Culture
Rumaan Alam and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Female Protagonist
The writer Rumaan Alam has noticed that readers, especially as of late, can be quick to dismiss novels that have characters they find…
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Culture
Renzo Piano’s Light Touch
The world-renowned architect Renzo Piano grew up in Italy watching his father, a local builder, work on construction sites, and he was…
Culture
Clare Carlisle and the Genre-Bender
Clare Carlisle, a British philosopher and an award-winning biographer, is fascinated by books that relate the inner lives and…
Culture
Jeff Bridges Is Digging It
The interior of Jeff Bridges’s garage, in Santa Barbara, California, has the ramshackle ease of an extravagant dorm room: a tiger-print…
Business
Merve Emre Ventures Into the Age Gap
In recent years, Merve Emre—a professor, literary critic, and contributing writer at this magazine—has tackled a range of culturally…
Culture
Fredrik Backman on the Art of Scandinavian Storytelling
Swedish, the native language of the novelist Fredrik Backman, is spoken by only about ten million people, so the writer feels fortunate…
Culture
Li’l Kayla Endures It All
“Precious Rubbish,” a début graphic novel by Kayla E., a book designer turned cartoonist, delivers an unflinching look at the author’s…
Culture
Women Who Made Amanda Seyfried Feel Less Alone
As an actress, Amanda Seyfried regularly inhabits the lives of others, real and imagined. As a reader, too, Seyfried gravitates toward…
Culture
Laurie Santos’s Pursuit of Happiness
Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist at Yale, teaches the most popular course in the university’s three-hundred-year history, Psychology…
Culture
Jesmyn Ward Delights in Being Bewildered
The best-selling novelist and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward tries not to think about her audience until the end of the…
Culture
Jeremy Denk’s Musical Account of American Divisions
In a time of upheaval and uncertainty, the classical pianist and best-selling author Jeremy Denk, like many people, is trying to figure…
Business
Min Jin Lee’s Indelible Twentieth-Century Women
In “Free Food for Millionaires,” Min Jin Lee’s best-selling début novel, the protagonist, Casey Han, is the ambitious daughter of Korean…
Business
Reëxamining Romantic Tropes with the Ripped Bodice
In 2016, Leah Koch and her sister Bea Hodges-Koch opened the Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore, in Los Angeles. Since then, the genre has…
Lifestyle
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Taste for Adventure
In the nineteen-nineties, Fuchsia Dunlop—now a celebrated food writer and expert in Chinese cooking—enrolled at the Sichuan Institute of…
Culture
The Henri Cartier-Bresson of South Korea
During Han’s lifetime—he died in 1999—he was primarily known for his commercial work. In 1966, he founded Han’s Photo, one of the first…
Business
Sebastian Mallaby on Finance’s Intellectual Adventure Stories
Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of five books, including, most recently, “The…
Business
Luca Guadagnino’s Fascination with the Bourgeoisie
Though perhaps best known for their portrayals of desire, Luca Guadagnino’s character-driven dramas, from “Challengers” to “Call Me by…
Culture
Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love
Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in…
Culture
Remembering Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean Heyday (and Forgetting His Recent Lear)
So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to…
Culture
The Twenty-first Century’s Best Works of Native American History
As Ned Blackhawk points out in his National Book Award-winning “The Rediscovery of America,” most histories of the United States’ origin…
Culture
What to Read This Winter, According to Tattered Cover
Tattered Cover is a Denver institution. Founded in 1971, it’s now one of the U.S.’s largest independent-bookstore businesses. Kathy Baum,…
Culture
Why Josh Brolin Loves James Joyce
The Oscar-nominated actor Josh Brolin—known for his roles in films such as “No Country for Old Men,” “Dune,” and the “Avengers”…
News
Annette Gordon-Reed on the Dark Side of the American Story
Annette Gordon-Reed is a historian and a professor at Harvard Law School. She won the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize…