February 13, 2026 Triptych How to Be THAT GIRL When You Feel Dead Inside By Emmeline Clein “Slim-thick” mannequins. Photograph courtesy of the author. 1. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) My mother is a strong proponent of batting your eyelashes in sticky situations; her mother preferred a strong drink and a withering gaze. Like hers, mine harbors vices and makes convenient excuses for abruptly leaving rooms. Evidence of sudden flight and ruthless pleasure-seeking accrues; she leaves a trail of chewed Nicorette all over her house and hides the metallic sleeves in the side pockets of car doors. She flirted her way out of quitting smoking during pregnancy in a Manhattan OB-GYN’s office in 1994, the year Adam Phillips published a collection of essays called On Flirtation that would change my life, or at least the way I tell my life story. Flirting, it turns out, is not the acquired skill that the teen magazines wanted me to think it is, but rather an orientation toward desire, rigor, and deferral; it requires both the conviction to remain unconvinced and a skepticism about narrative cohesion. I first read On Flirtation in a fit of severe insomnia, on a stunning and astoundingly uncomfortable couch in my flirtiest friend’s apartment. He flirts with the truth—though, to be fair, he currently claims to be in recovery from pathological fabulism—but is also known to flirt with chaos, credit card debt, and discipline. To Phillips, a flirt is a charming rebel, drolly doubting our culture’s cherished, constricting notion of the “good life” as a linear project of becoming one’s “true” self, which usually means a spouse, parent, and worker. Read More
February 12, 2026 History The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept By Barrett Brown Theophilus Schweighardt, The Temple of the Rose Cross, 1618, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret directorate was said to employ powerful magical-scientific techniques in service to sociopolitical reform. This naturally led to quite a bit of public speculation, which gradually abated in the absence of further pronouncements; within a few generations the only parties ascribing any significance to the incident tended to be dubious characters claiming to be Rosicrucians themselves, rarely with much to show for it. Thus, as a result of its gradual association with cranks, the Rosicrucian story developed a kind of inoculation against serious scrutiny. It wasn’t until the sixties that the British historian Dame Frances A. Yates breached the actual nature and extent of the thought movement that informed both the manifestos and its audience. In her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, she demonstrates that the texts were written as anti-Hapsburg, proreformist propaganda drawing on doctrines associated with the sixteenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, and that this was understood by commentators on both sides; that the surreal “alchemical wedding” described therein references the 1613 marriage of England’s Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, widely heralded as the linchpin of a proto-Protestant alliance capable of establishing such reform by force; that the broader proposals were indeed taken seriously by scholars, not as scripture but rather as a set of visionary policy proposals dressed in metaphor, akin to Bacon’s The New Atlantis; and that enthusiasts such as Elias Ashmole would directly implement those proposals by founding the Royal Society, establishing the primacy of science. Rather than being a footnote to premodern folly, the Rosicrucian affair turns out to sit at the narrative center of the modern world. Read More
February 10, 2026 On Film At the Movies with John Ashbery By John Yau Eddie Valiant and Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). One of the things I learned from John Ashbery was to be myself, especially when it came to movies, the subject we talked about most, with poetry a distant second. He showed me that I could be a fanboy because I was one. He made it clear that I did not need to be embarrassed about my enthusiasms, which ran the gamut, from the campy science fiction and badly made horror films of Ed Wood to the low-angled, stationary camera of Yasujiro Ozu and Hong Kong noir films starring Chow Yun-fat. Though John was a shy man, and kept a lot to himself, he was not afraid to be silly, serious, and emotional about an artificial world that was to him more real than the world we lived in. John and I talked about movies, directors, actors and actresses, cameramen, everything having to do with film. He once sent me a VHS of Wood’s Orgy of the Dead (1965), starring strippers in a graveyard at night, and guaranteed it was in “pristine condition.” Another time, knowing I was interested in “yellowface” and all the non-Asian actors and actresses who played Asians in films, he gave me a book on the subject that had been sent to him by an academic press. When I was doing research on the silent film actress Anna May Wong, I met a man at a movie-memorabilia fair who published a monthly newsletter about minor Hollywood stars from the silent era. The inexpensively produced stapled publication consisted of short articles summarizing the subject’s career, where they were at the present moment (often in an assisted living facility), and their filmography. John was very happy that I got him a two-year subscription, which he later renewed, and quipped: “Do you think he will ever run out of material?” John couldn’t get too much of films. He was endlessly fascinated by those who lived in what his friend, Frank O’Hara, in his poem, “Ave Maria,” called “that glamorous country.” This essay is about the adventures that John and I had while watching and talking about movies and TV shows, and the different rabbit holes that I discovered and I scurried down. Read More
February 9, 2026 On Games Jeopardy!: A Partial Taxonomy By Adrienne Raphel Screenshot from “Jeffpardy!” clip. Everyone I know is now on Jeopardy! As someone who writes about crossword puzzles, constructs puzzles, and teaches courses on writing and games, I have found that my connection to trivia champions is an occupational hazard, since puzzles and Jeopardy! share an enthusiastic audience (including the most recent Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner, Paolo Pasco, who also currently holds the trophy for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament). It’s also in my genes: my brother was a Jeopardy! champion in 2017; my mom was on the show last summer. Read More
February 6, 2026 The Review’s Review The Garden of Earthly Delights By Rosa Shipley Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, ca. 1480–1490. Photograph by Anonymous, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage Photolibrary. Public domain. The Garden of Earthly Delights taught me the consequences of looking at something for too long. It was pitch-black in the auditorium where we had art history class, save for my professor’s beacon of pointer light and the vivid glow of the piece on the giant smartboard. We started by looking at the middle panel, then the left panel, then the right one, and, finally, the exterior of the piece—bewildering. An almost sci-fi design on what looked to be a wooden cabinet, which contained the sprawl of the three panels. Why, I still wonder, did we start with the middle? Read More
February 5, 2026 Fiction from “Blue Obstacles” By Kathleen Collins Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins. The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel manuscript by Kathleen Collins (1942–1988). You can read Alix Beeston’s introduction to the work on the Daily here. This room: contains all the dampness in the world. The sheets are dirty. The floor is cold. Rain runs down the gutters. A step away the door opens and a light clicks. Someone climbs the stairs. The light goes out, leaving them in darkness. I’m in a romantic French hovel. A taxi brought me here in the middle of the night. You carried in my luggage, smoking your pipe and grunting while I kissed you and inhaled the damp odor about you of tobacco and mildew. It was a thrilling moment. I have just arrived in my light blue knit fringed in green, looking like a brown nun. A rough net of black hair controls my face and my eyes focus poorly on things … now on your pointed shoes … now on the unmade bed … now on the dampness, the clutter of your romantic French hovel. Everything is coming to me fresh through your tinted glasses, your severely pointed shoes. You talk about Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, the New York School of poets. I’ve never heard of Andy Warhol, nor Frank O’Hara. It is coming to me fresh, while I settle inside the full pout of your lips and inhale the dampness. You have … an odor about you … an odor about you … all these years I have followed in the wake of an odor about you … Read More