Makenna Goodman’s novel, Helen of Nowhere (Coffee House Press, 2025), begins with a discredited academic bemoaning the downward spiral of his career and blaming the women in his life. When he decides ...

This year, amid celebrations of the country’s 250 th anniversary, there have been countless opportunities to find community in our collective citizenship. The trouble with many of these celebrations, ...

In 1985, Lily loses her right eye to a strand of barbed wire. In 1986, she begins burying her teeth. I watch her from the kitchen window. She digs with her hands, pulls the tooth from her pocket and ...

In December 2021, writer Alex McMillan created the “Yankee Candle’s Stages of Abstraction.” They described a series of increasingly abstract Yankee Candle scents. The lower levels represent physical ...

There is a video I have watched only once. A man in Al Fashir, in Sudan’s Darfur region, holds his phone to his face. He is calling his son. The footage moves the way all footage of this kind moves, ...

Between the angular cuts of the typography, the searing red letterforms, and the torn wallpaper, the cover of Our Cut of Salt conveys layers of dread—which is apropos for a novel branded “a ...

I expected Dr. Robert Lamb to be a brash, quick-moving former pre-med like the ones I’d slept with just after college. But when I met him in the exam room, he had Teddy-bear eyes, large and ...

I rested my hand on my friend’s back, ready at any moment to hold her hair, as she dry-heaved into the movie theater hedges. When we decided to see The Substance on its opening night, before the hype ...

Psychiatry was treating its patients as biological machines. That was George Engel’s fear in the 1970s when he proposed the biopsychosocial model: an insistence that biology, psychological history, ...

Rainbow Rowell writes a lot of things—comic books, graphic novels, fantasy stories with a distinct Drarry undertone (yeah, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy kiss in certain corners of the internet)—but ...

Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear is an acidly funny, satirical take on the rise of tradwife culture, social media influencers, and the pressure on women to perform the perfect life. At the ...

I read Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, Belle Burden’s memoir in a single day. The book grew out of an essay she had written for The New York Times’ Modern Love column about her twenty-year marriage ...