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
July 21, 2026 Redux How Could I Forget Odysseus? By The Paris Review “An ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children.” Photograph courtesy of Emily Wilson. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. In 2017, to accompany her translation of the Odyssey, which was excerpted in issue no. 221 of the Review, Emily Wilson wrote a piece for our website in which she recalls performing in a children’s production of Homer’s epic at eight years old. It was this turn on the stage that inspired Wilson’s early encounters with the text she would come to translate. “I loved that Odysseus could transition so easily from being somebody to being nobody, and back again,” she writes. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost … Read More
July 20, 2026 On Books Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence By Ed Simon Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons. The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown’s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill, depending on which account you believe. The German-speaking Transylvanian was a character from a gothic novel—an apocalyptic wizard who (so it was claimed) lived in a cave where he transformed “darkness into light, death into life,” and “metals into gold.” At the very end of that revolutionary century another Philadelphian had similar occult ambitions, albeit of a literary sort, in generating something new and glowing from the base materials of gothic literature. Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale—frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States—begins with a religious iconoclast not unlike Kelpius who spontaneously combusts while worshipping in a temple overlooking the Schuylkill. Brown describes how a “faint gleam suddenly shot athwart” the temple, seemingly the result of some occult experimentation. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole was reduced to ashes.” Read More
July 17, 2026 First Person In Paris, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Prague, I Stumble Out, Insane with Coffee By Ed Park Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in, from issue no. 256. Courtesy of Hannah Tishkoff and OCHI, photograph by Deen Babakhyi. In the airport the bald man with the salt-and-pepper mustache is saying to three women, Unless you’re a comedian—listen to me—unless you’re a comedian, it’s not smart to have a favorite expression. In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury to the silver. My eyes have gotten so bad that everything’s a bug. In the raised drain-stopper I see my miniaturized face, with a long glass horn emerging from my forehead—the tap’s steady gush. In Edward P. Vining’s An Inglorious Columbus (1885), a massive, labyrinthine book presenting “Evidence That Hwui Shän and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century, A.D.,” we find “that large armies of mice occasionally migrate from Asia to America, or in the other direction.” Probably not unrelatedly: a UPI article of April 1996 reports that an Ohio man was indicted for ordering vials of bubonic plague bacteria, which he claimed he needed to defeat a horde of disease-bearing rats deployed by Iraq against the United States. Read More
July 15, 2026 First Person A City Bigger Than a Bomb: Dispatch from Beirut By Jacob Russell Maaysra, Lebanon. The site of an Israeli air strike that destroyed a house and killed fifteen people in the small village of Maaysra, north of Beirut. Hezbollah installed a poster blaming the United States for the deaths. Photograph by Jacob Russell. In Lebanon the rains usually start around the end of October. There is little transition from summer. One day the weather is fine. The next great squalls come off the sea accompanied by thunder that shakes the walls. So we were cutting it close, planning our wedding for October 7. It was to be a garden wedding, and hostile skies would certainly spoil everything. That morning I woke up hazy from dinner the night before. The mountain air was a little brisk, but the sky seemed clear. I stood over the stove waiting for the rakweh to boil and letting the chill soothe my hangover. I checked my messages to see which guests might be lost on their way to the village, whether the caterers and DJ were going to be on time. The first was from a childhood friend who had traveled from London. “Should we be heading to the airport? A colleague’s telling me this is going to be really bad.” I asked him what had happened, and he suggested I check the news. Read More