Daniel Kolitz, author of “The Goon Squad,” on the grotesque, his inventive journalistic approach, and the psychic toll of spending too much time in the GoonVerse.

From Liberalism and Its Discontents, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Modern democracies are facing a deep cognitive crisis. For many years now, societies have been ...

Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster ...

Abel Ferrara’s addiction to filmmaking ...

In February, Death descended on 1425 Old Sunset Trail in the community of Santa Fe Summit in the city of Santa Fe and it ...

Holidays, in themselves, are no longer interesting and I’ve no desire to hear any more about them. To quote Mrs. Quill, from Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies—there was famously only ever one novel and ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

From “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” which appeared in the July 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that ...

Little bottles of neon-yellow liquid, the scent of pastis. Paregoric elixir, or tincture of opium, it sounds like something out of César Birotteau. You can buy it over the counter. The instructions ...

“There are very few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.” With these words, on September 18, 1851, Henry Jarvis ...

The corpse flower, when it opens every few years, attracts admirers by the tens of thousands. It is only in bloom for two or three days, and for those days it stinks. People stand in line to savor its ...