An essay argues that horror cinema inverts the road's promise of freedom, treating highways as routes to dread and the un-understandable. Drawing on Psycho, Lost Highway and The Hitcher, it reads driving as a split, dreamlike state from which no one truly escapes.
An essay on Blade Runner's lasting power, drawing on Stephen Vaughan's set photographs of Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah. It ties the film's city detail, loneliness and shifting cuts to Philip K. Dick's novel and to nostalgia for a future now in the past.
Tracing serial fiction from Dickens's 19-installment Pickwick Papers through magazine-era serials to today's Substack newsletters, the essay argues that market incentives and fragmented modern attention explain the form's revival. Lauren Oyler's six-part story "The Hater" in New York magazine's Dinner Party newsletter serves as the current example.
Drawing on a reader's reply, the essay argues that political order runs on three layers moving at different speeds: power, ideology and culture. It contends China's continuity comes from their alignment, while consumer democracies lack a culture that sustains a long-term consensus.
An essay argues that generative AI is a form of bodily horror, comparing John Desmond Bernal's vision of discarding the human body to The Exorcist. It urges readers to resist AI by creating art and literature and by avoiding euphemistic language about it.
An essay examines the Salvador Dalí Museum's AI-built digital Dalí, trained on archival photos, film and audio, and treats it as a form of 'undead labor' in which a dead person's likeness is put to work. It also traces the 2024 Ask Dalí sequel and the wider prospect of reanimating the dead from digital archives.
A review-essay on Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich that critiques Silicon Valley's libertarian "network state" vision. It argues such enclaves would serve a cognitive elite, breed conflict and alienation, and reflect loneliness that Arendt linked to totalitarianism.
The essay defends the dilettante against the dictionary view of a shallow amateur, arguing that a wide-ranging, delight-driven pursuit of many interests is a mode of abundance. Drawing on Goethe and Schiller's 1799 essay, it presents dilettantism as a freedom from specialisation and meritocratic pressure.
A philosopher and mathematician argues that frontier AI solving famed problems undermines the "checklist" view of mathematical progress, and proposes a "generative encounter" model in which human purpose and open-ended inquiry remain central to mathematics.
Jesse Wright, writing for Current Affairs, traveled Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica and reflects on the historic highway as land is bought up for AI data centers. He asks what these massive facilities will leave behind compared with the road's legacy.
A philosophy applicant who faced over 20 rejections argues that culture and philosophers overvalue perseverance, and that quitting has exploratory value because failure reveals one's talents, limits and real passions. He draws on Sarasvathy, Schmidtz, Nozick and Descartes.
Robert Jensen argues that economics, political science, sociology and similar fields cannot be sciences in the way physics is, because human societies are too complex and ethically off-limits for controlled experiments. He holds that they can still reveal useful patterns in human behavior if researchers acknowledge their embedded values and judgments.
A former physics student recounts being fired from his first consulting job in 2001 and uses the episode to examine physics as a way of thinking. He weighs reductionism against treating physics as a framework for navigating chaotic systems, alongside the subject's declining uptake in England and its use by Musk, Cummings and Munger.
Biographer Sarah Fritz argues that women's biographies often default to men's perspectives, and describes how she centered Clara Schumann's own viewpoint in Madame Composer. She retold her prodigy years, previously narrated through her father's diaries, from Clara's perspective and challenged older assumptions about her self-doubt.
Poet Traci Brimhall describes how she wrote about her mother's death, borrowing poetic structures like the ghazal and elegy for essays, along with crocheting, embroidery and pilgrimage. She concludes that form helps her approach grief even without full consolation.
Maris Kreizman looks at the publishing "make book," a title an editor champions to build into a hit, arguing that corporate consolidation has made this harder. Small presses like Catapult, now closing, increasingly nurture debut writers.
Using David Foster Wallace's essay on boiling lobsters alive, Marianne Janack asks whether it is wrong to make people confront ethical questions they cannot immediately change. She draws on Descartes, Malebranche, and Beauvoir and Sartre's idea of facticity to argue that comfortable ignorance is easier but not better.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Marianne Janack
Novelist Jung Yun recounts leaving a secure New York career, shaped by her immigrant parents' creed of being smart, to pursue writing. She reflects on the randomness of publishing, citing Markus Dohle's 2022 remark, and on why the risk is worth it.
— via Literary Hub, Jung Yun
A fiction writer whose novel stalled explains how becoming a preacher in his mid-thirties changed his craft. Writing sermons for a congregation instead of an judging audience taught him to commit to a story's depth and to treat writing as practice rather than performance.
— via Literary Hub, Mindy Misener
Author Kate Maupin argues that post-apocalyptic fiction works as escapism as well as warning, and describes how raising a son with serious mental health struggles led her from fairy-tale fantasy to writing about collapse, loss and the light found in surviving it.
— via Literary Hub, Kate Maupin
