In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and ...

This untitled and undated piece may well be the last complete unpublished short story by Vladimir Nabokov. It was probably written and rough-sanded in the summer of 1926, when Nabokov read the prose ...

Lonsan had come to Japan from Thailand in 1995, after a chatty recruiter showed up in her village and offered her a job at a restaurant. She was living with her parents, who had no money or property, ...

Discussed in this essay: On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. E rnst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

Anthem for a forgotten cohortI recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 ...

Frazer’s understanding of history was largely progressive. He believed that primitive magic gave way to religion, religion to science, and that this sequence moved generally from the more false to the ...

How coaches get in athletes’ headsA t the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure ...

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed ...

W hen I pulled the used copy of Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes out of its white plastic mailer it felt oddly light for a book of its girth, its center of gravity not exactly ...

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. Random House. 416 pages. $20. The Soul of America, directed by KD Davison. HBO, 2020. 77 minutes. It’s the beginning of the new ...