October 6, 2026 First Person A Battle We Had to Win: Yan Lianke on Matchmaking By Yan Lianke The author with his wife, Zhai Lisha, at the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang, 1984. Courtesy of Yan Lianke. I was promoted to the rank of cadre in late 1982, with much fanfare. The next spring, I returned home in a blaze of glory, ready to meet a mate. Back then, if you were still unmarried at twenty-five, people said you’d been left on the shelf. Even so, I’d never, not in my whole life, thought about what kind of person I wanted to marry. I’d never considered how love would begin, how it might unfold. Not even what love was made of or how much it weighed, what proportion of its significance was emotional or physical, or which was more important: spiritual or sensual love. Now I think that’s like asking whether planting or harvesting matters more. Read More
September 10, 2026 First Person My Grandfather in Grundy, Virginia By Zaina Arafat Photograph by Aaron F. Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late seventies, my grandfather left Nablus and took a job as head surgeon at a hospital in Grundy, Virginia, a coal-mining town tucked between Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains. Grundy is the rural county seat of Buchanan County and home to Buchanan Mine, the deepest operating longwall coal mine in the United States. Neil Armstrong was rumored to have visited and signed the guest book, after the miners disputed Armstrong’s claim that he was the first man to walk where no man had ever set foot. They did that every day, the miners said. 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 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
June 25, 2026 First Person The Mudder, the Lawyer, the Prince, and Mr. Wrong By Lisa Carver Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince. The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he’d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed wire through mud and then jump on a bicycle and wild turkeys attacked you. He kind of looked like a flatworm. The most attractive flatworm on earth: lithely muscular, bendy, slippery. I wanted to lick him. Yet, can you believe it, he said yes to mud and barbed wire and turkey attacks but no to fooling around with me?? And for such a reason! His reason was this: “My judgment regarding our future compatibility is clouded by physical attraction. I don’t want to get broadsided by darkness.” What the hell! We’re not a hundred years old! It’s not the future! It’s right now. We’re on a date. These are our bodies on earth that we drag around everywhere. I thought getting broadsided by darkness was what everyone longed for … to have the burden of self, the responsibility of existence, temporarily annihilated by tidal wave. To be helpless. I thought (still think?) that’s what sexual love is: the closest you can get to death and still live. He seemed to want a love both convenient and long-lasting? What?? And I don’t know how he thought he was getting closer to finding such a thing by simultaneously refusing to either accept me or reject me. Read More