The Manifold Mind of Saul Bellow: On the 20th Century Master, 20 Years Gone

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 the tiresome pressures of train travel and seedy hostels, I found that my irked, overstimulated soul was peculiarly receptive to the master’s comforting genius. I consumed the book in a couple of hours at a restaurant counter.

The Theater of the Unreal: On AI and the Deceptions of New Tech

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 himself. No doubt in the coming weeks and months the headlines will just keep coming, from tragedy to farce and back again. But here’s something I’m sure will not change: generative AI is theater.

Giant of the Attic: On the Majesty of Alan Moore

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 Musson. “Always have done.” Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it. Life of a novelist now. Solitude.

My Father’s Picture: On the Possibility of an Image

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 1932, which is when he left his homeland never to return. A few weeks before his death in New York, as we were leafing through old photographs, I asked him why he had taken that picture from the sunken basement window that peered out on the street.

The Greatest: On the Wonderful Mystery of Janet Malcolm

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 speak her name in hushed tones and with a sense of holy awe. Katie Roiphe, who has quite consciously positioned herself as Malcolm’s inheritor, called her “the only living writer who terrified me.”

The Engine of Waking Life: On Depression and Teaching

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 out, lost, and useless. I filled my days with reading, using my newfound time to try to brute-force my way through a classical education. Then I read a charming essay by Salvatore Scibona about St. John’s, a small liberal arts college in New Mexico focused on reading and discussing great books.

The Nonfiction Artist: A Photo Essay by Max Vadukul: Never-Before-Seen Portraits of Gay Talese

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 day. I still remember the afternoon that I visited Gay at his Upper East Side townhouse. He was wearing his signature fedora, bespoke Oxford shoes, and a Brioni suit. He’s someone who dresses for his role in the world, like a policeman, a monk, or a judge.

Wouk Backlash: On The Caine Mutiny and the Literature of War

In 1958, a young and fast-rising political scientist named Samuel Huntington was denied tenure at Harvard because of a book he wrote. Huntington had penned it in the wake of the Korean War, just as Americans were, for the first time in their history, reconciling themselves to the idea of a large peacetime army. For past wars, the country had mustered a large army, then all but disbanded it when the fighting ended. But the emergent Cold War seemed to call for a standing reserve of military might. Nervous Americans, ill-practiced at living in the shadow of a garrison army, wondered what to make of it.

You Say You Want a Revolution: On One Battle After Another and Pynchon’s Vineland

There is a buzz in the air. Electricity skitters across telephone wires, rubber sheaths stretched from pole to pole, drooping above rooftops. Signals ping between satellites and television antennas. Microwaves zap frozen dinners. Static has become the incessant white noise in the nation’s collective head. Later that autumn, “Miami Vice” will premiere on NBC, broadcasting a world of pastels, cops, cocaine, and excess onto the Tubes in every household. Brewing over that sweet Northern California summer — like the bulbous belly of a helicopter skimming the crests of evergreens, its blades whirring and shearing the air — is the presidential election.

Nothing is Over: On Rioting in the Contemporary American Novel

For the past 35 years or so, the Black working class and their accomplices have rioted against the police across different cities with increasing regularity. I want to be clear: I am not talking about protest. I am talking about riots, uprisings, and rebellions where property is looted, fires burn, rocks are thrown, and tear gas is deployed. In 2020, by the police’s count, there were riots in dozens of American cities. Occasionally, the contemporary riot will be large groups of black-clad anarchists (many of whom are white, though not all) and other radical activists running wild in the streets. These street battles happened prior to Ferguson too.

AI, Impressionism, and the Fleeting Now: On Gustave Caillebotte and the Art to Come

Who has heard of Gustave Caillebotte? Among my family members who grew up in the Chicago area, his most famous painting — Paris Street; Rainy Day — is widely beloved. This is solely due to its prominent placement in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it marks the entrance of the Impressionist wing. My family has many memories of walking up the white marble stairs to see it atop in all its enormity: seven feet high and nine feet wide. But that’s all they knew about Caillebotte — and that was more than I could say.

The Power of Art in the AI Age: On 21st-Century Painting and the Backlash Against the Thinking Machines

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies. It took years of effort to earn the ability to transcribe reality. Artists observed figure models to draw people accurately, and the readiest option was their own reflection. A self-portrait was both a tool and a visage recorded for posterity, revealing how the artist saw herself under prolonged observation, expressed through talents that she devoted her life to cultivating. When you look into the eyes of a self-portrait, you see the part of an artist’s soul that she tried to preserve ahead of death. This is why so many artists have posed themselves with memento mori such as human skulls.

The Woes of Slight Autism: On Emmett Rensin’s The Complications and Life on the Spectrum

During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine — let’s call her “Mary” — told me that she liked a guy, “Jack,” in our class. I didn’t think much of it. People have crushes on each other, they catch feelings, sometimes the feelings are mutual, and sometimes they’re not. I shifted the conversation away from her confession toward asking her what grade she got on the biochem test. She claimed that she forgot. Later in the day, I went to tennis practice, where I started making small talk with one of my teammates. He mentioned he just found out that his ex was going out with Jack.

To Go Big or Come Home?: On the Writing Life With Major and Indie Publishers

In late 2022, I found myself at a crossroads. It had been four years since I’d published a book, and although it had been named on multiple “Best of 2018” lists and sold enough to earn (minor) royalties, the publisher had declined a paperback run. My agent and I had amicably parted ways after she’d passed on three consecutive book manuscripts. I’d spent 18 months — and about 120 query emails — trying and failing to find a new agent. I was forced to consider the possibility that the publishing world had seen the best I had to offer and decided they could live without it.

The Prophet and the Barbarians: On Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss, as is well known, lives on top of a mountain in a little hut. It is cold on the mountain. Sometimes, when the sun is shining, he ventures out to the moss-sprung slopes to pick mushrooms, but most of the time he just sits indoors, reading the Tarot, listening to the prophecies blown to him on the icy winds, the curtains of rain. He spends his evenings huddled by the fire, studying the works of the great heresiarchs: Basilides, Swedenborg, Clung. Only occasionally does he venture down into the valleys to meet the toothless hordes, usually when there has been another Taylor Swift concert or another presidential election.