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

The Moment

The Physician as Patient

Medicine after COVID-19
Laura Kolbe
June 1, 2022
Essays

The Spaces We Inhabit

How childhood influences architecture
Turner Brooks
May 2, 2022
Essays

Que Será, Será

Conjuring a long-forgotten memory of my mother
Sven Birkerts
April 11, 2022
Pandemic Files

Lighted Windows in Lockdown

The visible and invisible lives of others
Ben Libman
March 14, 2022
Essays

My Painting of Kyiv

Will the birthplace I love still exist for my daughter?
Maria Kuznetsova
March 12, 2022
Essays

Communalism in the Veld

Rethinking property in South Africa
Glen Retief
March 1, 2022
Essays

More Joy and Less Cool

What it means to be a skater
José Vadi
March 1, 2022
Illustration of fluid black shapes and chairs by Laura Padilla Castellanos
Essays

The Black Shape Slumped in a Chair

Kerry James Marshall and the Taliesin murders
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
March 1, 2022
Illustration of three rows of chairs by Laura Padilla Castellanos
Essays

Unspeakable Pain

What doctors don't hear
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
March 1, 2022
Illustration of a figure falling against a green background
Essays

Who Owns Your Story?

Transcending the trauma narrative
Aminatta Forna
February 28, 2022