“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.”
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending excellent stories by Tony Ho Tran, Rachel Aviv, Ariel Saramandi, Theo Lipsky, and Inori Roy.
Lessons for the End of the World
“On Octavia Butler, the L.A. fires, and the uses and misuses of the things that cannot be recovered.”
A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer
“Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?”
Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece
“Will an A.I. restoration of ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ right a historic wrong or desecrate a classic?”
Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
“A century ago, an aspiring actress published a remarkable autobiography. She made up most of it.”
When the Arctic Melts
“What the fate of Greenland means for the rest of the Earth.”
‘Actually Really Sacred’: A George Saunders Reading List
Nine essays and interviews from literature’s favorite laureate of compassion.
A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
“Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges.”
The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses
“Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time.”

