Essays

Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club
Aria Aber
A Closer Look

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness
Rachel Eisendrath
Essays

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife
Jhumpa Lahiri
Objects of Desire

A Night’s Sleep

An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit
Vincenzo Latronico
Essays

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page
Michel Chaouli
Essays

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body
Megan O’Grady

Browse

Essays

Television and Film

Service or Servitude?

The Bear and The Menu give us very different views of capitalism
Daniel W. Drezner
September 12, 2023
Essays

Abstraction and Nonsense

The real in fiction
Percival Everett
June 12, 2023
Essays

Ahead of Time

On poetry and mourning
Kamran Javadizadeh
June 12, 2023
Essays

James Baldwin in Turkey

How Istanbul changed his career—and his life
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
June 12, 2023
Essays

New York Anabasis

In praise of the return to the surface
Rachel Eisendrath
June 12, 2023
Essays

Notes on Affirmation

SFFA v. Harvard and the quest for acceptance
Thomas Dai
June 12, 2023
Books

The Consolations of Failure

Two new books look at what failing can—and cannot—teach us
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
June 12, 2023
Essays

This Part of Our Lives Is Over

Sending my daughter to Japan
Emily Bernard
June 12, 2023
Essays

[I had a dream last night]

Brandon Shimoda
June 5, 2023
Essays

The Winter Zoo

Visiting animals when most humans stay away
Kate Zambreno
May 8, 2023