Nathalie Léger on Barbara Loden You have to meet Mickey Mantle, Fred Wiseman had said to me at the beginning of my research—he knew Barbara Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana, you should…

This issue features a “micro-interview” with Robert Alter, conducted by Rich Cohen. The micro-interview consists of five exchanges distributed throughout the print magazine. Alter, a professor of…

All must die. When my grandfather died, in the fall of last year, at the age of ninety-four, I realized for the first time just how much he shaped my understanding of America, and even more so of…

I. GET OVER IT There’s a scar on my knuckle in the shape of a star. I got it from punching Alex Rodriguez in the teeth one afternoon in sixth grade. He and eleven other kids cornered me by the chain-l...

I. DYNAMITE In 1868, the West was a mythical place, a land associated with boundless acreage for the speculator, infinite glory for the intrepid mountaineer, and rich veins of ore for the prospector.…

“A lot of it, like anyone’s style, just comes out of what you can’t do.” A few of Kevin Wilson’s all-time favorite short novels:We Have Always Lived in the Castle The Member of the Wedding Mrs.…

Judging by the popularity of the Jurassic Park franchise—five feature films, with a sixth blockbuster scheduled for 2021, three “Lego” Jurassic Park shorts, various theme-park attractions, some…

It’s sometimes easy to forget that our technologically complex world wasn’t created out of whole cloth. Or that it wasn’t always here. Without an awareness of the past, “the sense of time falls in…

I was first introduced to Suzanne Scanlon at Dixon Place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan over a decade ago, at a now seemingly prescient gathering that Kate Zambreno had assembled in…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

An old diary entry of mine dated “MAY ????” reads “THIS IS THE YEAR I DEADHEAD.” I wrote this with the declarative energy of a person who wants to change their life. All the various web articles I…

What does it mean to die well? This question is central to palliative care, the field of medicine in which I work when I am not writing, a field aimed at easing suffering in serious illness and…

The somewhat quaint 1953 Ingmar Bergman film Summer with Monika tells the story of Monika, a young, lubricious working-class girl in Stockholm who falls in love with Harry, a winsome…

1 I had a thing about sensation. It was small, dedicated, working its way in to me. I was reminded of a bee burrowing  into the smooth cone of a flower, how it wags its bottom in the air— funny. 2 I…

On or about December of 1835, in a gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, used for the display of freaks, machines, and oddities, American pop culture officially began. Virginia Woolf first made the…

This Fourth of July, on a ridgeline in remote Upstate New York, Peter Schjeldahl is going to blow stuff up. Schjeldahl is the New Yorker’s erudite longtime art critic. Never a pontificator, he’s the…

At the tail end of 2017, The Believer went to Wordstock, Portland, Oregon’s literary festival. This was a year the U.S. president called the press “the enemy of the people”; his administration…

As he approaches seventy-six, John Cale is a man in a state of evolution. In the past, he tuned his instruments to a refrigerator’s hum in order to resonate on the same frequency as modern life (60 Hz...

THE BOOK The 1898 children’s classic known in America as ​Bob, Son of Battle ​and in England as ​Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir​, by Alfred Ollivant, was long declared—and still is considered, by…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays o...

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

Wallace Shawn is immediately recognizable from his many film and TV roles, including Manhattan, The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre, Clueless, the voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story, The…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays o...

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays o...

Winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and Columns, and a fourteen-time finalist. Named the best magazine of 2022 by Alta. The Believer has come home and now is ready for all your digital r...

Over the last decade, Maggie Nelson’s writing has become one of the guiding intellectual lights for artists of all disciplines. Her books on aesthetics, gender, violence, and, most recently, freedom,…

Stephen Harrod Buhner is a generalist, a scholar of all things, both human and not. He is best known as a writer, but I first came to his work through his talks, which take the shape of digressive…

I had heard of Garth Greenwell’s work, but somehow I had never read any of it until September 2019. I received a galley of his second book, Cleanness, just weeks after I returned to New York from a…

I. THE TRAM TON PASS On October 29, 2013, Scottish botanist James “Jamie” Taggart flew from London to Hanoi via China. He was embarking on his third plant-hunting expedition overseas, and his first…

When I requested an interview with Hanya Yanagihara she politely acquiesced under the condition that we converse via email. “I’m afraid I’m not terrifically articulate in interviews (they make me…

In the distance to the north, we could see an ice floe, perhaps fifty feet long, hovering about thirty feet off the surface of the ocean. It rose up into the air, the ground beneath it perfectly…

In the poem, “Legendary,” from her 2017 publication Ordinary Beasts, Nicole Sealey uses the sonnet form to hold the persona voice of Venus Xtravaganza, a narrator of the 1990 documentary Paris is Burn...

I. CLARICE THE MYSTIC At a reading I gave in Seattle two years ago, a man with white hair told me he had once lived in Brazil and had named his daughter after Clarice Lispector. Later, he handed me a…

About five winters ago, I spent a lot of time wandering around London’s cemeteries. Not so much the famously occupied ones, with their hulking tombs and majestic statues, like Highgate, where Karl Mar...

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

Science was supposed to have banished God, but he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. He is the ghost lurking in our data sets, the cockroach hiding beneath the particle accelerator. He…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

Non-exhaustive list of video games mentioned: Night in the Woods What Remains of Edith Finch EarthBound The Last of Us If you were feeling cheeky, you could call the first chapter of As I Lay Dying a…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays…

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” remarked Jorge Luis Borges. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” For this column, I’ve written short essays o...

Greil Marcus is the author of The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. His The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, will be published in September by…