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Oct 14, 2026
“What is our contemporary digital-infused life if nothing else but a sustained experiment in self-deception?”
Oct 14, 2026
What was Unmuzzled OX? Andy Warhol posed with it. So, improbably, did Rodney Dangerfield — in a robe, with a lapdog
Oct 14, 2026
Janet Malcolm's sentences were cold, clear, and clean. Rarely did she turn those sentences on herself
Oct 13, 2026
The literary world’s revulsion toward AI nurtures a self-defeating refusal to understand it, and thus how to resist it
Oct 13, 2026
When the future is hard to see, Lea Ypi’s grandmother told her, learn from the past. She knew what she was talking about
Oct 13, 2026
For decades, Fredric Jameson refused to train specialists. His students were meant to become intellectuals
Oct 10, 2026
Mencken is still relevant, but which Mencken? There were many — some confounding, some repellent, others bracing and hilarious 
Oct 10, 2026
Smuggling literature behind the Iron Curtain took ingenuity. Think microscopic copies of Solzhenitsyn nestled in a baby’s diaper
Oct 10, 2026
Literary culture has changed, often for the worse. But that doesn't mean the world is also getting worse
Oct 9, 2026
A quip about Hitler made Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy enemies. A subway-platform truce made them friends for life
Oct 9, 2026
Silicon Valley’s self-styled futurists build marvelous machines. Their politics, though, recycle discredited ideas. Jill Lepore explains
Oct 9, 2026
Robert Frost was both a skeptical believer and a believing skeptic. Yet his letters reveal a soul closer to despair
Oct 8, 2026
Is a 600-page history of the British novel a monument to a dying form? If so, it's a joyous one
Oct 8, 2026
Generational analysis is almost always nonsense," says Leon Wieseltier. No one told Yale's Kent Professor of Law and History
Oct 8, 2026
After his 10-year-old daughter died, Darwin sought solace in his barnacles. For the naturalist, grief was best relieved by work
Oct 7, 2026
Why don’t little magazines like n+1, The Point, and The Drift produce more book reviews? Ross Barkan details an emerging problem
Oct 7, 2026
Woodworking, building computers, photography — why is so much of Francis Fukuyama’s memoir concerned with his hobbies?
Oct 7, 2026
William T. Vollmann's publisher insisted he shorten his novel. “I said, ‘I cut it, but I’m really sorry but unfortunately, it’s like 400 pages longer now”
Oct 6, 2026
“The real secret to beating envy is to realize that envy, in addition to being a great vice and an internal poison, is a drag”
Oct 6, 2026
Are single-mindedness and arrogance what’s required to write great fiction? Consider the case of Cormac McCarthy
Oct 6, 2026
The almost-forgotten Akhenaten. The pharaoh revolutionized Egyptian theology and art, then was erased from the material record
Oct 3, 2026
From the perspective of a career academic, the discourse in large parts of literary Substack appears worryingly thin and poorly informed
Oct 3, 2026
The problem with pandemic novels? Their authors were scared, unmoored, and used their fiction as a staging ground for psychological parables
Oct 3, 2026
Habermas believed the gap between expert and layperson could always, in principle, be closed by the right chain of translation
Oct 2, 2026
A poem you can put your beer on. The mimeo revolution of the 1960s generated a deluge of experimental printing
Oct 2, 2026
"Lust in Chekhov’s story is a humble sin, worthy of pity. It causes no wars and burns no buildings"
Oct 2, 2026
Self-help and life hacks treat existence as a puzzle to be solved. The ancients had a name for that: heresy
Oct 1, 2026
Fitzcarraldo Editions is one of few publishers willing to take risks. Its reward: publishing Joshua Cohen, Jon Fosse, and Annie Ernaux
Oct 1, 2026
For as long as there have been writers, they have analyzed, lamented, navel-gazed, and mythologized the writing life
Oct 1, 2026
Contrarianism and controversy boosted John Berger’s reputation as writer — while degrading his mental health