August 4, 2026 On Sports Last Days at the Aqueduct: New York’s Rundown Racetrack By Max Callimanopulos Courtesy of Max Callimanopulos. The first one thousand fans through the gates of the Aqueduct Racetrack on the last Sunday of June received a commemorative vial of track dirt. I arrived too late to claim mine, but I spotted several as I walked out to the grandstand. A few old men clutched them tightly while watching the races. Others used them as paperweights to keep their stacks of betting slips from blowing away. “Magic charm,” said a man in a Vietnam War Veteran hat, flashing his little jar at me. After 132 years, the Aqueduct Racetrack was closing. Some lucky people would leave with a bit of it in their pockets. Read More
August 3, 2026 Redux My Year of Tests and Arbitration By The Paris Review Courtesy of Ottessa Moshfegh. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in your inbox every Sunday morning. The first thing you learn about the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” published in issue no. 204 of the Review, is that she pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings. Miss Mooney is a jaded teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school, prone to showing up hungover, faking her students’ state exams, napping on the job in a sleeping bag, and offering such wisdom as: You can’t “get fat from being ejaculated into.” Read More
July 30, 2026 On Film The Soothing Unsubtlety of UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun By Paul Thompson Still from UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun. © 2026 Sincere Films, courtesy of Paulio Shakespeare and NTD. There’s this old joke from the Cold War. An American is on a flight next to someone from the USSR; they strike up a friendly conversation. The American says: “I’m really impressed by your country’s propaganda. It’s so persuasive, so sophisticated.” The Soviet is sheepish. “Thank you, but it’s nothing compared to yours,” he says. The American blanches. “What do you mean? We don’t have propaganda.” The Soviet laughs. Read More
July 29, 2026 One Book The Theater of Sport: Bill Buford Revisits Among the Thugs By Leo Robson Bill Buford with Granta, between 1979 and 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This month, we’re rolling out a new web series, One Book, which is more or less what it sounds like—an interview with an author about the making of just one of their books, not because that book has just been published (it could be decades old) or is in the news (though we’d be thrilled if it was), but because it is very good. This is the first installment. — Tarpley Hitt, online editor. *** In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football hooligans”—a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of violence and vandalism on match days. English soccer in those days was associated with brutality on the “terraces” (the standing area at stadiums) and in the streets before and after matches. Hooliganism was the so-called British disease, a source of national shame. Buford started going around with the Manchester United “firm,” or gang, known as the ICJ, or the Inter-City Jibbers. Later, he sought danger at a disco organized by the far-right group the National Front, and while traveling among England’s supporters at the World Cup. Read More
July 27, 2026 First Person The Bit Player: My Father with Steve Zissou By Molly Cooper Photograph courtesy of Molly Cooper. In the mideighties, at my mother’s insistence, my father started seeing a psychoanalyst named Dr. Stein, who had an office on East Ninety-Sixth Street. I was around nine or ten, and could reliably be found camped out on the carpet in front of our family television, recording or rewatching scenes from my favorite shows, or poring over the latest issues of Teen Beat and Bop, a pair of nail scissors handy to clip out celebrity photos for my bedroom walls. I don’t remember much of what my father said when he’d occasionally mention his visits to Dr. Stein, but one detail that stuck was that he sometimes rode up or down in the elevator with Bill Murray, who happened to live in the building. I’m not sure who said it, most likely my mother, but the idea was floated that they resembled each other, my father and Bill. Both were tall, of medium build, with soft, rounded features, blue eyes, wavy brown hair (fair to say somewhat disheveled), and a wry, ready grin. In this comparison, to my young ears at least, there was a sense of something appropriate, even fated perhaps, about these elevator encounters. Read More
July 23, 2026 On Nature What We Talk About When We Talk About the Interstitium By Laura Kolbe Anatomical drawing of a human figure with dissected torso, 1927. Exposition d’art Medico-Historique, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Like many doctors I know, I found myself being peppered with questions from friends and patients—some genuinely curious, others more finger-wagging—after The New York Times Magazine published a long piece in the spring about the “discovery of a third circulatory system.” Recent experiments had shown that foreign materials such as tattoo ink or chemical tracers could migrate into what the magazine described as “hidden pathways” throughout the body—routes that did not correspond with either of the conventionally accepted networks that Western medicine has mapped and taught for centuries. “The implications of a new circulatory system,” the writer claimed, “are potentially enormous.” The article was referring to the interstitium, a catchall term for the mostly cell-less, latticed network of proteins and fluids that surrounds our organs and tissues. This system was already known to the sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose illustration collections number among the first mass-produced medical textbooks, and to anyone who has ever looked at the iridescent cobwebs that split as one carves a cooked turkey. But unlike the other two kinds of classically recognized circulation—the vasculature and lymphatic systems—the interstitium and its fluid dynamics go minimally discussed in Western medicine, whether in the formal training of physicians or at the level of popular science. (Think of an anatomical dummy in a grade-school classroom, its extractable eyes, heart, liver all fitting neatly on their hooks and pegs like chocolates inside an Advent calendar.) Read More