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Journalism is “the first rough draft of history,” as Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham famously put it in 1963. Which... Read More

‘Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we... Read More

The so-called genie of the gambling bottle was released in 2018, when the Supreme Court determined that the prior federal ban on sports... Read More

A tropical rain had landed in Singapore, breaking the swelter of October’s first days. It was a period of anticipation and planning... Read More

It’s hard to keep loving the movies when we realize how much damage they’ve done. In A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist... Read More

The weather has become untrustworthy, for determining the seasons and otherwise. As I write this introduction, the leaves remain stubbornly... Read More

Once, I went to my firm’s Christmas party all alone. At my department’s holiday dinner just a couple of nights prior, my... Read More

Rereading the 9/11 Commission Report triggers a flood of memories for anyone over 30. The “just-the-facts” description of the... Read More

The reviews of Rachel Cusk’s Life of M, a roman à clef surely about Natalie Portman published in late August, have been... Read More

It’s being shouted from all corners: The U.S. Open has become an overcrowded, overpriced circus awash in influencers, aspirational... Read More

We got inside an old icebox down by the creek near the little woods. . . . The door closed with a metal click. We had Southern accents; we... Read More

When Army Air Forces officer Claude Eatherly piloted the plane Straight Flush in support of Enola Gay’s mission to obliterate the city... Read More

The first hour of Na Hong-jin’s Hope holds its own among the greatest monster thrillers in film history. If the South Korean film was... Read More

Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation is ten years old this October. First uploaded onto BBC iPlayer between the Brexit referendum in June... Read More

My generation was the first to come of age with social media. From the beginning, there was reason for skepticism. My early memories of... Read More

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