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GRACE KRILANOVICH’S SOPHOMORE novel, Acid Green Velvet, appears 16 years after her debut, The Orange Eats Creeps (2010), a surreal book... Read More

In the fall of 2007, as the American housing market began to buckle, a Morgan Stanley bond trader named Howie Hubler lost $9 billion. The... Read More

The Southbank Center has hosted many great cultural events over the years. In 1951, the Festival of Britain almost single-handedly dragged... Read More

In New Mexico, Facebook and Instagram are considered a "public nuisance," but letting artificial intelligence systems record and store young... Read More

In the summer of 2023, the British journalist Jon Ronson’s adult son Joel attended what was billed as a party at a real-life castle in... Read More

I often wonder about the quiet lives of influencers, what the people whose SEO captions and sticky smiles turn into when the camera turns... Read More

It’s been 30 years since the first airing of the Miracle Mop infomercial in 1996. While this may not be a meaningful milestone for most... Read More

In September 1789, the Frenchman-turned-American Pierre Charles L’Enfant wrote to George Washington, then just five months into the... Read More

The greatest trick the free market ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t exist. Nowhere is this more destructive than in the... Read More

Not long ago, a close friend of mine, a software engineer, was discussing how his job role had changed in recent months as his company had... Read More

This is not one of those periodic “End of Reading” Atlantic click bait essays. Americans—well, the kind who read books or... Read More

I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was... Read More

I was in New York all summer, making a big fuss about DC to all those sophisticated cosmopolitans. They think it’s boring. They assume... Read More

Most of the group chats on my phone are dead – thank goodness. The one for the parents in my kid’s class went quiet... Read More

Some mornings, this newsletter has me thinking about Homer Simpson’s alcohol-fueled car fantasy. In his daydream, Homer’s at the... Read More

Mexican author Clyo Mendoza’s 2018 book Silencio begins with a young woman poisoning herself, a death undertaken in—and greeted... Read More

Every summer, I volunteer at a business camp for high school students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. For nearly two decades, the parking lot... Read More

Everything is a wager these days. Gambling odds are now a ubiquitous feature of sports broadcasts, and prediction markets welcome bets on the... Read More

Over the last week or so, my social media feeds have been inundated with tributes to the late, great Wendell Berry, who passed away at the... Read More

“There is no other way to say this,” Carolyn Forché writes in her prose poem “The Colonel,” dated May 1978,... Read More

Brother to Dragons is one of Warren’s finest contributions to the American tradition of literary tragedy.   Read More

LOUISE GLÜCK’S A Village Life (2009) provides the first epigraph for Etna, Paul Yoon’s new novel with a dog narrator.... Read More

How do you write? I mean, at all: How do you enter or approach that space where literature becomes possible? Is there some kind of protocol... Read More

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Mike Vrabel, the hulking former linebacker who coached his team to the Super Bowl last season, had assumed his news... Read More

If you’ve never seen a bad production of Macbeth, you’ve probably never seen a production of Macbeth. Famously cursed, the play... Read More

In the days following the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for reasons which were initially more unconscious than conscious, I reread... Read More

Wendell Berry, the Southern agrarian writer, farmer, and poet, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the age of 92. He was a... Read More

Our culture has an unhealthy obsession with mental illness, and the Lindsay Clancy trial is just the latest reminder. Children and adults... Read More

So begins Homer’s Odyssey.  Film buffs, classicists, political pundits—almost everyone—has been talking about this... Read More

On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that artificial general intelligence — a computer that can cogitate like the human mind... Read More

Russell L. Riley writes at the beginning of “Inside the George W. Bush White House,” an oral history of the Bush 43 years, that... Read More

Ryan, a 48-year-old teacher living in North Carolina, quite literally wishes he had never been born. He has a “deep resentment”... Read More

I have lived through 34 summers in Phoenix, and I seem to be getting progressively worse at dealing with them. The heat is horrific, of... Read More

It begins with breathless death: two boys trapped in an ice box. These are the Jump brothers, Ned and Billy-Billy, whose play-it-again name... Read More

Most novels provide a sense of unity by means of illusion. What seems to be one story is actually at least two stories and often more. At the... Read More

As the first birthday of Romanticon comes around, I’ve found my days taken up with the organising of a hundredth birthday party. A... Read More