Riva’s Uncharted Territory

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 Hits demands the opposite. The mood and the genre and the era change constantly. Nothing is put on a pedestal. Everything played is treated equally.

Why Woolf?: On Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel

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 in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions.

A New Yorker’s New York: On Gay Talese’s A Town Without Time

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 we took Gene Hackman for granted, or that one red sauce restaurant with the very good amatriciana that is supposed to never close — until, suddenly, it does. In its wake comes a new Chipotle.

I Coulda Guessed Half of That: On Harvey Pekar and American Splendor

When I was a young boy, I’d sit in the backseat of my parents’ car as we passed the Limerick city Garda station. In front of this station is an old statue of a robed man clutching his head, which seems to be at once melting and splitting into three other heads. One time as we passed this statue I asked my parents who it was that was being depicted, and my mother answered, That’s what’ll happen to you if you think about that statue too long. After that moment, I was terrified of stumbling on a thought that featured the man in the statue, lest my head melt as well.

Twilight of the Clerks: On David A. Westbrook’s Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party

Julien Benda published his most famous study Les Trahision des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in 1927. His use of the derogatory French term clerc (a medieval scribe) to denote a mediocre intellectual careerist and bureaucratic functionary was perhaps Benda’s most memorable contribution to modern thought. Yet most have forgotten the prophetic content of the book itself, and its prediction that Europe was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world.

The Gods That Failed: On Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York

In the late 1980s, New York was a city on the brink. Wall Street boomed, and white-collar New York rejoiced; blue-collar New York, after decades of disinvestment, became an inferno, as the Black and Hispanic working class was pitted against white ethnics. Racial strife, embodied by several successive and increasingly high-profile beatings and killings, seized the consciousness of a beleaguered municipality. Tens of thousands slept on the streets every night, many of them poor and mentally ill, while thousands more were ravaged by a mysterious illness. All the while, New York City proved slow and ill-equipped to stop their suffering.

The Bloody Love of Poe: On Richard Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his left eyebrow collapsed, wearing a cravat resembling a torn bedsheet tied into a noose, his arms crossed. This is what has been made of him by the inclusion of his Gothic fictions in the short story anthologies and all the film adaptations.

Against Literature: On Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges

The first thing a young Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) learned in his conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was to value writing that was deliberate, restrained, and clear. Bioy dates this revelation to sometime between 1931 and 1946, before he began the diary that would chronicle their friendship, a record that starts in May 1947 and ends in 1989, three years after Borges’ death. Long considered a cult object among Spanish-speaking readers, Borges — the title of this 700-page diary — is set to be released in English for the first time in October 2026 by NYRB Classics, in a translation by Valerie Miles.

A Cat Chasing a Laser Beam: On Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction

Over the course of 33 days, I read Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction. I set myself the arbitrary goal of reading exactly one chapter every morning I could, and the overall experience felt like a prolonged conversation with a warm and unassuming friend. In interviews, Frank has clarified that his book does not offer a survey or — “God forbid” — a theory of the novel in the modern era. Instead, with “the structure of something like a traditional biography,” he set out to narrate how the 20th-century novel emerged, changed, struggled, and grew old.

Paradise Lost: On Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite

Before TikTok crowned legions of influencers, taste was ruled by a singular aristocracy: the magazine editors. In his debut book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, author and New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum pleads the case for cultural gatekeeping in an era of algorithmic overwhelm and creative chaos. And what gatekeeper has wielded greater influence over the collective consciousness than the media conglomerate Condé Nast, which once, as Grynbaum reminds us, “had a foothold in nearly every sphere and phase of American life”?

The Wandering Fascist: On the New Translation of Maurizio Serra’s Malaparte: A Biography

There’s a passage in Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris which, for all of its contradictions, helps explain the lingering fascination with Malaparte’s work. While there’s something inherently fraught in giving Malaparte the first word, it’s also useful to establish him as an edifice of sorts. Whether that edifice will be torn down or defaced in the words to come remains to be seen. The year is 1948. Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert, is living in Paris.

Your Own Intellectual Jesus: On Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates

“When we are no longer willing to die for the truth, there will be no truth anymore,” conservative German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observed gloomily during a conversation with Slovenian philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Žižek in 2023, suggesting we might be living through the end of an era inaugurated by Socrates, “the first martyr for the European concept of truth.” Agnes Callard’s new book Open Socrates, which claims to make the case for a philosophical life, could not be more timely.

American Warfare: On Richard Beck’s Homeland

In the issue dated September 13, 2001, Newsweek magazine ran a photograph of a firefighter carrying a young girl to safety. “Horror at Home,” the caption read, a simple and stark evocation of the tragedy that had occurred two days earlier, when the Twin Towers were struck by two airplanes. The Towers collapsed entirely, blanketing Lower Manhattan in ash, smoke and dust. First responders from throughout the tri-state area raced to the scene, to assist in any way possible, answering the call when it was needed most. The photograph of the firefighter escorting the girl served as a synecdoche for the collective bravery displayed by all of the firefighters, medics and other rescue workers who showed up in droves on that Tuesday morning. There was one problem, though.

The Last Colossus: On Cynthia Ozick’s In a Yellow Wood

Volumes of a writer’s selected or collected work usually have a kind of a grandness to them, an authoritative summing up that pretends to the definitive, and are the outcome of retrospective weighing: the author, if they have made the selections, or a custodian of their work — spouse, editor, literary executor — has looked at years of production and decided that these writings will stand for what the writer and their work was. You can go further into their corpus and search out the oddities, the minor, the incomplete and occasional, the neglected, but this material before you is the main substance — it will offer the most up-front and prepossessing (some might say imploring) portrait, a testament, for better or worse, of what is past and aspires toward the enduring, a record colored and oddly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of a particular mind either deceased or soon-to-be.