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

From the Archives

Legislative-Executive Relations

Dean Acheson
June 1, 1956
From the Archives

Walden—1954

E. B. White
September 1, 1954
From the Archives

G.B.S.—Mankind’s Friend

Thomas Mann
March 1, 1951
From the Archives

Germany and the Germans

Thomas Mann
December 1, 1946
Blue stamps from WWII ration book
Essays

Note on the Home Front

I shall never forget that first winter of gasoline rationing
Eve Riehle
September 1, 1945
A photograph of a London street during WWII.
Essays

After a Visit to England

London during the Blitz
Thornton Wilder
September 1, 1941
From the Archives

Tides of American Politics

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
December 1, 1939
From the Archives

Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole

Virginia Woolf
March 1, 1939
From the Archives

Address at the Dedication of the Thomas Mann Collection at Yale University

Thomas Mann
June 1, 1938
From the Archives

Afterthoughts on Constitutions

Carl Becker
March 1, 1938