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“Most English-speaking people,” the fantasist and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “will admit that cellar door is... Read More

Just as my parents remember where they were when we landed on the moon, I remember where I was when I first saw the music video for Lana Del... Read More

The president spoke of liberty spreading by cell phone, and the internet’s father proclaimed its goal was to “serve... Read More

Artificial Intelligence presents a number of risks and challenges, the most important of which is existential risk. That is a fancy way of... Read More

CONSIDER THE DUMPSTER. What’s in it? Where does it go? This winter, the house next door to us is being gut renovated—and gut... Read More

The Ryan Gosling–led sci-fi thriller Project Hail Mary, released March 20, has surpassed $300 million at the box... Read More

They’ve been calling Kristoffer Borgli this year’s enfant terrible, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why.... Read More

A collection of black-and-white photographs by anonymous French soldiers, of their fellows wearing gas masks and other alien-looking... Read More

In A Separation—Katie Kitamura’s third novel, and the first in an informal trilogy that ends with Audition—the first-person... Read More

The headline for this New York Times interview with Lena Dunham reads “Lena Dunham is Still Trying to Figure Out Why... Read More

When Carey Mulligan was preparing for her role in Beef, she had some feedback about the insults. The second season of the Netflix anthology... Read More

There has never been a time when more people had an “excuse” for being rude at an airport. During the recent TSA government... Read More

This story contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of The Pitt, “9:00 PM.” Michael Robinavitch will live to intubate another... Read More

One of the most common questions we get during tours of our learning space is this: “With such small class sizes, do you worry about... Read More

What should everyday Americans think about aliens? My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the... Read More

An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New... Read More

Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to... Read More

I head east on a warm November day to the Texas A&M Forest Service office in La Grange to meet forester Logan McMillan. With rosy cheeks... Read More

Experience has its advantages, and in four years of covering baseball, I’ve learned to tune out the music that blares from the speakers... Read More

To become a Martian colonist, I first had to fill out a Google Form. It asked me about my aviation know-how, medical training, and experience... Read More

Last week, I visited, for the 20th or more time, the always much-anticipated Whitney Biennial — wild and wacky, ponderous and... Read More

On March 19th Hachette Book Group made headlines for terminating a book contract with author Mia Ballard over her alleged use of AI in... Read More

Iris Murdoch is best known as a writer of novels. She wrote twenty-six of them, most focusing on the lives of middle-class professionals in... Read More

Last autumn, I sat in a community arts building in a pocket of north London, among young creatives sipping negronis, and watched Sam Altman... Read More

Having a sense of humor is an intangible quality that can brighten up your life, the lives of others, and, as a writer, brighten up the page... Read More

In the last 10 years, the Extremely Online among us have reappropriated virtually all cartoon IP into memes. The aesthetics range from... Read More

I. Imagine, for a moment, the district of Tondo in capital city Manila, colonial-era Philippines—water-bound, fishing boats, traders,... Read More

A year or so ago in this space, I argued that genuine universal literacy was never really tried. Drawing on Adam Fox’s Oral... Read More

A recent ruling by a German court at first glance could be seen as a victory for freedom of speech. But on closer inspection, it shows why... Read More

I watched it because it kept coming up in the queue, and because I have two young boys, but the new Louis Theroux documentary Inside the... Read More

Over the past year, our feeds have become saturated with AI-generated content and endlessly recycled recommendations, favoring speed and... Read More