2+ day, 20+ hour ago  (1934+ words) Writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it. Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital…...

6+ day, 21+ hour ago  (1910+ words) And when it comes to seem that he will always be here, that anything else he can remember was just a setup for this eternal joke'that's when the vortex opens and sucks him in. A metaphorical vortex, but also a…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (1701+ words) La Vida Loca'The Baffler Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics, 720 pages. March 2026. I've come to understand that when a self-described nerd says that they like to read, if they're not talking about Barnes and Noble-branded box…...

2+ week, 19+ hour ago  (611+ words) Liu and I first met in Beijing in 2020, where we later became part of Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter about Chinese urban and internet culture that was frequently mistaken for a podcast. We caught up on a video call as Liu…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago  (570+ words) Evergrande was the first casualty. Just like Lehman Brothers in the United States, it was long believed that Evergrande was too big to fail. Just like Lehman Brothers, it crashed. It had crossed each of Xi's three red lines, its…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago  (1399+ words) You can tell a time traveler by the fact that she's generally holding a hand over one ear and asking people to repeat themselves The women around the Dwarf knew that the gift was dormant within her, and yet none…...

3+ week, 1+ day ago  (165+ words) The other month my Uber driver tried to sell me life insurance. This was unnerving considering he was operating a famously dangerous vehicle (Tesla) and because he made it clear that he was personally very well insured. As the adage…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago  (172+ words) The figure of the child collects cultural anxieties like an air filter collects dust. With this one line, Elio cuts to the heart of the creative crisis at Pixar. Hesitant to critique the military or the nuclear family, let alone…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (130+ words) George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries, edited by Geoff Wisner. Library of America, 701 pages. 2026. What saves this congenital conservative is his penchant for self-reflection and his willingness to at least partially revise his views. Strong's civil war diaries serve as…...

4+ week, 21+ hour ago  (296+ words) This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith by Darcey Steinke. HarperOne, 288 pages. 2026. Having to choose between mental torture and physical torture is rather like having to choose between death by water or death by fire. It is only…...