Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?

www.newyorker.com

I recently created a simple test, which convinced me that the answer is no.

Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save…

Inside a Four-Million-Word Diary of 1860s New York – JSTOR Daily

daily.jstor.org

George Templeton Strong chronicles Civil War–era New York with unmatched immediacy, capturing daily life and upheaval.

Tabula Rasa: Volume Six

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A project meant not to end.

Ian Frazier on George W. S. Trow’s “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse”

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The writer and his great subject—Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records—shared a deeply American restlessness.

The Brilliance and the Badness of “The Sun Also Rises”

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Although Ernest Hemingway’s novel makes positive claims about what one should be—brave, admiring of nature and grace—its architecture is held up primarily by hatred.

Why I Wrote “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller

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As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the…

Patrick Radden Keefe on Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”

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New Takes on the classics. Throughout our centennial year, we’re revisiting notable works from the archive. Sign up to receive them directly in your inbox.In 1972, on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson asked Truman Capote about capital punishment. Capote had…

Finishing School: Hands Off Our Pencils

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Given the wild fluctuations in the market, I did what anyone with a crippling dependence on pencils would do: I took inventory.

Ed Caesar on Nick Paumgarten’s “Up and Then Down”

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A story about a man trapped in an elevator has just the right amount of anxiety.

Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself

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He was a spy, a crusader, an obsessive advocate for neglected people and places—yet his work was shaped, too, by an inner crisis.On November 20, 1959, at a pier in Brooklyn, the writer Peter Matthiessen boarded the M.V. Venimos, a…

This is where The Booker Prize nominees write: from kitchen tables to a cemetery bench

www.wallpaper.com

From kitchen tables to bare desks (and even a cemetery bench): 12 writers from the Booker Prize 2025 longlist on their favourite writing set-ups

The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department

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Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.

Nathan Heller on E. B. White’s Paragraph About the Moon Landing

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New Takes on the classics. Throughout our centennial year, we’re revisiting notable works from the archive. Sign up to receive them directly in your inbox.The New Yorker was in its infancy when it discovered Elwyn Brooks White, who made his…

Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists – Longreads

longreads.com

A found list is a rare analog window into someone else’s needs—an accidental autobiography, a blank space to be filled with one’s imagination.

Tabula Rasa

The New Yorker

This is the third article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volume One and Volume Two. Edward Abbey was a walking Profile subject. In 1972, I came close to acting on that fact, but in the ensuing years never got to it, as with all the other story ideas in this reminiscent montage.

Tabula Rasa

The New Yorker

This is the fourth article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volumes One, Two, and Three. In a cogent sense, I have spent, at this writing, about eighty-eight years preparing for Wordle. I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle.

He Was My Role Model. My Mentor. My Supplier.

O.G. rings me in the a.m. to say he’s just touched down in Phoenix. It’s the day before he said he’d arrive, and while there was a time when I’d treat the seeming opacity of his plans as par, the call’s a minor surprise.

Katherine Dunn’s Dark Carnival of Desire

The New Yorker

When Katherine Dunn’s novel “Geek Love” became Sonny Mehta’s first purchase as editor-in-chief at Knopf, she became famous in the literary world, at the age of forty-three, after years of obscurity.

The Problem of Nature Writing

The New Yorker

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover.