“The stories he told himself about his own perilous and erratic progress through the world would be reshaped to place this anal ailment at the summit of his pilgrimage.”
From the novel My Lover, the Rabbi, by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social.
“La Tour has something to tell us about true drama that Caravaggio doesn’t, really—about the way that it is not about drawing attention but about giving it…” —Nicole Krauss
harpers.org/archive/2026...
“The President was hopping boldly out of golf carts in Texas and Maine to tell the traveling White House press corps that ‘regime change’ was coming soon to downtown Baghdad.”
Lewis H. Lapham on Iraq (October 2003).
“The nights in these rooms, those cursed nights of unwanted children.”
From Nightmare of the Embryos by Mariella Mehr, out in March with New Directions.
“The beach was filled with stones that had been smoothed to perfect ovals and circles by thousands of years of being tossed by the sea, some gray and striated with pure white, and others that when wet were the color of emeralds.” —Nicole Krauss
“The temptation to both seize and cede power in the face of fear proves irresistible time after time.”
M. Gessen @mashagessen.bsky.social on wartime and the state of exception, from 2017.
“The startup’s mainstream breakthrough was a viral ad that showed Roy using a pair of speculative Cluely-enabled glasses on a blind date. His date asks how old he is; Cluely tells
him to say he’s thirty.”
Sam Kriss profiles the generation heralding in the AI age.
“Since the death of her second husband, the art teacher, the estrangement from her family has weighed heavier. Did mother die today? Johanna wonders.”
Elaine Blair reviews the novel Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth.
“Like a palm reader, Bose could tell how much suffering had been inflicted and how long it would take for the plant to recover its joie de vivre.”
Dan Piepenbring on The Man Who Made Plants Write, by Jagadish Chandra Bose.
“To capitalize on the yearning for tradition, and to bind sumo’s fortunes to the state, the sport’s governing body aligned itself with the rising tide of nationalism that took hold of Japan after its victories in wars against the Chinese and the Russians.”— @viajoshhunt.bsky.social
“I, Adolf Hitler, on this my deathbed / Am suffering bravely great pain. I / Wish to make it known to all that I’m / Not, as the ancient King Herod was, / A murderer of women and children.”
Readers should consider the statement twice, the second omitting every alternate line.
“While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges…”
Researchers at Princeton evaluate the potential of a new satellite collision tool— the CRASH clock.
.buff.ly/PwMlrUJ
“By now Cluely had been listening in on our conversation for a while, and I suggested that we open it up and see what it thought I should say next. I clicked the button marked WHAT SHOULD I SAY NEXT?” —Sam Kriss
“It’s said that after the last ice age, chows’ ancestors made their way down to the villages around the Yangtze River, seizing a world of opportunity in the calorie bonanzas provided by humans’ waste dumps and self-electing as sanitary engineers.”— Andrew Norman Wilson
“We didn’t keep dogs of our own; we were nomadic agents hired by owners, who were often the breeders as well.” — Andrew Norman Wilson
“The honorees were figures of the Seventies and Eighties, Trump’s salad days, and several of them had some obvious connection to chapters in his past—his disco period, for example.”
Thomas Frank on the culture wars at the Kennedy Center.
“The more I played PowerWash Simulator 2, the more I started to think, 'In sixty years, will power-washing even be a thing?' As I get older, I’ve started to worry more and more about the future.”
From reviews of the video game PowerWash Simulator 2.
“It’s easy to describe Caravaggio as a genius of light, but he was an expert in darkness too, in life and in art, on how it also calls to us, how it can be soft or beckoning or another side of the story, and not just obscuring, or an absence, or the opposite of knowledge.”
Sam Kriss, who wrote about the next generation of AI startups in our March issue, spoke with Will Stephenson about AI’s false starts, doomsday scenarios, and eccentric proponents.
buff.ly/o5VJXWU
“Everyone knew I was on track to win Best in Show someday. Even with the bad hip, Mom could still train, groom, drink Kahlúa mudslides, and drive—but I was Mr. Showtime.”
From a new story by Andrew Norman Wilson.
“ROBESON: You are the author of all the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people
out of the country.
WALTER: No, only your kind.”
By Marjorie Garber, from Paul Robeson’s 1956 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Blakely’s suggestion that interpretive research might be better suited to the unique threat posed by MAGA is likewise unpersuasive.”
Colin Cepuran contends with Jason Blakely’s essay on political science in the age of Trump.
harpers.org/archive/2026...
“I remember those days in the weeks after we first arrived as passing in a state of exultancy that I attributed largely to the light.”
Nicole Krauss on Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour.
“If I could muster this kind of enthusiasm for any real-life task that’s just as conceptually boring, I’d be unstoppable, but alas, this is the only world with free soap.”
From reviews of the video game PowerWash Simulator 2.
“But a dance can last only so long. He could find better ways to luxuriate in his loneliness. Let’s help him out and say he’s obsessed with baseball.”
Dan Piepenbring on Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
“There is potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic outcomes.”
Enter a new satellite tool— the CRASH clock.
.buff.ly/PwMlrUJ
“The anal specialist—‘my butt doctor,’ the rabbi proudly called him—did not forbid anal intercourse.”
From the novel My Lover, the Rabbi, by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social.
“After the Second World War, sumo was the first of Japan’s traditional cultural institutions to stage a comeback, probably because its connections to the empire were poorly understood by the Allied forces.” —@viajoshhunt.bsky.social
