March 3, 2026 On Books Main Character Syndrome in Wartime By Julian Castronovo Kamala Harris shares a statement to reporters following the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs parade before boarding Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday, February 14, 2024, in Maryland. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson. The White House, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character. I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story: a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote insofar as I continue to tolerate it. This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. They do not feel the story of history to be totally disconnected from their personal, concurrent experience of being alive. Main characters, after all, drive the plot. Conveniently, real-life main characters love to write about themselves, so there’s plenty of material from which I might learn how to achieve main character status myself. Material, for example, like George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries and 107 Days, two recently published diaristic texts. Both of these meticulous nonfictional accounts of living through history are said to be very novelistic. One is “remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail” such that its author “emerges as an unforgettable, three-dimensional character.” The other, we’re told, “reads like a suspense novel” in that it has “a novelistic feel” and “the pace of a page-turning novel.” It would seem that these writers—George Templeton Strong and Kamala Harris, respectively—are main characters because their realities were, even during times of crisis and dissolution, like books. Things, in other words, make sense when you’re a protagonist because you live inside a novel. The present operates with a narrative purpose and a unifying logic by which the lives and actions of individuals are bound together and to the world at large such that it is possible, as any main character innately knows, to do something important. Read More
February 28, 2026 Arts & Culture Tyrant Style By Thomas Morton Selfie by Giancarlo DiTrapano. Giancarlo DiTrapano was a friend, so take all this with a gram of salt. Gian had two arts at which he was preternaturally talented, what we’d’ve called his genius before that word just meant “smart guy.” One was, I guess you’d say, books. Sounds dumb, but that’s what he did and was good at. He found people who wrote, not always writers, and coaxed them into writing books that were wildly better than what the rest of the book world was crapping out in any given year. I know this probably sounds more like management than art. It’s hard to consider editing an art if you haven’t seen it being done, and publishing is full-well up the stairs at the sausage factory. The books Gian put out weren’t sausages. The writing he knew how to find and to encourage was great from sentence to sentence, that was obviously the big part of it, but the books weren’t just a casing for the writing. The books themselves were fucking Things. They were objects of care and craft—the design, the cover, the typeface, the size of the paper, the blurbs(!), everything was hand-wrought to fit perfectly together with the writing and the writer as one discrete deal, the way a Pink Floyd album in its proper sleeve is. This was at a time when smaller independent imprints would sometimes have a uniform house style that looked all right, and the major publishing houses routinely put out books that looked like slapped-together dog shit. He’d do one or two of these guys in a year, obsessing over them through the whole process, talking endlessly about them the whole way through from manuscript to galley. No one makes two sausages a year without taking a major bath on the enterprise. Read More
February 27, 2026 On Psychoanalysis On Angst By Jamieson Webster Cixous with her children Anne-Emmanuelle and Pierre-François, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Olivier Morel and Hélène Cixous. In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader. Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true. We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.” Read More
February 26, 2026 First Person You’ve Always Been the Caretaker By J. D. Daniels Photograph by Dzan Fotos, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. October 2022. We were making up after a long argument when I gave my girlfriend a tight hug and we heard a noise like a car backfiring. “What was that?” she said. “I think I broke your ribs,” I said. I’ve had a broken rib, I broke my friend Bob’s ribs, doesn’t make me an expert. The X-ray showed a density in her lung. Next she had a CAT scan with contrast. (Never say “dye.”) After that came the pulmonologist, then radiology. Bronchoscopy. They sent her home on my birthday, still coughing up what they called a normal amount of blood. Needle biopsy and pneumothorax, a fancy way to say her lung collapsed. They kept her in the hospital on suction for two days. Then it was time for oncology. And chemotherapy and immunotherapy and thoracic surgery were still in her future, waiting. Medical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived. Read More
February 24, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Monzer Masri and Robyn Creswell on “A Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan” By Monzer Masri and Robyn Creswell Images courtesy of Monzer Masri. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Monzer Masri’s poem “A Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan,” translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. Here, we asked both Masri and Creswell to reflect on their work. 1. Monzer Masri Do you have photographs of different drafts of this poem? Yes, I don’t usually get rid of early versions of poems or book manuscripts. I keep them all, even now, in clear plastic envelopes, though they aren’t organized by date or by subject. The problem is that whenever I go back to them, which I do from time to time, I invariably add to the chaos—so much so that I despair of ever getting them in order. Which is why it took me a few hours to find the oldest version I still have of “A Palestinian, A Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan,” dated June 3, 1977. That exactly matches the date of the manuscript—in the image below, it’s the notebook with the red cover—for Bashar wa tawarikh wa amkina (People, dates, and places), which was published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture at the end of 1979. Read More
February 23, 2026 Arts & Culture What’s So Funny About Infinite Jest? By Lora Kelley Photograph by Slashme, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled the time a man sat down next to her at a café, pulled out a copy of Infinite Jest, and opened it to page one. Her friends laughed—there was something humorous about the image, its sincerity and its hope—though, as her public defender husband, Alec Miran, mused a moment later, “How else do you start?” How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.” David Foster Wallace meant for the novel to pull readers in; he wanted, among other things, for people to like it. He said a few months after Infinite Jest came out that “a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work,” and that he feared that people would find his new book gratuitously difficult. What Wallace can’t have intended or predicted, prescient as he was, is that in the 2010s the novel would crest into a sort of synecdoche for youthful chauvinism, a signifier so potent that it would threaten to overtake the book itself. Readers now seem eager to leave behind its “litbro” baggage, an artifact of the Twitter and Bernie Bro era, and to engage with this complicated, pleasurable novel on its own terms. People, my reporting suggests, are ready to be normal about Infinite Jest. Read More