The new kind of AI skincare ad is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as “Purification Slop." ...

Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

There is a pivotal early scene in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia in which T. E. Lawrence and his superior, Colonel Brighton, visit the desert encampment of Prince Faisal, a leader of the Arab ...

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan. The ...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start ...

I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you ...

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in ...

Before I started it, I knew that anti-Zionism existed as a tradition, but I hadn’t heard of half these people. For me, one of the lessons of the past few years has been that Zionism affects everything ...