The Groaning Grid

The US can’t reach its net-zero targets unless electrical utilities transition to renewable energy, but the biggest power providers are dragging their feet.

September 30, 2022

‘Write It Again’

Very rarely, over the sixty years I knew Joan Didion, would she say something helpful if I asked her advice.

September 28, 2022

His Dreaminess Had Will

In the last three years of his life, the elusive New York artist Ray Johnson picked up what he called a “new career as a photographer.” His late pictures were a final message, prank, secret, or gift.

September 26, 2022

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

The Witch Hunters’ Crusade

Why did sixteenth-century investigators of witchcraft place such an inordinate emphasis on demonic sex, and why did they concentrate their inquiries on women?

September 26, 2002 issue

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Arthur Kern's Creatures

Arthur Kern’s unsettling, grotesque sculptures bring to mind twins fighting for space within the womb, disembodied heads frozen in cryogenic pods, an astronaut doomed to float forever through outer space.

June 1, 2016

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales. 

November 19, 1987 issue

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue

“Ever Freer to Speak My Mind”

“The right’s political program has the effect of making ours a less democratic, less inclusive, less gender-neutral, more homophobic, more misogynistic, more authoritarian, and more corporate-friendly and wealth-empowering polity.”

September 24, 2022

Light Under a Bushel

“We can’t accept the principle that the way to judge a course of study is by how much money you will make. It’s important to study history if you want to be an intelligent citizen in a democracy.”

September 17, 2022

Soft Shapes

“I like when things have their own meaning or history but it’s none of your business.”

September 10, 2022