Elaine Blair

Designing Women

Making space for women to behave badly in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘The Favourite.’

As Bad as It Gets

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

Learning to Fight

Ben Lerner’s ‘The Topeka School’

A Woman’s Work

With Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ the modern feminist polemic was born.

Fighting for Her Life

‘Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin’

The Mind–Body Problem

Men’s Lib

John Burnside’s ‘On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist’

Fathers & Daughters

The unnerving comedy of Louis C.K.

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Looking After the Knausgaards

‘My Struggle: Book Four’

‘The Smallest Possible Disaster’

Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation’

Hilton and Love

Love Objects

In Spike Jonze’s Her, the casting of youth and beauty is an artistic failure that compromises the film’s larger artistic achievement.

The Making of Susan

Single Women and the Sitcom

Like any kind of comedy, a sitcom can have a marriage at its very end, but a marriage somewhere in the middle is narrative disaster. And since sitcoms are, effectively, comedies without end, it’s hard to write a marriage into the show in a way that encourages—rather than dashes—our illusions of its rightness.

A New Brilliant Start

The civic virtue of David Foster Wallace

American Male Novelists: The New Deal

The Loves of Lena Dunham

On ‘Girls’ and sex

Great American Losers

The man who feels himself unloved and unlovable—this is a character that we know well from the latest generation or two of American novels. His trials are often played for sympathetic laughs. His loserdom is total: it extends to his stunted career, his squalid living quarters, his deep unease in the world.