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

www.newyorker.com

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.

Tell me things about talking to strangers

As the adage goes, everyone you meet knows something you don't. I’ve long aspired to be the sort of person who curiously gleans stories, tidbits, and heartfelt confessions from the people I meet.

Fast Times on America’s Slowest Train

Longreads

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. In 2014, the National Rail Passenger Corporation, best known as Amtrak, pulled off one of the epic marketing coups of U.S.

Confessions of a Viral AI Writer

WIRED

Six or seven years ago, I realized I should learn about artificial intelligence. I’m a journalist, but in my spare time I’d been writing a speculative novel set in a world ruled by a corporate, AI-run government.

My Fathers Death in 7 Gigabytes

WIRED

It was a reasonable death. He was 90 and took the inevitable final turn in late March. “I think this is it,” my brother said from the nursing home. “They brought in the snack cart.”  I went to Baltimore and fished a ginger ale out of a bowl of melting ice and sat by the bed.