Read the first installment of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. “Would you say that you have a personality?” I ...

Warhol’s resigned tone belies what he woke up to and lived in day after day: the great something that was his work, which is ...

Ingmar Bergman spareness, your love of astrological signs, fluted lines, specific and sharp as stalactites in the cave of ...

Yan Lianke’s story “ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky ,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris ...

I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the ...

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it. I couldn’t pretend to be that surprised by the proposition, ...

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble ...

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades ...

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...