What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?

Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career

A few days after my brother died, I sat in the living room of a dead house and made eye contact with a bird.  It’d been raining that day: the world outside had been coated in a wet, pewter varnish,…

David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.

YouTube video by Fleetwood Mac

Moving to Paris made my cheeks hurt. After a decade since I’d last worked in France, I found myself back in the land of one of my ancestors’ other colonizers. My Broca’s area could still conjure th…

The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle...

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like...

The essay served as a definitive diagnosis of American race relations. Events soon gave it the force of prophecy.

How the beloved British diarist outlasted her critics

I’ve known Lauren Markham’s writing since her first book, The Faraway Brothers, came out in 2017. Then, a couple years ago, I got to know her a bit more as a person when a friend emailed the two of…

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

Your job as an organizer was to find out what it was that people wanted to be different in their lives, and then to persuade people that it mattered whether they decided to do something about it. This...

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s desperation to be cool as they suck up to Donald Trump is so cringe it makes my skin crawl I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at…

YouTube video by Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern