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On the first page of Transcription, American poet Ben Lerner’s latest novel, a version of his long-fidgeting semi-autobiographical... Read More

AT THE START of Ben Lerner’s Transcription (2026), we meet a man reading a novel on a train. He’s struggling to read... Read More

The LeBron James Bob Does Sports Memphis controversy continues to churn. Perhaps it would more accurately be called the LeBron... Read More

On October 7, 1955, five poets stood on a tiny stage at the back of a small art gallery in an unfashionable part of San Francisco and read... Read More

In the fall of 1971, Wallace Stegner, who was running his eponymous fellowship at Stanford, offered the writers in his program some financial... Read More

I (bravely!) consider myself a pioneer in tradwife studies. When I first started feeling inexplicably drawn to Ballerina Farm content, for... Read More

In March of last year, about six weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American... Read More

“I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian... Read More

1. In the preface to Male Fantasies, a 1977 psychoanalytic study of “the fascistic type” in Nazi Germany, author Klaus... Read More

In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller and Paul Thacker break down the latest developments after... Read More

Anyone even passingly familiar with the history of poetry can tell you something about Petrarch’s Canzoniere, beginning, no doubt,... Read More

The anti-war protests are real. So is the foreign money behind them. Read More

You work from home. You no longer attend church. You shop at Costco and barely know your neighbors, except when they notify you of misplaced... Read More

I don’t feel like I have a self. Most people I encounter speak about their experience as if they have an internal centre of awareness... Read More

I’ve never been to space, but as a young child my ego was obliterated by the short film Powers of Ten. I was at summer camp, on a... Read More

Jay McInerney’s latest novel, See You on the Other Side, opens—humorously, fittingly—at the Odeon in Manhattan.... Read More

It’s easy to start a fight between David Bowie fans: Simply ask them to name his best album. Thanks to Bowie’s rare combination... Read More

There’s a meme, of sorts, that pops up on Twitter from time to time: why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore? The... Read More

The first thing Deep Throat says in this film is worth remembering: “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House.... Read More

Most of us agree, at least in principle, that a stronger commitment to free speech on our campuses and in public life would be a welcome... Read More

Authenticity, performance, the thin line between fact and fiction: these are, by now, the well-known central preoccupations of Ben... Read More

I hadn’t thought of Robert Frost as a poet of midlife.  Read More

From the earliest days I can and cannot recall, my existence was something of a petri dish: eating raw butter, speaking with a lisp, and... Read More

Films don’t come much more self-consciously provocative than Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama. It’s... Read More

“I look for you,” writes Solomon ibn Gabirol in eleventh century Spain. “I don’t know how to look for You,”... Read More

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka... Read More

By now, the argument has a bleak familiarity: Conservatives lack the toolkit to make good art, and all too often they lack the perception to... Read More

Here are works on and of the West, including The Oracle’s Daughter, Brand New Beat, and Questions 27 and 28 that we’re excited to... Read More

Ibram X. Kendi has been relatively quiet since 2025, when his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University closed its doors. The... Read More

What are the functions of the genuine literary critic? Some claim that the critic serves no purpose: He or she merely gets in the way of the... Read More