Winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and Columns, and a fourteen-time finalist. The Believer has come home! After a half decade away, the award-winning Believer is back at McSweeney’s.…

A few years ago I met a guy who used to go to wrestling school. The whole point of wrestling school, he explained, is to learn how to perform gymnastics that appear to be real fighting but are actuall...

A few years ago I met a guy who used to go to wrestling school. The whole point of wrestling school, he explained, is to learn how to perform gymnastics that appear to be real fighting but are…

Lots of trans guys I’ve talked to have had a Loren Rex Cameron story, and this is mine: Some years ago now, when I worked up the courage to confess to my spouse that I wanted top surgery—we were newly...

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...

This is the page for The Believer's special swim bundle. For just a subscription, click here. Purchase this bundle alongside a subscription to McSweeney's Quarterly or Illustoria, and get 15% off your...

Winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and Columns, and a fourteen-time finalist. The Believer has come home! After a half decade away, the award-winning Believer is back at McSweeney’s. Su...

But it might not matter. Also: might be Me. Humans aren’t meant to read three  A day, that’s what killed Art Garfunkel. Everyone saw the same article so now We get children in novels remembering Past ...

History is strewn with apocalypses gone wrong. The most delightful nonstarter apocalypse of my youth was Y2K. The computers were going to destroy us. By New Year’s Eve, all of America was hysterically...

At this hour of the morning, the park is populated by reclining bodies, unemployed day laborers: peach and strawberry pickers, tomato-plant thinners, onion toppers, men who weren’t hired at the predaw...

PART I THE BELIEVER: You published your first book, a guide to perfume, in 1992 in France, one of the global centers of perfumery. How did that audience engage with it? LUCA TURIN: First of all, no on...

Fiume o morte!, the 2025 film written and directed by Igor Bezinović, tells the true story of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in a hilarious way. It is part documentary, part docudrama, part perf...

Kurt Vile has been around for a long time now. Born and raised in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of Philly, Vile started playing music as a teenager. In 2005, he and Adam Granduciel cofounded...

The day after my second novel was published, I flew to New York City for an evening literary event at the Center for Fiction featuring myself and two other writers. Out of geographic convenience, I ha...

In April of 2021, I walked into Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). I had been feeling increasingly unstable, and despite not having a plan, my fantasies of suicide were getting h...

The announcements appear on white slips of paper tucked inside fortune cookies, and on postcards of Parachute Jump, the iconic carnival ride that blooms, cherry red, 250 feet above the Coney Island sh...

Lots of trans guys I’ve talked to have had a Loren Rex Cameron story, and this is mine: Some years ago now, when I worked up the courage to confess to my spouse that I wanted top surgery—we were newly...

A few years ago I met a guy who used to go to wrestling school. The whole point of wrestling school, he explained, is to learn how to perform gymnastics that appear to be real fighting but are actuall...

The self-interview is the most horribly conscious of conscious events. Any question would appear to be asked because of a calculation involving the glory gained by being able to give its particular…

Misha Glouberman is my very good friend. Years ago, we started a lecture series together called Trampoline Hall. He was the host, and I picked the lecturers and helped them choose their topics. After…

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…