“As it moved from the underground to the relatively legitimate terrain of network TV, MMA became one of the principal vectors through which young men—the nationalist right’s central demographic—interact with politicized culture.” —Nic Johnson

Harriet Clark’s debut novel “has the shape of a child’s love for her mother, a love that has to squeeze through such a narrow aperture that it can never be fully accommodated.” —Laura Miller

“Black internationalism implies a shared politics grounded in anti-imperial and decolonial movements, whereas the recent black American interest in culture across the black Atlantic doesn’t require that.” —Lovia Gyarkye

“There are things I’m terrible at. One of them is writing dialogue.” —Liana Finck, in a new comic

The Backrooms “does, in fact, make one feel strange, or rather it makes one feel several seemingly contradictory things at once: bored and fascinated, lulled and unnerved, unmoored and, unexpectedly, at home.” —Gabriel Winslow-Yost

“Agents and editors each like what they already know, and the work that appeals to them too often reflects their own demographic.” —Michael Gorra

“Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: ‘Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.’” —Joe Dunthorne on the New York School poets

Rather than letting ourselves tire of repeated stories, how might we allow them to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise? —Adania Shibli

“Arendt’s vision of the good life required not only resistance to the dystopian schemes of tyrants but also the safeguarding of smaller freedoms in our daily lives.” —Christopher Benfey

“Much of [the New York School’s] early life exists only in speech, in anecdotes, and gossip.... When these poets die, they take their histories with them.” —Joe Dunthorne

“The discrepancy between the Rabelais book and Bakhtin’s other studies has mystified Bakhtin scholars. Some who applaud one Bakhtin find the other unconvincing or even repellent.” —Gary Saul Morson

“The UFC has become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.” —Nic Johnson

“Criticism is in every sense a more solitary endeavor, rooted always in an individual encounter with an artwork, whereas as a curator I think about potential audiences and potential encounters.” —an interview with Dennis Lim

After WWI, “many writers had to negotiate what Lionel Trilling called the ‘bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.’ None did so more inspiringly, overcoming greater inner and outer dangers, than Thomas Mann.” —Adam Kirsch

Mary Turfah on the severely wounded children seeking treatment in Beirut

Nineteenth-century illustrators and photographers “helped propel [photography] out of artisanal isolation and into the currents of mass visual culture, where image making became not just an art but a public experience.” —David S. Reynolds

“I’m focused on work that has real stakes and ideas that might feel scary to articulate. I think there’s freedom in that risk.” —Lovia Gyarkye, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

“Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote.” —Gary Saul Morson

David S. Reynolds on the “rage for pictures” in nineteenth-century America

Magda Teter on Salonica's Jewish history

“In 1930 two civil engineers from the University of Utah wrote a proposal, ‘Putting Great Salt Lake to Work,’” writes @cetracey.bsky.social. “They never followed through due to a lack of financing, among other concerns, but the idea didn’t go away.”

“Classics is often criticized for being too obsessed with ‘great men’; in this case, the great man may have been a thief.” —@mmschwartz.bsky.social

Gabriel Winslow-Yost on the uncanny, nostalgic power of the Backrooms

Christopher Benfey on the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Randall Jarrell

A comic from Liana Finck on being bad at writing dialogue

Adania Shibli on Gaza, storytelling, and repetition

“During my year at Oxford [my professor Dirk] Obbink had perhaps also engaged in other pursuits: he’d allegedly been slipping papyri out from the collection and selling them to a prominent family of American evangelicals for millions of dollars.” —@mmschwartz.bsky.social

After 1912, Salonica “became a new city altogether, in which the newcomers began to redefine its character and marginalize its deeply implanted Jewish and Muslim residents.” —Magda Teter

Steve Hilton’s “British career had been largely about wrapping hard-right ideas in touchy-feely niceness,” writes @fotoole.bsky.social. “Silicon Valley…would want to do the same thing in reverse, ditching its ‘Don’t be evil’ credo for the joy of being evil.”

“It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the [Democratic] party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.” —an interview with @josephoneill.bsky.social

“You learn different things at different stages of life, but the Observer, the onetime house paper of New York City’s power elite, is where I learned to develop a voice.” —an interview with Suzy Hansen

“The Hill has a sculpted purity to it, formed by the absence of all the stuff that would fill [the narrator’s] life if she chose to actually live it.” —Laura Miller

“Libraries, by their benevolent nature, want to scatter,” Christian Donlan writes. Yet “constancy and stability are to be found...in the bright human impulse” that has “encouraged generations to keep [them] intact.”

“To reach the goal of bringing 800,000 acre-feet per year to the [Great Salt Lake] and to stave off disaster, it’s the changes to water law and the redistribution programs that need to be expanded, rapidly and heartily.” —@cetracey.bsky.social

In one of Huguette Caland’s self-portraits, “she is landscape, artist, art. The idea of home—in a city, in one’s body, in a corpus of visual art—is the thematic link for...her five-decade-long career.” —Nicole Rudick

Steve Hilton “helped to make democracy laughable—and Trump knew how to convert that ridicule into power.” —@fotoole.bsky.social

“I went a different way in life after college than Hegseth did, but I know what kind of worldview, and what kind of inferiority complex, that upbringing can produce.” —an interview with Suzy Hansen

“If powerful liberals don’t hold Republicans accountable, what chance do ordinary citizens and officials have if they are maliciously accused of being Chinese agents or election fraudsters or domestic terrorists?” —@josephoneill.bsky.social

“Is the Middle East’s dire predicament fundamentally the outcome of ill-judged Western intervention?” Andrew Arsan writes. “Or must [the West] be seen…as just one half of a ‘partnership between local autocrats and foreign patrons’?”

“Richard Nixon became a Mets fan when he moved to New York after his resignation. No doubt he too saw himself in those perpetual underdogs abused by fate.” —Andrew Katzenstein

“As it moved from the underground to the relatively legitimate terrain of network TV, MMA became one of the principal vectors through which young men—the nationalist right’s central demographic—interact with politicized culture.” —Nic Johnson

Harriet Clark’s debut novel “has the shape of a child’s love for her mother, a love that has to squeeze through such a narrow aperture that it can never be fully accommodated.” —Laura Miller

“At his concerts, his unhurried tempo, his decision not to announce or explain songs, and his deliberate touch at the piano created a devotional atmosphere, as if each note carried some universal secret.” —Sean Jacobs

“For all its sorrow and fellowship,” Lovia Gyarkye writes, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Many a Moonlit Caveat“contain[s] an element of mischief.”

For the premodern men “who debated the finer points of apples and asses and desire and shame in apothecary shops and tobacconists and cloisters, sexual pleasure led them to their own theology—albeit a deeply heretical one.” —@erinmaglaque.bsky.social

“Agents and editors each like what they already know, and the work that appeals to them too often reflects their own demographic.” —Michael Gorra

“Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: ‘Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.’” —Joe Dunthorne on the New York School poets

An agent’s work has changed since the profession began in the 1800s. “For one thing, agents now edit,” Michael Gorra writes. “In part that comes from the peculiar pressures the publishing industry puts on first novels.”

“The discrepancy between the Rabelais book and Bakhtin’s other studies has mystified Bakhtin scholars. Some who applaud one Bakhtin find the other unconvincing or even repellent.” —Gary Saul Morson