What Grief Tastes Like
Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart shows the possibilities and limitations of the food memoir.
The Dark Side of the Houseplant Boom
American culture is becoming more and more preoccupied with nature. What if all the celebrations of the wild world are actually manifestations of grief?
Don’t Underrate the Political Spouse
How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands’ ambitions—and their own
The Interior Lives of Hoarders
Cultural portrayals of hoarding tend to invite pity rather than empathy, revulsion rather than self-reflection. A new entrant in the field masterfully refocuses the lens.
Late-Night Classical Radio Host
A poem for Sunday
The Books Briefing: The New Legacy of America’s Wilderness
Humanity’s long and complex relationships with the natural world: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The True Costs and Benefits of Fracking
New York is getting more out of the domestic oil boom than North Dakota ever will.
The Books Briefing: Miss the Movies? Read the Books.
Even if you're not going to theaters or streaming on demand, you can still curl up with the original works: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Elizabeth McCracken on the Mysteries of Married Life
“Weddings are public; marriages are supposed to be private, or so I always thought.”
The Irish Wedding
A short story
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car
A poem for Holocaust Remembrance Day
The Awful Wisdom of the Hostage
What a new memoir reveals about endurance—and extreme remorse
As From a Quiver of Arrows
A poem by Carl Phillips, published in The Atlantic in 1995
Florida Man
A poem for the congressman from Florida
The Books Briefing: Beverly Cleary Saw Kids as They Are
Our staff share some of the children’s books that helped them identify and work through difficult emotions early in life: Your weekly guide to the best in books
‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary, Hemingway, dramatizes one of the great revolutions in the history of American literature.
The Paradox of Caring About ‘Bullshit’ Jobs
A new entry into the literature of work makes an uneasy case for small acts of reclamation.
The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary
The author recognized that humiliation is a kind of trauma—and that gentle humor could help neutralize it.
The Unending Assaults on Girlhood
Rape culture permeates adolescence. The lessons that it teaches girls cast long shadows.
What AI Can Teach Us About the Myth of Human Genius
If literature were no longer the sole purview of the human, other fictions intrinsic to the world of letters might also be called into question.
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