The End of Literature
Even if writing is reduced to tweeted epigrams to keep readers reading, won’t writers still tell stories?
By Robert Coover
September 4, 2018Opioids and Paternalism
To help end the crisis, both doctors and patients need to find a new way to think about pain
By David Brown
September 5, 2017Still Wilderness
What are we feeling when we are feeling joy? And where inside us does that feeling reside?
By Christian Wiman
September 5, 2017Against Solidarity
As a writer, with a writer’s chronic need for detachment, I have avoided the ideology of gender
By Emily Fox Gordon
September 5, 2017Urban Wild
In slowly gentrifying Detroit, you might see a fox, or even a coyote, but where have all the stray dogs gone?
By Laura Bernstein-Machlay
September 5, 2017A 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
By William Deresiewicz
September 5, 2017Our Nuclear Future
We may think the bomb is back, but it never really went away
By Jeffrey Lewis
June 5, 2017Reading Thoreau at 200
Why is the seminal work of the great American transcendentalist held in such scorn today?
By William Howarth
June 5, 2017My Mongolian Spot
An ephemeral birthmark is a rare gift, connecting me to generations spanning the centuries
By Jennifer Hope Choi
June 5, 2017Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
By Jay Neugeboren
Thursday, July 18, 2024To Catch a Sunset
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
By Sandra Beasley
Thursday, July 11, 2024The Next New Thing
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
By Witold Rybczynski
Thursday, July 4, 2024Imperfecta
Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing
By Pamela Haag
Thursday, June 20, 2024The Widower’s Lament
After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss
By Steven G. Kellman
Monday, March 4, 2024The 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
By John Dos Passos Coggin
Thursday, April 13, 2023The 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
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
Thursday, March 2, 2023Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
Thursday, July 28, 2022The Believer
When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in