November 7, 2025 – "Woolf likely imagined these cards would end up in a garbage can or, at best, someone’s attic." ...

Evening fell. This could be seen easily through the glass greenhouse windows. Now certainty had been established.” ...

A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles.

October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Read the first installment of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. “Would you say that you have a personality?” I asked him. What am I really trying to find out—this guy is a robot. I just ...

The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally ...

We came in two cars. A white Honda Odyssey, the back row of seats kowtowed under great reams of toilet paper. Everything else—cartons of grapes, jugs of water, Tupperwares of cut fruit, all of our ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...