Is there a novel more revered—and more famously unread—than James Joyce’s Ulysses? On the centennial of its publication, we invite five writers to respond to this love letter to Dublin, a book that is eminently readable despite its complexities.

Thomas A. Bass on the dangers of nuclear waste, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas on how lions live with humans, Megan Craig on Robert Adams’s photographs, Pico Iyer on the funny side of Japanese funerals, fiction by Nadia Davids and Ilan Stavans; poetry by Terrance Hayes; and our new Tuning Up section

“Political hostility alone is not enough to trigger an arms race. Neighbors can detest each other without necessarily engaging in a competition for more and more dangerous weapons.”—Jeffrey Lewis, “2022: A Space Emergency”

Plus: Tamara Dean on the surprising history of 19th-century abortion, Janna Malamud Smith chronicles the orphans at the keyboard, and Mark LaFlaur memorializes Jason Epstein and the egghead paperback

“A great deal is eclipsed by a worldview that imagines we can always secure a win, for it confuses the ambiguities of life with the clarity of sport.”—Elizabeth D. Samet, “The Art of Losing”

Plus: Natalie Wexler on the divide between teachers and cognitive scientists, Witold Rybczynski on the homes that make a marriage, and Lisa Zeidner on the greatest Hitchcock film of them all

“My delight in the beauty of the world now coexists with grief at its destruction. These emotions are like cellmates who cannot get along.”—William deBuys

Plus: Lucy Jones on rewilding our minds, Andrew Levy on the failure of commemorating 9/11, Sandra M. Gilbert on unruly women poets of the 1950s, and more

“It was the first time I had ever been denied alcohol by a Russian, and it was hard not to take that as a sign of social improvement.”—Graeme Wood

Plus: Mary Jo Salter writes sonnets for Zoomtimes, Sally Greene talks about the power of “Black Power,” Shakhar Rahav explores China’s power moves

“History shows that many—perhaps millions—of Americans have at one time invented or accessorized a past to clean up the family genealogy.”—Nancy Isenberg, “White, Whiteness, Whitewash”

Plus: T. M. Luhrmann on the exvangelical movement, Joseph Horowitz on the future of the performing arts, and Sierra Bellows on conceptual art for the Covid Era

“The main reason the United States can’t contain Covid-19 is because it has not created a health system for everyone”—Philip Alcabes, “Race and Public Health”

Plus: Thomas A. Bass on our post-privacy world, Ingrid D. Rowland considers art after the plague, and Mark Edmundson wants English professors to teach what they love

“We will need to shelter in place, we will need to move less, we will need to stop flying all over the globe.”—David Gessner, “Looking Back From the End of the World”

Plus: Farah Peterson on a dangerous founding American myth, Alex Basaraba on whether mountains should have legal standing, and Peter Filkins on Joseph Brodsky

“The amazing feats achieved by computers demonstrate our progress in coming up with algorithms that make the computer do valuable things for us. The computer itself, though, does nothing more than it ever did, which is to do whatever we know how to order it to do.”—Mark Halpern

Plus: Pamela D. Toler on a pioneering American journalist, Meryle Secrest reviews Adam Gopnik on Warhol, and Adam Hochschild details an unusual Gilded Age marriage