Tag Archives: Books and Literature

In 2011, I taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. It was a general-education class, the sort that students say they have to “get out of the way” before they move on to their major courses. Few of the students were avid readers, and many held …

Gary Indiana, the elfin novelist, cultural critic, playwright and artist whose crackling prose and lacerating wit captured the ravages of the AIDS crisis, Manhattan’s downtown art scene, lurid true crimes and his own search for love, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74. The cause was …

“Good Omens,” a series based on a novel by the author Neil Gaiman written in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, will return for a third and final season, but it will consist of only one episode, Prime Video announced on Friday. “Good Omens” is the third production to face turmoil this …

This week, I released an audio essay on Donald Trump. And in a way, it was about Donald Trump’s mind and the peculiar ways in which it works, the degree to which he moves through the world without inhibition and the ways in which that is potentially worsening as he …

Why did pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University chant “N.Y.P.D., K.K.K.” and the Movement for Black Lives demand “an immediate end to Israel’s lethal settler-colonial project”? And how did the tables turn so quickly on Israel — even before its military retaliation — after Hamas attacked it on Oct. 7? If …

In 2014, when I was freshman in college, I saw a job post announcing that Daniel Jones, the founding editor of Modern Love, was looking for an intern to help judge the column’s third college essay contest. I applied, miraculously heard back, interviewed with Dan and then took a test …

The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered. Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces made the time ripe for unbelief — …

The Oliver Sacks that most of the world knew — the one I fell in love with after we met in 2008, when he was 75 — was the beloved neurologist and the author of many best-selling books, admired worldwide. A forthcoming volume of Oliver’s letters, nearly 350 of them, …

By Sadie Stein Dear readers, I don’t require a dedicated ghost-story season. To me, that would be like loving people only on Feb. 14, or pretending canned tomatoes don’t exist. Besides, as I understand it, ghosts don’t work on schedule. But in case you’re stricter than the undead and I, …

Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland a few years ago when he stumbled across something extraordinary: a virtually unknown short story by Bram Stoker, author of the Gothic masterpiece “Dracula.” The story, a creepy tale of the supernatural …