July 14, 2025 | Ottessa Moshfegh interviews her former crushes, Joyce Carol Oates posts cat pics: Substack is where authors go to get weird... more »
July 11, 2025 | Mountains rise, species disappear — in the incomprehensible vastness of time we encounter the geological sublime... more »
July 10, 2025 | Engagement with art and literature is a way of turning toward the world, towards reality, even in a state of captivity or desolation... more »
July 9, 2025 | The science of consciousness has stagnated around two opposing approaches: physicalism and idealism. There’s another way... more »
July 8, 2025 | Geoff Dyer has been described as an “essayist,” “comic writer,” “humorist,” and worst of all, “travel writer.” How dare they, he asks... more »
July 7, 2025 | For Kurt Vonnegut, survival was a kind of "cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line"... more »
July 4, 2025 | Only mediocrities adhere to rules of writing, so make your prose purple — the purpler the better... more »
July 3, 2025 | The geopolitical stakes of the race for AI dominance prompt a thorny question: Can we preserve both our humanity and our security?... more »
July 2, 2025 | Why do writers write? For pleasure, meaning, money, fame – and for no reason at all. Lydia Davis explains... more »
July 1, 2025 | The mystery of Sylvia Plath is that she was simply ordinary right up to the point that she became extraordinary... more »
June 30, 2025 | Humans have long mistaken fluency for presence. Now, with the rise of hyper-fluent AI, our notions of identity will be tested... more »
June 27, 2025 | The doubt disorder. At the 28th Annual OCD Conference, Andrew Kay asks: What is OCD, and where does it come from?... more »
June 26, 2025 | “Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority”... more »
June 25, 2025 | For influential 20th-century anthropologists, religion could not be reduced to its social function or explained away by other metadiscourses... more »
June 24, 2025 | Geoff Dyer: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign — immaturing with age”... more »
June 23, 2025 | “Violence follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love”... more »
June 20, 2025 | You won’t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, but A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality... more »
June 19, 2025 | Politicians love to mock seemingly useless studies of shrimp treadmills and gecko mechanics — but silly science plays a vital role... more »
June 18, 2025 | James Schuyler, whose poems exuded calm, was prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes... more »
June 17, 2025 | Geniuses behaving badly is a historical commonplace. Indeed, it's enough to wonder if the label is a license to misbehave... more »
June 16, 2025 | The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”... more »
June 13, 2025 | “Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”... more »
June 12, 2025 | From 1770 to 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?... more »
June 11, 2025 | Sandra Cisneros: “Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house”... more »
June 10, 2025 | Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation... more »