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Nina Berman / Redux The Brutal Reality of Life in America’s Most Notorious Jail
I’ve been locked up in maximum-security prisons for two decades. My time on Rikers Island was worse.
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Getty; The Atlantic When Good Pain Turns Into Bad Pain
Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, recalls her life as a runner—and the culture she says the sport needs to change.
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Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship
Creative partnerships can be a challenge for fragile egos—but they also provide a lifeline in difficult times.
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Gregory Halpern / Magnum Remembering the Strange Dream of Lockdown New York
It took a pandemic to imagine a more humane city.
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Getty; The Atlantic What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts
A 1933 novel tracks the Nazis’ rise to power in real time.
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Getty; The Atlantic What a Famous Writer’s Early Work Can Teach Us About Failure
Marguerite Duras’s second novel, The Easy Life, shows that all writing is practice.
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Craig Sillitoe / Fairfax Media / Getty Why Read Literary Biography?
What Shirley Hazzard’s life can, and can’t, tell us about her fiction
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Photo-illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Source: Vatican Pool / … The Reinvention of the Catholic Church
Scandals have taken a toll, and faith is flagging in Europe and the U.S. But Catholicism isn’t on the wane—it’s changing in influential ways.
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María Jesús Contreras ‘That’s Just Like White Noise.’
Any writer with an interest in probing “American magic and dread”—to borrow a phrase from the novel—is probably in conversation with Don DeLillo, whether or not she knows it.
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Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic The Companies That Are Killing Creativity
Amazon and Spotify offer a raw deal for artists.
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Illustration by James Lee Chiahan. Source image: Karol … Cormac McCarthy Has Never Been Better
His two new novels are the pinnacle of a controversial career.
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Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic A Novel That Will Make You Laugh and Then Punch You in the Gut
Kevin Wilson’s Now Is Not the Time to Panic features narrators haunted, yet not bound, by troubled pasts.
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Illustration by Ernesto Artillo. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; … How J. Edgar Hoover Went From Hero to Villain
Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.
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Ben Hickey Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet
We all need a lesson in close reading and a dose of skepticism—especially online.
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Chicago Daily News / Getty; Schlesinger Library, Harvard … Why Did Gay Rights Take So Long?
A quiet movement that began in the 1920s didn’t disappear—it just went underground.
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Tejumola Butler Adenuga The Grimke Sisters and the Indelible Stain of Slavery
The abolitionists have long been portrayed as heroes. A new book views them, and their family, in a different light.
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Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty Bob Dylan Reveals Himself Through 66 Songs
And it’s the closest we’re probably going to get.
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Emin Ozmen / Magnum; The Atlantic A World Where Death Isn’t the End
Namwali Serpell’s new book explores grief as it’s really experienced.
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Caco Neves The Secret of How We Move
Two new books show that movement helps us see the rhythms we all share—whether in the angular works of Martha Graham or in the natural choreographies of daily life.
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Matt Williams The Trap
What it takes to make it in hip-hop’s new capital
