Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

The End of Literature

Even if writing is reduced to tweeted epigrams to keep readers reading, won’t writers still tell stories?

Essays [ssa_access]

Opioids and Paternalism

To help end the crisis, both doctors and patients need to find a new way to think about pain

Essays [ssa_access]

Still Wilderness

What are we feeling when we are feeling joy? And where inside us does that feeling reside?

Essays [ssa_access]

Against Solidarity

As a writer, with a writer’s chronic need for detachment, I have avoided the ideology of gender

Essays [ssa_access]

Urban Wild

In slowly gentrifying Detroit, you might see a fox, or even a coyote, but where have all the stray dogs gone?

Essays [ssa_access]

A Jane Austen Kind of Guy

I get it that women find my affinity for their writer intrusive, but her world has much to offer men, too

Essays [ssa_access]

Our Nuclear Future

We may think the bomb is back, but it never really went away

Essays [ssa_access]

Reading Thoreau at 200

Why is the seminal work of the great American transcendentalist held in such scorn today?

Essays [ssa_access]

My Mongolian Spot

An ephemeral birthmark is a rare gift, connecting me to generations spanning the centuries

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

● This week's archive pick

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