Essays

Toni Morrison’s Native Figures

A new reading of race in her novels

Namwali Serpell

How LLMs Set My Fiction Free

Writing no longer felt like experimenting. AI made it fun again.

Christopher Sorrentino

My AI Boyfriend

A cynic enters the data pool

Lauren Oyler

Chasing Alice

The life and death of a chatbot

Sheila Heti

Donna Haraway’s Utopian Promise

We were supposed to become feminist cyborgs. Instead, we got ChatGPT.

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Jagged Intelligence

The dangerous unknowns at the heart of LLMs

Melanie Mitchell

Browse

Essays

Dogsbody

Dale Peck

March 16, 2026

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club

Aria Aber

March 16, 2026

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife

Jhumpa Lahiri

March 16, 2026

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body

Megan O’Grady

March 16, 2026

Who Was Shakespeare?

What Hamnet does—and doesn’t—get right

Dana Stevens

March 10, 2026

My First Book Outed Me

How writing poems changed the course of my life

Carl Phillips

January 26, 2026

Portrait of Audley “Queen Mother” Moore

Essay of the Week

The Forgotten Visionary of Reparations

Queen Mother Moore called for liberation, not just compensation

Robin D. G. Kelley

January 19, 2026

Essay of the Week

No Harm

An excerpt from the winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize

Jonathan Gleason

January 13, 2026

Dick Rudisill’s “Ruined Couch,” a gelatin silver print of a cushionless, dirt-covered sofa

Objects of Desire

Loveseat

I threw it away. Then I wanted it back.

Helen Phillips

December 15, 2025

Seamus Heaney surrounded by books at London’s Royal Society of Literature in March 1995

Searching for Seamus Heaney

What I found when I resolved to read him

Elisa Gonzalez

December 15, 2025

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