The Unfunny Man Who Believes in Humor
How Lorne Michaels became the arbiter of funny
Jethro’s Corner
A poem for Sunday
A New, Unbearably Honest Kind of Writing
Two authors’ memoirs attempt to communicate intensely isolating experiences to readers.
The Modern Voice of War Writing
In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque reinvented a genre.
What Christopher Hitchens Understood About the Parthenon
The British Museum should return the ancient treasures to Greece for the sake of art, not nationalism.
A Novelist Who Looks Into the Dark
Ali Smith scrambles plotlines, upends characters, and flouts chronology—while telling propulsively readable stories.
Hanif Kureishi’s Relentlessly Revealing Memoir
How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again
Why Contemporary Fiction Loves Analog Tech
In Catherine Airey’s new novel, a young person’s curiosity about a life lived without social media or streaming is deployed to superb effect.
In Search of the Book That Would Save Her Life
Sarah Chihaya’s unconventional memoir charts her troubled relationship with the literature that formed her.
The Stranger Things Effect Comes for the Novel
A crop of stories is responding to the fakery of the digital age by embracing the realness of analog objects.
Cloud Pantoum
A poem for Sunday
What to Read in the Face of Disaster
Can any writer offer useful wisdom when ash rains over a metropolis?
The ‘Dark Prophet’ of L.A. Wasn’t Dark Enough
As fires have raged, so have citations of the prescient author Mike Davis. But in a changed world, we need new thinkers too.
Be Like Sisyphus
How to embrace hopeful pessimism in a moment of despair
There’s a New Language Sheriff in Town
Whether renaming the “Gulf of America” or issuing edicts on gender, Trump is enforcing his own brand of political correctness.
The Millworker’s Wife
A poem for Sunday
How Does a Real Person Become a Character?
Two novels take different approaches to bringing the dead back to life.
The Forgotten Woman Who Transformed Forensics
In the 1970s, Martha Goddard invented the rape kit. So why did she die in relative obscurity?
The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon
Kari Ferrell’s memoir is a zippy, intimate account of low-level trickery before the era of scams fully erupted.
A New Kind of Immigrant Novel
Aria Aber’s debut about an Afghan German party girl in Berlin shows that there are plenty of ways to tell an outsider’s story.
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