Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife

A Night’s Sleep

An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body

Browse

Essays

Omega Constellation

Unwinding what I lost
April 10, 2024

When Metaphor Gets Literal

What my mother’s coma taught me about reading poems
April 3, 2024

Antique Medical Slides

Specimens of my past and future self
March 20, 2024

The Story Wars

The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies
March 11, 2024
Books

Gender Wars

Two scholars excavate the origins of today’s trans backlash
March 4, 2024

Heat Maps

Desire in the dark
March 4, 2024

Lessons of the Line

Charles Simic and me
March 4, 2024

The Common Reader

Virginia Woolf in The Yale Review
March 4, 2024

Jars with Well-Fitting Lids

Seeing loss more clearly
February 14, 2024

Free All Necks

How the groundbreaking work of artist and teacher Alma Thomas inspired a generation of Black students
December 11, 2023