Aileen Keown Vaux and I share an obsession with what it means to be from the West—the particular gothic weirdness of the region, the grandeur and threat of its landscapes and the histories of ...

I stared at the bracelet on my mother’s arm. At first glance I’d thought it was ugly. Odd stones, rough and discolored. Off-white but not like pearls or opals, more like soiled linen. And it got worse ...

Bartman: Reading books is one of the great joys of my life, and interpreting a book into visual language that, in some way, ...

There is a video I have watched only once. A man in Al Fashir, in Sudan’s Darfur region, holds his phone to his face. He is calling his son. The footage moves the way all footage of this kind moves, ...

I have a scar that runs from my hip to my knee, and for years I described it the way a doctor would: fracture, plate, six screws. The morning before the surgery, I remember staring at the ceiling of a ...

Between the angular cuts of the typography, the searing red letterforms, and the torn wallpaper, the cover of Our Cut of Salt conveys layers of dread—which is apropos for a novel branded “a ...

I expected Dr. Robert Lamb to be a brash, quick-moving former pre-med like the ones I’d slept with just after college. But when I met him in the exam room, he had Teddy-bear eyes, large and ...

My partner and I have been trying to have people over more often. We recently hosted a dinner party where the conversation found its way to retirement. Our acquaintances, all in their late twenties ...

Hernan Diaz’s Ply (Riverhead Books, 2026) is a work of unapologetic maximalism. It is a Dickensian story of an orphan mastering an illicit trade; a plot-driven noir; a pointed exploration of our ...

I rested my hand on my friend’s back, ready at any moment to hold her hair, as she dry-heaved into the movie theater hedges. When we decided to see The Substance on its opening night, before the hype ...

Psychiatry was treating its patients as biological machines. That was George Engel’s fear in the 1970s when he proposed the biopsychosocial model: an insistence that biology, psychological history, ...