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