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

Photograph by Marco Borggreve. Courtesy of Alisa Weilerstein.

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

The Japanese writer Taeko Kōno is a maestro of transgressive desire whose stories often—and deliciously—use food as a metaphor for sexual appetite. Kōno, who died in 2015, is considered one of Japan’s ...

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed. It ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of ...

I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly ...

In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home ...