Most people, especially New Yorkers, who are proud of their tap water, mock my interest in mineral water; to them, “all water ...

From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle ...

January 1, 2026 – "On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You ...

“I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief,” Alice Oswald told Rachael Allen in our Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue.

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical ...

May 25, 2016 – Our celebration of Glen Baxter proceeds apace. To mark the release of his new book Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings, we’re running two ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

Ambrose Bierce’s old house in St. Helena, California, surrounded by the vineyards of Napa Valley, is in good repair. Eight stout sequoia trunks flare outward from a fused base in the front yard. An ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...

It’s hard to imagine now, but people once gathered together freely, shoulders rubbing against shoulders, breath exchanged between lungs, bodies open to one another—all this closeness, almost a million ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you ...