Joanna Kavenna’s latest dystopian novel tackles surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence with sharp satire, intelligence, and faith in the human spirit.
Like his wife Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne had an abiding interest in, and a cleared-eyed view of, the struggle between the haves and the have-nots.
Dorothea Lange’s life of looking at others, especially those harmed by unjust systems, helped her see that victims were more than just their socioeconomic scars.
Those of us stuck at home and not on the front lines can become numb. How should we feel about the hordes of lives being lost every day? How should we grieve?
As Colson Whitehead argues in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the legacy of injustice is not something we can simply move past. Old crimes continue to shape us.
The Mexican government has already ordered people to stay home, with Mexico City under lockdown. But in a small pueblo in the south, life continues as before.
Isolation can foster new growth within families or communities despite physical separation, as we confront the crisis with generosity, solidarity, and care.
Telling the story of two friends in the Oregon territory who steal milk to bake cakes, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film asks us to ponder the nature of generosity.
While flawed, the 1619 Project is a first step toward disenthralling ourselves from an imagined past of America as history’s designated instrument of liberation.
T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, recently unsealed, reveal the extent of their thirty-year epistolary romance, and Hale’s undeniable influence on his poetry.
The late Terrence McNally’s work included one play that stirred considerable controversy among American Catholics. It’s worth revisiting that debate today.
COVID-19 restrictions have had a devastating impact on independent cinemas. But thankfully, a special program of films about nuns is now available online.
Many of us are familiar with the absurdity-unto-death that is working remotely. Forget the zoom-and-gloom: put down your devices and pick up these new books.
The collection ‘Oblivion Banjo’ is a major work of American poetry by a poet who draws the reader into the inner workings of his imagination as few others do.
Corpus Christi gives parish Catholicism a jolt of Protestant spiritual energy, reaffirming Christ’s message of love, delivered by a criminal-cum-priest.
The selves that constitute the poet Lawrence Joseph are particularly numerous and peculiarly unlikely: he’s a Catholic, a leftist, an Arab-American, and a lawyer.
In 'Softness of Bodies,' the story of a flighty young poet in Berlin pivots from comedy to drama, from shoplifted shoes to darker issues of money and violence.
Problems have solutions, while mysteries like suffering, love, and death do not. They must be instead lived out with attention to human richness and interconnection.
Set in a miserable dystopia, Houellebecq’s latest novel is both thought-provoking and wearying, fronted by a hypercynical yet dangerously nostalgic narrator.
