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

Essays

An Incomplete Mentorship

Ellen Bryant Voigt helped me become the writer I am today. After a falling out, we never spoke again.
Rachel Jamison Webster
October 30, 2025
Taylor Swift in an embellished white military coat and booties under a cloud of confetti during the Eras Tour
Essay of the Week

How We’ve Misunderstood Taylor Swift

The Life of a Showgirl received mixed reviews from fans and critics. But it may be her most honest work yet.
Stephanie Burt
October 20, 2025
Essay of the Week

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the ambivalence of American drinking culture
Sloane Crosley
October 6, 2025
Grayscale image of an excavated Cycladic figure face down in the dirt on the island of Keros in July 1967
Essays

Cycladic Figurines and Their Mysteries

An excavation in fragments
Adina Hoffman
September 8, 2025
Essays

How Mrs. Dalloway Began

Slipping into Virginia Woolf’s sentences
Edmund de Waal
September 8, 2025
Black-and-white photo of an empty canal on the island of Murano in Venice, Italy
Essays

The Husband

My three trips to Venice, before and after marriage
Anne Enright
September 8, 2025
A color photo of Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk at Trump’s second inauguration
Essays

Trump Is Only a Symptom

The crisis that America can’t change at the ballot box
Rana Dasgupta
September 8, 2025
Essays

What Is a Poetic Novel?

A newly translated manifesto
Hélène Bessette,
translated by Kate Briggs
September 8, 2025
Grayscale AI rendering of road-rage victim Christopher Pelkey
Essays

When AI Speaks for the Dead

A murder victim recently addressed a defendant with the help of AI. What are the limits of our new reality?
Patricia J. Williams
September 8, 2025
Crabs cooking in a pot of steaming water
Objects of Desire

Blue Crabs

Eating them the way God intended
Joseph Earl Thomas
June 9, 2025