I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages.

One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, ...

From an archived version of a blog post titled “How to Murder Your Husband,” which was allegedly written in 2011 by Nancy Brophy, who was put on trial in April for shooting and killing her husband in ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. T oward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

A t the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...

Discussed in this essay: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. T his buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous ...

W hen Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the results and they ended up mixing ...

W riting about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

How the media failed Julian AssangeE very year on the first of December, the Committee to Protect Journalists publishes its global prison census, documenting the number of journalists behind bars ...