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

Graphic with ring light and hand wearing teal nail polish by Tung Chau
Essays

The Screen is a Mirror

On gender transition in the Zoom era
S. Brook Corfman
November 22, 2021
Graphic with lips and motioning hands by Tung Chau
Essays

My Queer Voice

It has outed me my whole life. Why?
Zachary Pace
November 15, 2021
The cast of A Strange Loop singing and dancing.
Essays

Becoming a Playwright

The sources of my storytelling
Michael R. Jackson
November 10, 2021
Graphic with hands holding ballet slippers, weighing scales, and cigarettes.
Essays

Battle Scene

Ballet, trauma, and rebirth
Ian Spencer Bell
October 18, 2021
Graphic with a hamster atop one house and a gravestone atop another.
Essays

A Small Death in the Family

What losing our pet taught me about a much greater, deeper love
Craig Morgan Teicher
October 12, 2021
Installation of found hand mirrors arranged in an oval on a wall.
Essays

Race Off

The fantasy of race transformation
Namwali Serpell
September 27, 2021
Todd Gitlin speaks with with I.F. Stone at a demonstration against nuclear weapons, Washington D.C., 1962.
Essays

In Pursuit of Clancy Sigal

A writer’s radical life
Todd Gitlin
September 20, 2021
Collage with images from social media
Essays

Now Is Pretty Creepy

What Miranda July's performance art reveals about our technologically mediated lives
Min Li Chan
September 20, 2021
Graphic with alternating black and purple, and hands opening to a white space
The Moment

Strangers in Our Own Homes

The pandemic’s xenophobic discourse
Divya Victor
September 20, 2021
Two cartoon characters superimposed onto painting of a storm.
Essays

The Brink of Destruction

Revisiting John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”
Edward Hirsch
September 20, 2021