I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

Harper’s Magazine turns 175 this month, but New Books is only twenty-three—too young to rent a car without incurring an additional fee. It feels older, doesn’t it? Those two imperious monosyllables, ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

Once, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked to rail against Nancy Pelosi, who ...

I’ve never wanted to be pregnant, and I’ve been pregnant three times. Each time I learned the news, my commitment to what I’d already known was confirmed viscerally and instantaneously—with the ...

Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $59.99. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $39.99. Video games, even when played alone, have to be ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a ...

When 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 in ...

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala, translated by William Savinar. Vanderbilt University Press. 206 pages. $34.95. The Dope: The Real History of ...

Writing 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 ...