I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School,…
On July 7, we published on our website an open letter signed by more than one hundred and fifty prominent writers, artists, and scholars. “The free exchange of information and…
Shirley Jackson’s devastating 1948 short story “The Lottery” takes place in what might be a provincial corner of America in which an annual, compulsory lottery lends a degree of adventure…
From Breaking Bread with the Dead, which was published last month by Penguin Press. Navigating life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. There are days…
From Angels & Saints, which was published last month by New Directions. Surprisingly little was originally known about the angels. They are mentioned fewer than two hundred times in the…
From a conversation between Vladimir Alexeev, a data journalist, and GPT-3, a language generator developed by the artificial-intelligence laboratory OpenAI. GPT-3 learned to respond to questions by analyzing online data.…
From The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, published this month by Archway Editions. The two-act play was written in response to the Broadway musical Hamilton, which Miranda composed based on a…
From Having and Being Had, a book of non-fiction, which was published last month by Riverhead Books. Every year, financial advisers come to campus to meet with faculty, but I…
From Fathoms: The World in the Whale, which was published in July by Simon and Schuster. Many international collecting institutions aim to feature a blue whale among their centerpieces. Suspended…
From reports of weapons used by demonstrators and police officers in Portland, Oregon, where authorities have repeatedly used force to break up crowds protesting the police killing of George Floyd.…
1960s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string—Like a book of life I’m in the kitchen with my killer Picking all the teeth out of a mouth harp Cigarette-ing…
Learning to Go to Sea on Shore, by George Wright. Originally published in the November 1918 issue of Harper’s Magazine It is a small hotel compared with the fashionable resorts…