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

A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Is This Tyranny?

How losing the right to vote changed my understanding of America
Feisal G. Mohamed
April 1, 2020
Image of COVID-19 virus. Graphic by Bianca Ibarlucea.
Pandemic Files

Medicine’s Innovation Problem

The novel coronavirus exposes health care’s key weakness
Rena Xu
March 30, 2020
Image of COVID-19 virus. Graphic by Bianca Ibarlucea.
Pandemic Files

The Law of Salus Populi

Epidemics and the law
John Fabian Witt
March 30, 2020
Image of COVID-19 virus. Graphic by Bianca Ibarlucea.
Pandemic Files

The Lice

Vulnerability, contagion, and children
Miranda Featherstone
March 30, 2020
Image of COVID-19 virus. Graphic by Bianca Ibarlucea.
Pandemic Files

Cannon Fodder

A doctor on the front lines
Laura Kolbe
March 27, 2020
Image of COVID-19 virus. Graphic by Bianca Ibarlucea.
Pandemic Files

There’s a Sickness Outside

A doctor reflects on how dread and anxiety can become their own pandemic
Nitin Ahuja
March 27, 2020
Fine art of a woman bathing
Essays

A Common Seagull

On making art and mourning
Sheila Heti
January 1, 2020
Abstract automaton
Essays

Broken Doll

A daughter’s suicide in another country
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
and
Rahul Bery
January 1, 2020
Author photo
Essays

Changing My Mind

On sources, revision, and order
Lydia Davis
January 1, 2020
A photo of the author's mother and brother in 1974
Essays

Ghosts in My Nursery

Mourning the brother I never knew
Miranda Featherstone
January 1, 2020