The Books Briefing: What’s Wrong With Following a Recipe?
On recipes, spontaneity, and time: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Why Are We So Spiteful?
Our culture is pettily vindictive in part because it is unequal. But we cannot punish our way to a more just society.
The Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career
How she became a novelist, what politics and writing have in common, and why, at the end of every good story, someone’s got to die
The Books Briefing: Why the Graphic-Novel Format Can Be Perfect for Memoirists
Illustrated memoirs offer an expansiveness that prose ones sometimes cannot: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright
A previously unpublished novel invites a reassessment of a writer criticized for his doctrinaire pessimism about race in America.
How the Space Fantasy Became Banal
The final frontier, as a setting, has long channeled giddy dreams of human communion. A new group of cultural works explores the opposite possibility.
The Opportunists
In Louis Menand’s monumental new study of Cold War culture, success owes less to vision and purpose than to self-promotion.
Women Refusing to Be Like Other Women
New novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri explore the liberating power of isolation.
The Dharma of Working Out
In her new memoir, Alison Bechdel runs, climbs, bikes, skis, spins, and Soloflexes her way toward transcendence.
On Rape Narratives and the Surprising Value of Plot
Why literary novels about wrenching events are taking more and more cues from crime writing
The Books Briefing: How to Be Happy
Everyone says they want to be happy. But do we mean the same thing? Your weekly guide to the best in books.
Celebration
A poem by Grace Schulman, published in The Atlantic in 2009
The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout
A memoir of life in Silicon Valley, a capitalist satire, a novel that envisions a better future, and more: Your weekly guide to the best in books
What Grief Tastes Like
Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart shows the possibilities and limitations of the food memoir.
The Dark Side of the Houseplant Boom
American culture is becoming more and more preoccupied with nature. What if all the celebrations of the wild world are actually manifestations of grief?
Don’t Underrate the Political Spouse
How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands’ ambitions—and their own
The Interior Lives of Hoarders
Cultural portrayals of hoarding tend to invite pity rather than empathy, revulsion rather than self-reflection. A new entrant in the field masterfully refocuses the lens.
Late-Night Classical Radio Host
A poem for Sunday
The Books Briefing: The New Legacy of America’s Wilderness
Humanity’s long and complex relationships with the natural world: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The True Costs and Benefits of Fracking
New York is getting more out of the domestic oil boom than North Dakota ever will.