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For centuries, conservative thinkers have asked themselves: Where did it all go wrong? A few of them have settled on impersonal historical... Read More

It was just over three years ago, at a barn party near Rhinebeck, New York, when I first heard about the very wealthy, very horny man who... Read More

The metaphor of a “dark forest” comes from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy, which is the best sci-fi released in... Read More

As you know, I write about art and the preservation of heritage, but today’s topic is the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, so I’ll... Read More

No-one can doubt that books have lost their special place in our culture. It is simply not possible for an author to matter any more in the... Read More

Mark Twain unreservedly disdained celebrations of the Fourth of July, those perfervid cataclysms of self-aggrandizement whose blasts of... Read More

For many readers, the career of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis is the standard for mainstream literary stardom. The biopic writes itself:... Read More

In the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s... Read More

I am perhaps the first person in sixty years to move to San Francisco to save money. A fortuitous situation has arisen which means that for a... Read More

I’M STANDING INSIDE Thor's Power Gym in Kópavogur, Iceland—one of the best-equipped strongman facilities on earth, a... Read More

In the late aughts and early 2010s, before Cambridge Analytica and Theranos and the so-called techlash; before the interest rate hikes and... Read More

Reading about Hu Anyan’s litany of gig work in China—in his recently translated memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing—is... Read More

HOPE IS A MOVIE THAT’S VERY COMFORTABLE with tossing audiences into the deep end and letting them sink or swim on their own.... Read More

We began the editorial process for “The Fifth Syllable” shortly after the publication in Granta of a story shortlisted for the... Read More

I grew up in a Buckinghamshire village called Iver, living for 18 years in a Queen Anne house called Copthall. In the early 1970s, when I was... Read More

Sometimes a boundary is just a line in the road. But sometimes it’s a gate from one world to another.  Driving due south from... Read More

Among medieval hand-held farming tools, the sickle is your best bet for reaping. It’s also just the thing for deadly weaponry in times... Read More

Author Emily St. John Mandel wants you to know that her new novel is hopeful. She understands that might be hard for you to believe based on... Read More

Often, these ranked lists take shape as you go along, leading to debate and even fierce disagreement on what will take the top spot. That is... Read More

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