New York Times

  • Weekly Geekery

    New York Times readers who ignore The Economist: Danger, groupthink ahead. Data suggests police de-escalation can work. Goats have feelings, too. (Sheep, not so much.) Babies brainwash you with their cuteness. If the Ghostbusters need props, who you gonna call? MIT professors!

  • Roxane Gay on Resisting Numbness

    There is a new name to add to this list—Alton B. Sterling, 37, killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, La. It is a bitter reality that there will always be a new name to that list. Black lives matter,…

  • A Quiet Corner of the World

    At the New York Times, Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., writes about how a national park in Montana left an indelible mark on her and her marriage: We were both intoxicated by the place, not…

  • Defiantly Diski

    Over at the New York Times, author Heidi Julavits reviews the late Jenny Diski’s memoir, In Gratitude: While I couldn’t read “In Gratitude” without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was ……

  • You’d Prefer Not To

    The Internet has been abuzz with grammatically incorrect chatter since the New York Times recently published an article heralding the end of the period. But Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon doesn’t expect that little dot to go anywhere anytime soon: Bilefsky’s piece…

  • Bring It

    Bring It

    I used to like my mother best when she killed a spider or fly with the palm of her hand.

  • On Writing “Chick Lit”

    At the New York Times, Jennifer Weiner writes about her experience with the gendered devaluation of popular fiction: Somewhere between my birth and my novel’s publication, I’d gotten the message that there were books that mattered and books that did…

  • Reading against Time

    As a child, I loved it when a book took me somewhere else. I still do, but I’m more surprised and grateful now to be transported by words on a page from one world to another. Perhaps because, as grown-ups,…

  • The Perfect Prism: Muhammad Ali and Literature

    For the New York Times, Richard Sandomir investigates how Muhammad Ali influenced literature, as his life story functions as “the perfect prism through which to view sports, race, religion, politics, celebrity, comedy, tragedy.”

  • Sleeping with Machetes

    At the New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson reviews Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing. In this new novel, Gyasi explores the consequences of slavery in 18th-century America and West Africa: Throughout, the focus is on the wounds inflicted on the colonized and the…

  • Tour of Today

    We follow Heffernan through the Smithsonian Natural Museum of Internet History, as she annotates the exhibits: the Kindle, with its lithe design and endless supply of books, usurper of the printed word; the MP3, compressing the rapture and idiosyncrasies of…

  • Dystopian Refuge

    For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about the Middle Eastern writers finding refuge from the post-Arab Spring disillusionment and chaos in dystopian fiction, speaking with writers like Basma Abdel Aziz, author of The Queue, and Saleem Haddad, author of…