Criticism

Who Was Shakespeare?

What Hamnet does—and doesn’t—get right
Dana Stevens

James Schuyler’s Genius

Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment
Mae Losasso

Terrence Malick’s Disciples

Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood
Bilge Ebiri

Chaos Agent in Chief

What Michael Wolff’s Trump quartet tells us about the next four years
James Surowiecki

The Elusive Poet of Desire

Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down
Langdon Hammer

Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time

How a novelist transformed a single day into a radical experiment in time
Clare Carlisle

Browse

Criticism

Oprah Winfrey wears a tiara, standing with cast members of SNL
Television

Has Anyone Talked About How It Feels

Oprah Winfrey’s reign
Kathryn Lofton
September 20, 2021
Release of pink and white balloons.
Books

How to Continue

AIDS elegies after Ashbery
Sam Huber
September 20, 2021
Collage with images from social media

Now Is Pretty Creepy

What Miranda July's performance art reveals about our technologically mediated lives
Min Li Chan
September 20, 2021
Black and white portrait of Machado de Assis
Books

Machado de Assis’s Afterlives

The Brazilian novelist’s overlooked politics
Ratik Asokan
June 28, 2021
Blue and yellow illustration with two faces on either side of a hanging lamp
Books

No-No Man

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nihilist masterpiece
Roy Scranton
June 28, 2021

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois
Madhu H. Kaza
June 28, 2021
New York Times Cover reading "US Deaths near 100,000, an incalculable loss
Books

Incalculable Loss

How writing can help make sense of grief
Christopher Spaide
May 19, 2021
Corgi jumping from floating dock into water after a tennis ball with great abandon

It Me

The trouble with memes
Marta Figlerowicz
May 19, 2021
Men in an airport lounge
Books

Olga Tokarczuk’s Radical Tenderness

Reading the Nobel winner's oeuvre
Marek Makowski
February 16, 2021
Still from Pen15, a television show
Television

Act Your Age

Swapping bodies, swapping ages, and re-inventing youth
Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey
December 21, 2020