January 1, 2026 First Person Happy New Year By Laurie Stone Fireworks in Eberhardzell, 2018. Photograph by Andreas Weith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I feel no division between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is confined to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” I thought it could, although maybe you would need to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That was obvious. On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you like your funk. And it’s so much easier to let yourself down than to let down another person. Richard says, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he says this I feel a wave of love for him rise up, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes in maintaining its shape. I’m making Richard sound like the wooden fortune teller in the penny arcade, where you slip a coin into a slot and she spits out a fortune-cookie saying. This is a compliment to Richard. The fortune teller knew a thing or two. Every promise of course invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we promised nothing. Read More
December 22, 2025 Diaries Dream Diary By J. D. Daniels Dickens’s Dream, unfinished painting by Robert W. Buss, 1875. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Dream. All global financial markets have been crashed by a computer worm called the “Be Interesting” virus. Dream. A long argument with J. D. Vance about clearance to fly on an airplane. Smoking grass with him and typing information on a medical certificate. — I hate dreaming of people named J. D. Dream. A song. “Doesn’t anybody here remember I’m alive?” Dream. I die and am reunited with my dead uncle Billy Joe. He is glad to see me but he can’t remember my name. I don’t care. The important thing is we are together again. I press my forehead against his. Dream. “We don’t need the code. We have the code.” Dream. My house was full of rats, snakes that ate the rats, and hawks and three eagles that ate the snakes. Dream. A song. “You can utilize us, come what may.” Dream. A song. “The dragon sleeps no more.” Dream. Everyone I knew assembled to tell me the world would have been a better place if I had never been born. Read More
December 19, 2025 First Person Nobody Loves Anyone as Much as Adelaide Faith Loves Caveh Zahedi By Adelaide Faith and Caveh Zahedi Photograph courtesy of Adelaide Faith. CAVEH Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been obsessed with finding a romantic partner. I believe that the purpose of life is to join with others and my main goal in life has always been to find a life partner. Unfortunately, this quest has proven elusive and I have been divorced three times. After my last divorce, at the age of fifty-seven, I found myself dating mostly twentysomethings, not because I was especially drawn to twentysomethings but because they were the only ones who seemed drawn to me. My last several girlfriends all approached me as fans after a film screening or messaged me on Instagram. They’ve been the only ones who have seemed interested. ADELAIDE I hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight and a half years. In all that time I’d only had two dates. They were both with the same person, but they were a girl on the first date and a boy on the second. I found that interesting, but nothing else about them. On the first date they told me they liked to wear odd socks. Between dates they sent me a selfie with a sock on each ear. I don’t know why I agreed to the second date. It was something to do, and maybe I wanted to experience not being the needy one for once. Maybe I thought I’d enjoy acting cold, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was easy to get rid of them in the end. I told them I didn’t believe in romance. “I don’t think anybody really loves anybody,” I said toward the end of the second date. “They just pretend they do to secure backup. They want someone on their side in case they’re struck down by misfortune.” I believed that was true at the time. CAVEH After my breakup with Kathy, who had been twenty-four when I met her and twenty-seven when we broke up, I was lonely and single again. I was more famous than I’d ever been, so getting laid was a little easier than it used to be, but not by much. After a few demoralizing one-night stands, I met Kate, who was also twenty-seven. She emailed me asking if I could teach her how to appreciate poetry. I googled her. She was cute. So I offered to meet her over Zoom and read through a poem together. My main motivation was romantic. But I wanted to meet over Zoom because I was worried that (1) she might be crazy (I attract a lot of them), or (2) that I was projecting my own desires onto her. But I enjoy close readings of poems, so I figured the worst that could happen was that I deepen my knowledge of poetry. ADELAIDE It was hard to find anyone I was interested in. My capacity for being interested in someone had been absorbed by my therapist for so many years, and this had been all projection. Since I wasn’t able to get to know her, she couldn’t fall short of my ideal. Whenever I told a friend I’d been single for eight years they acted like I must be mistaken. It seemed an impossibility to them, just unthinkable. But what did they mean? Was there some specific practical thing they would have done that I hadn’t, which would have prevented my being single? Or did they think interesting people had been appearing right under my nose but I’d refused to really see them? Nobody had interested me in all those years. I’m sure my friends could easily imagine experiencing one single day of not meeting anyone they wanted to date, so why not three thousand consecutive days? That’s what had happened to me. Read More
