William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob ...

I just wanted to tap. But in the mid-Eighties and early Nineties, in the well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey, the price of flapping, winging, and shuffling off to Buffalo was… ...

Shia LaBeouf and I were born six days apart in June 1986. I see him as the representative of my nanodemographic—as if my week’s cohort of white American males emerged from a brief huddle to announce, ...

From Wildcat Dome, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. She gets off the bus and walks for about twenty meters along the ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

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From the Archive Timeless stories from our 174-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day.

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"The overall impression I came away with from the court decision was that Jarvis Jay Masters was considered a low-grade person who only deserved a low-grade trial. It’s certainly what he got." ...

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How the press combats rumor, the market rigger, and the propagandist ...