Essays

Essays

Toni Morrison’s Native Figures

A new reading of race in her novels
Namwali Serpell
Folio

How LLMs Set My Fiction Free

Writing no longer felt like experimenting. AI made it fun again.
Christopher Sorrentino
Folio

My AI Boyfriend

A cynic enters the data pool
Lauren Oyler
Folio

Chasing Alice

The life and death of a chatbot
Sheila Heti
Folio

Donna Haraway’s Utopian Promise

We were supposed to become feminist cyborgs. Instead, we got ChatGPT.
Meghan O’Gieblyn
Folio

Jagged Intelligence

The dangerous unknowns at the heart of LLMs
Melanie Mitchell

Browse

Essays

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
Graphic with two bathtubs on pedestals and a leaf dropping from the faucets
Essays

Suicide in Fiction, Reconsidered

Why we need stories about living after a suicide attempt
Morgan Thomas
September 7, 2021