The AARP stands for nothing. In 1999, the group announced that its four-letter initialism, which for more than forty years had denoted the American Association of Retired Persons, would thenceforth…

Read more

On Elden Ring

Read more

Hare (Blue Eyes), by Valerie Hammond © The artist. Courtesy Planthouse, New York City Had I known that Aesop’s fables were so unhinged, I would’ve turned to them long ago.…

Read more

On the Village Voice

Read more

A photograph by Steven Ahlgren from his book The Office, which was published by Hoxton Mini Press © The artist I’ve never visited the office of this magazine. Oh, sure,…

Read more

Fredric Jameson at ninety

Read more

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony in Miami, 1922 © Bettmann/Getty Images One of the most jarring things about the Ku Klux Klan is the silliness of their rituals and…

Read more

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

Read more

Something about poetry—writing it, reading it, writing about reading it—begs to be postponed indefinitely. I don’t mean that I dread it, only that it calls for conditions that never quite…

Read more

The death of the mythical method

Read more

No one can torch the English language like a Beltway insider. A few years ago, phrases like “a feature, not a bug” and “saying the quiet part out loud” burned…

Read more

On Eliot Weinberger

Read more

I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking…

Read more

On Kafka

Read more

Because I’ve written about government conspiracies, I sometimes hear from crazy people. “Only the intervention of AI can stop Man from creating Hell cybernetically,” one wrote recently. “It would be…

Read more

When Guatemalan adoption became big business

Read more

I was six the first time I recall setting foot in a funeral home, and I remember my confusion at the phrase—a home where none but the dead lived, and…

Read more

Billie Holiday’s changeable shade

Read more

Carrie Sun used to be on the side of Big Money. Her memoir, Private Equity (Penguin Press, $29), describes her disillusioning tenure as an assistant to Boone Prescott, the founder…

Read more

The elusive fiction of Phyllis Paul

Read more

The Wa State is an autonomous zone nestled in the highlands of Myanmar bordering China and Thailand. You won’t find it on United Nations maps, but it’s about the size…

Read more

On Mary Beard’s lives of the Caesars

Read more

On the enduring legacy of Marshal Pétain

Read more

On May 21, 1991, in the third-floor men’s room at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a student noticed a hand dangling beneath one of the partitions, already turning blue.…

Read more

The grand, gruesome theories of René Girard

Read more

Did you get this message?, by Esther Pearl Watson © The artist. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles So you’ve seen a UFO—great! May I suggest keeping a lid on it? The…

Read more

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonality

Read more

A few years ago I found myself close to an episode of tabloid intrigue. A friend’s uncle was accused of murdering his wife in a rich Connecticut town. He attempted suicide…

Read more