Holidays, in themselves, are no longer interesting and I’ve no desire to hear any more about them. To quote Mrs. Quill, from Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies—there was famously only ever one novel and ...

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 ...

The bus bumps onto the dark highway. It is almost as cold inside as out, and the windows are already icing over from our breath. Our guide is Céline, a petite Frenchwoman. “We have clouds tonight,” ...

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959). CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare. Under one arm, he’s ...

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

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, ...

We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come. And then it was the third week of September, and I was still ...

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass ...

“This time is different.” With Donald Trump’s second term off to a roaring, snorting start—a furious dust cloud of ICE raids and ICE-raid photo ops, tariffs announced and then paused, a funding freeze ...

From I’m Always Looking Up and You’re Jumping, which will be published next year by Random House.

Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32. In 2001, the ...

While it’s true that other publications are also caving in to the power of “artificial intelligence,” we’re particularly distressed by the submission of our historical rival, once a great voice of ...