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Michael Jordan is hanging in the air. It’s 1998, in Salt Lake City, and he’s just released the most famous shot of his career. As... Read More

When Alicia hopped her first train in May 2024, a southbound freighter out of Georgia, there were a few things she didn’t know yet.... Read More

The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was 65 when his great treatise on the transformation of life was published. With Philosophie... Read More

Last month, I sat in a packed-to-the-gills movie theater to experience the latest release from a controversial comedian whose work regularly... Read More

Novels are the best of life and these are the best novels of the year, at least the best not told “sorry I really like it but I... Read More

“The cruel, gray facts,” unlike the “truths in your heart,” are a matter of record, the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen... Read More

During the quarterback meeting the night before the Chicago Bears hosted the Philadelphia Eagles on Sept. 29, backup QB Case Keenum probed... Read More

Stations, a new novel by the Irish writer Louise Kennedy, lays out a friendship that shapes a heart, and tears it. Red Camelin is the first... Read More

Clare Ath always loved the outdoors. The summer after her freshman year of college, she got a job as a backpacking guide in Colorado,... Read More

Talking to the Los Angeles Times in 2014 he said, “I think I’m an okay writer, but a very good storyteller,” and then, on a... Read More

In 1970, the poet, educator, and architect June Jordan posed the following question during a middle-school graduation speech in Ocean Hill,... Read More

For almost six months (!), I’ve been facilitating a reading group—Intellectual Bootcamp—through Persuasion Institute. We... Read More

We had Taylor Lorenz on last week to talk about AI. And in the course of the conversation, I threw out something that’s been on my mind... Read More

IN THE PARIS REVIEW this year, god of American letters Sarah Schulman said MFA writing programs disserved students if “they were of the... Read More

I first watched The Craft—the cult-classic horror film about four teenage outsiders who form a witches’ coven—in a... Read More

The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of... Read More

I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, 10 minutes from frat row, a strip of filthy, dilapidated mansions long since demolished and bought by... Read More

Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation. This theme was beautifully... Read More

When I was a kid, my dad read to my brother and me almost every night before bed. Very early on, it was Dr. Seuss. Dad literally knew Yertle... Read More

The best horror movies invoke anxiety, a deep human emotion. “The Exorcist” and its countless imitators exploit our fear of... Read More

In spite of his six widely read novels, his two works of nonfiction (with their original contributions to the study of language and the human... Read More

“LET ME EXPLAIN to you how this university works.” The speaker was a world-famous Princeton historian; across the cafeteria... Read More

On January 18, 2021, as the first Trump administration entered its last days, the 1776 Commission published its final report. Convened in... Read More

Daylight saving time is here, which means the sun is setting earlier, the weather is cooling, and you have an extra hour to enjoy some brand... Read More

Hegel tells us that the great historical actors are made by chance: they emerge when the personal ambitions of some particular man align with... Read More

IN JUNE 1964, Peter Bogdanovich and his wife, all-purpose helpmate, and eventual creative partner, Polly Platt, left New York City and took a... Read More

Madeline Summerville and Joel Kotkin debate Carl Marrara and Kenin Spivak about the stakes of this week's midterm elections and the "mostly... Read More

Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a magic eye of a book, is a novel preoccupied with middles: a woman’s experience of middle age, the... Read More

THE HONGSHAN CULTURE existed in a Nebraska-size area of northeastern China from 4700 to 2900 BCE. Archaeologist Guo Dashun called Hongshan... Read More

Twenty years ago,  when the New Atheism was new, provocative books with puckish titles like Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great... Read More

Last year I began inhaling novels about scam artists, con men, grifters—an archetype that looms so large today, you almost forget... Read More

The photo project “Grievances: Notebooks of Anger and Hope” shines a light on the words and lives of citizens who put pen to... Read More

I don’t know how many years it has been since the word sumptuous has come to mind, but my head was absolutely ringing with it as I... Read More

I have been on the move. I turned from my desk and took four steps to reach a bookshelf behind me. Once there, I slid a row of poetry books,... Read More