December 18, 2025 From the Archive New Optic By Anya Berger Snapshot of Anya Berger in the late 1960s, taken by Jean Mohr in Ornans, France. Courtesy of Katya Berger. The following fragment, which dates to 1969, was unearthed in the archives of John and Anya Berger by their daughter, Katya, and John’s biographer, Tom Overton. Read more about its history and their working and romantic relationship here. When I was twenty-five, I had a short love affair with a pompous man who said things like: “You look marvelous, marvelous, and the most wonderful thing is that, looking at you, one knows that you will be just as desirable in fifteen years … No, thirteen years.” I forgot everything about this person with lightning speed, except this particular remark, and when thirteen years were up, I said to his ghost, “How about it?” And when fifteen years were up, I said, “Now how about that?” I have always been very healthy, and such changes in my body as have occurred have either been for the better—more covering on the bones, the legs a little finer—or can be accounted for by four pregnancies and four nine-month periods of lactation. My parents were quite old when I was born, my father fifty and my mother thirty-eight. My mother has been completely shapeless for as long as I can remember, but I am not much like her physically, and emotionally I’m actually her opposite, so there was no identification. My father, whom I loved and admired, I was separated from for seventeen years for reasons connected with world history in those decades: I saw him first as a slim, upright, elegant man of sixty-three, and then again as a haggard, bony relic of eighty, until finally he died senile and shrunken at eighty-five. Read More
December 18, 2025 On History The New Way of Seeing: In Anya Berger’s Archives By Emily Foister Anya Berger in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Katya Berger. Anya Berger (1923–2018) is most famous for being the wife and “muse” of art critic and novelist John Berger. In 2018, after both John and Anya Berger were dead, their daughter Katya Berger was with John’s archivist and biographer, Tom Overton, when they unearthed paper records in the family’s basement. These suggest that the work published in John’s name during their relationship, from 1958 to 1973—The Success and Failure of Picasso, Ways of Seeing, G., and A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor—could be considered joint projects. The private family archive documents a period largely missing from John Berger’s main archival holdings at the British Library. Née Zisserman, Anya Berger was born in Manchuria to a noble Russian father and Viennese Lutheran mother, considered Jewish by the Nazis. She came to England as a refugee in her teens, first on scholarship to St. Paul’s boarding school, and then to read modern languages at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. She was a polyglot, responsible for shaping the English-speaking left with her translations of Marx, Lenin, fallen Freudian Wilhelm Reich, and architect Le Corbusier. The collaborative nature of her relationship with John was no secret; they once signed a telegram “jonanya.” Although Anya was the linguist, they worked together “officially” on a few translations, most famously Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (1939, trans. 1970). Ways of Seeing (1972), the TV show and subsequent book which made John Berger a household name,drew heavily on Walter Benjamin’s writings on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Anya, a fluent German speaker, had introduced her husband to Benjamin’s ideas before the Arendt-Zorn translation of Illuminations was published in English in 1968. Anya Berger appears in the second episode of Ways of Seeing, on “Women and Art.” The show presents the concept of the male gaze to a mainstream audience a year before Laura Mulvey would write her canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Part of a roundtable of women tasked with responding to female nudes, Anya is the first to speak, seated across from her husband, leaning forward assertively over her widespread knees. “Of course, weall have an image of ourselves, and it’s a visual image, but I wonder how much this sort of classical, European painting has shaped that image.” She is animated. “When I look at the paintings that you show in your film, I can’t take them seriously, I cannot identify with them because they are so immensely exaggerated always, they fasten on to some sort of secondary sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts and great big bee sting bottoms [John Berger’s laughter], huge things like that, and they just aren’t real … Nearly all the paintings you have shown are what is called idealized, and therefore they are to me very unreal in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself, and in connection with any deep down pleasure that I might have in looking at another female body.” Read More
December 17, 2025 On Photography Eve Babitz’s Photographs By The Paris Review Hollywood, California. Photographs courtesy of the Huntington Library. In 1969, five years before Eve Babitz published her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, she kept a journal—her only surviving diary—in which she honed the voice that would make her the consummate chronicler of seventies Los Angeles. A selection of entries appears in our new Winter issue. In the journal, Babitz also detailed her experiments with several other art forms, including collage and photography. “I got a camera for $7.98—a Brownie,” she notes on December 21, 1969, “and have been taking pictures of palm trees which are turning out very well.” The Huntington Library, which acquired Babitz’s archive in 2021, is currently displaying several of those photographs in an exhibition that features, among other subjects, those very same palm trees near Babitz’s Hollywood home, and members of her family and her famous circle of friends: Babitz’s father, Sol, a former violinist for the 20th Century–Fox studio orchestra, a bespectacled Annie Leibovitz, and Linda Ronstadt, swaddled in furs. Annie Leibovitz. Linda Ronstadt. Sol Babitz. Linda Ronstadt. Eve Babitz’s brownie camera.