a fiery writer-owned cooperative

One day in springtime John couldn’t stop talking and the blue of the sky seemed as audible to him as the peal of a bell, and as he walked the long Elysian fields of campus he began to laugh, at the th...

I heard the two men talking, this morning, before I saw them. Then I saw them, and then they saw me, walking up the steep ramp toward them to the pedestrian bridge over the expressway. Their talking s...

Myriam Gurba descends into the darkness of a new book by Veronica Gonzalez Peña

The greatest love story in Rock ’n’ Roll came from Portland, Oregon.  The one and only time I saw Dead Moon perform in 2004, I was already a superfan, on the threshold of what would be a long career ...

3 p.m. April 2 Adults hide many things about adulthood. Like, for instance, the fact of colonoscopies. This is the dreaded test adults over 45 must endure in order to make sure we haven’t got colon ca...

Canadian pro-democracy activist Charlie Angus raises the alarm, with Nathan Munn

This whale is watching you and judging you for your incursion into his kingdom. His judgement is ruthless but resolves in your favor. You are cleansed.

The aspect ratio is the message, says J.D. Connor; Anna Merlan’s teenage dreamboat

New speculative fiction from Annalee Newitz

One more bouquet for Dolly Parton, from Jídé Salawu

Metal machine thinking repudiated by Nathan Munn

When you’re going through the biggest breakup of your life, it’s natural to seek advice from one of the great rom-com screenwriters of all time. I have just left Brad, and I am reading Nora Ephron. I...

Nancy Kissinger goes berserk in the Newark Airport: a vignette of 1982 by Sarah Weinman

Philip Ardagh’s Bunnies on the Bus, illustrated by Ben Mantle, is one of the most bonkers children’s books I’ve ever had the pleasure of laying eyes on. The tale begins on a sunny summer day in Sunny ...

Zito Madu reviews the documentary 'American Doctor'

How a hacker took over an industry and disrupted the world

The first of David Byrne’s two recent shows at the Hollywood Bowl, a beautiful amphitheatre in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, took place during a week in which various heat records were broken, d...

Recently, my wife and I went for breakfast at Hearts Coffee Shop, a historic diner in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles proper. We squeezed in at the end of the counter, the last seats in ...

One of the most awesome and least appreciated elements of Philip K. Dick’s ever-more-relevant stories of the near future is how so many of his characters are connected to reality by the almost literal...

a fiery writer-owned cooperative

Why Dolly Parton dressed up, by Maria Bustillos; Jack Pendarvis plays a sad, pretty song

There are very few cis, straight artists who merit queer icon status. I tend to a certain skepticism, because sometimes it can seem like just the recognition of gay fans and a few tax-deductible donat...

I spent a night at the Madonna Inn, a delirious confection of a hotel in San Luis Obispo, a few years ago with my family. The in-house restaurant there—properly called Alex Madonna’s Gold Rush Steak H...

Slightly over a decade ago, I heard the Yorùbá word “jápa” for the first time.  It’s always a bit jarring to hear a new word spoken in one’s native language. Sometimes it’s an archaic word, or one...

How a hacker took over the porn industry and disrupted the internet

Felipe De La Hoz on how NYU used to be

The Wikimedia Foundation’s annual Wikimania conference in Paris drew nearly 5,250 participants this year, in person and online. It’s the Foundation’s 25th anniversary, and the conference’s organizers ...

Visionary Alan Moore talks ‘reality’ with Zach Rabiroff

Maria Bustillos on the press and Jason Arday; Brian Hioe is pursued by a weirdo

Until The Lancet published the link to a new paper on social media a few weeks ago (“Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus ...

Jídé Salawu seeks out an elusive flavor

Trevor Alixopulos ponders a neighborhood mystery; a conference in Kuala Lumpur with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Hey man how’s it going I have been having this fantasy. Not a fantasy as such. I suppose fantasy implies something good. Uh—ok what is it? First off I have a gun in my possession. What are we talking...

Ilana Masad and Samantha Paige Rosen talk about new ways to live

a fiery writer-owned cooperative

The recently confirmed $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, in which the AI behemoth agreed to pay to compensate authors whose copyrighted works it had scraped for use in training large languag...

(Part I) This is the first of three parts, inspired by two recent exhibitions: Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum in New York, which closed July 26th, and Leonora Carrington at th...

Sam Thielman and his son saw SPIDER-MAN

How to Destroy a Storied Brand and Crush Your Own Soul in Eight Easy Steps

I never let a July pass me by without revisiting the infamous 1970 bootleg audio of Orson Welles attempting to record voiceover narration for advertisements for various foods, beginning with frozen pe...

An electrifying defense of skills-based treatment from Kate Wagner

Alan Moore on the invention of history, interviewed by Zach Rabiroff

Rax King enjoys the ride and isn’t worried about the wheels

Alternative approaches to The Man, considered by Nathan Schneider

Disclosure Day is undoubtedly a lot of fun. It often feels, as many Spielberg films do, like the work of an enthusiastic kid with a massive budget playing with his favorite toys: Car chases! Train stu...

A text analyzed by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski; Trevor Alixopulos consults Dr. Strange