I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass ...

Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional ...

Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed ...

Once, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked to rail against Nancy Pelosi, who ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $59.99. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $39.99. Video games, even when played alone, have to be ...

Coming of age in the Seventies as a Midwesterner, a Mormon, and a resident of a town of about five hundred people, I didn’t get to meet a lot of outspoken liberals, but those I did meet made strong ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. Princeton University Press. 408 pages. $22.95. The New Science, by Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Italian by Jason Taylor and Robert C.

“No bears,” said Vera, the realtor, who lived next door in a blue colonial. “Bobcats, however . . . ” She crossed the kitchen to the Dutch door and unlatched it. She pointed to a low branch in the ...