How did cowboy hats and boots become the visual iconography of American rural music?
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Ronan Farrow, Diana Nyad, Rachel Monroe, Ross Andersen, and Teresa Mathew.
Talking with Multi-Genre Writer Walter Mosley
The author talks with The Paris Review about writing, crime fiction, and his depiction of Black American life.
Why We Still Can’t Quit F. Scott Fitzgerald
With a new “lost” short story published by The New Yorker, the bottle is just about dry.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Cheerful Novel of Climate Change
The sci-fi writer explains how his city-dwellers learn to survive and thrive after a climate-change catastrophe.
Steven’s First Limo Ride
Steven is both the young protagonist’s stuffed frog and new little brother in this piece of short fiction about a troubled family, told from the blunt, optimistic point of view of a 10-year-old.
On Not Being Able to Read
In law school, they told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me.
Nell Battle Lewis, Storyteller for Jim Crow
How an otherwise high-minded social reformer preserved and perpetuated her white supremacist worldview.
Essay
Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.” —Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus, April 20, 2017 I. The Smartest Person in the Room I often say that one of the […]
Angrily Experiencing the Best Days of Our Lives
Ukrainian author and poet Serhiy Zhadan writes about resisting corruption and coping with loss in a society that is spiraling senselessly into conflict.

