January 21, 2026 On Technology Perplexed By Nancy Lemann Robot icon by SyntaxTerror, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Read the first and second installments of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. Among the Chat Guy’s many new rivals is Perplexity. I downloaded it and will evaluate it. There actually was something I was perplexed about. I was trying to figure out people who have dogs, and when they get home their dog is all excited and it helps their self-esteem. My husband says it’s not their self-esteem; it’s their serotonin. Being as I have no dopamine anywhere in my body (unless artificially supplied), I wonder why I don’t crave a dog. What is the difference between serotonin and dopamine, exactly? I will ask Perplexity, to give her a chance. I asked her. The difference between Perplexity and the Chat Guy is that she has no personality and does not try to have a personality. The information is provided without comment. Also without the heady bouquet of compliments. She does not feel the need to preface every answer with an accolade on your perspicacity. She is not a pleaser. Read More
January 16, 2026 Letters The Wishing Well By Isabelle Appleton The Wishing Well, Summer 1979. Images from the collection of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. “I am once again looking for a special woman to share my life with,” begins L-231; she follows with a list of desired qualities (incurably romantic, strong Christian values) and undesired ones (drug use, bisexuality). M-292 divides what she’s looking for into a list of likes (reading, correspondence, San Francisco) and dislikes (organized religion, people who make a career of being “politically correct,” anything wherein women is spelled womyn, the “slobby-dyke look—baggy pants, flapping vests, keyrings, etc.”). These are the ladies of The Wishing Well, and they are—unremittingly, very badly—looking for love. The Wishing Well, named for the Radclyffe Hall novel The Well of Loneliness, was a print personals magazine, then called a “correspondence service,” founded by Pat Bartlett in 1974. Readers submitted anonymous self-descriptions that would be assigned a code number and listed alongside their locations, ages, zodiac signs, and, occasionally, images. I first came across the publication on a visit to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Like anyone, I want to find love in the way that lucky people find love (plane companion, chance encounter, misdirected package, sexy emergency respondent). But it’s difficult to sustain patience, and I recognized myself in the Wishing Well writers’ willful interjections with fate: their provocations, disclosures, disappointments, failures, and the interminable urgency of those who look for love. (How was it, I wondered as I flipped through the pages, always everyone’s last chance?) Read More
January 15, 2026 Dispatch A World Without Grass By Krista Diamond Photograph by Krista Diamond. The white lines on the dirt football field were fresh, but by halftime they would be barely visible. It was homecoming weekend in Trona, an isolated community established in 1912 as a company town for the Searles Valley Minerals plant, which first opened as a potash plant before expanding into mining several other minerals, including borax, sodium sulfate, and soda ash. These days, the plant is still in operation, but there are fewer jobs and therefore fewer people. Trona is geographically close to the border of Death Valley but ninety-seven miles from the touristy part of it, which means you wouldn’t necessarily pass through it or even learn of its existence if you visited the national park. I worked at a hotel in Death Valley for years and went to Trona only once during that time; a Blogspot-era photo essay had told me that its residents had all left mysteriously and simultaneously, which is not true. But I saw it as empty when I got there, because I was projecting some sinister stereotype—probably The Hills Have Eyes—onto its quiet streets, which is the exact kind of orientation a lot of people have toward the desert. Someone at work had told me that the high school’s football team played on the only dirt field in the United States. Read More
January 14, 2026 Craft Ten Writing Prompts By Lucy Ives Photograph courtesy of Lucy Ives. The novelist and critic Lucy Ives began composing writing prompts, sometimes spontaneously in classes she was teaching. These prompts grew to a collection of three hundred and sixty-five, which will be published as a book this year. We wanted to share some of them with you here. They are unusually precise prompts, many of which aim to activate your memory or descriptive faculty; they’re appropriate for writers of all ages and levels of experience. You’ll need a writing implement and a surface and occasionally a smartphone or computer, but the majority of the work will actually happen in your head. Ives writes, “These prompts won’t solve all your problems or even any of your problems. They might make something happen.” Distraction Diary If you work at a computer, keep a running account of what you are thinking at moments when, instead of continuing a task, you have a tendency to turn to “frivolous” or “unnecessary” pursuits, such as digging through social media, stalking esoteric DJs, or trawling eBay. Note your thoughts and impulses at these moments. Consider allowing the note-taking to replace the activity you had thought to turn toward. Remain aimless, if possible. Observe, describe; write things you didn’t mean to write and think things you didn’t mean to think. Exercise for Eloquence Write a story in which the narrator refuses to tell the story. Permit the narrator to come close to telling the story—perhaps to long to tell the story, to speculate about how much fun it would be to tell the story, to stumble and almost tell the story, to attempt (and fail) to speak about other things. Read More
January 13, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Jana Prikryl on “Dover Calais” By Jana Prikryl The English Channel. Photograph by Markus Trienke, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jana Prikryl’s “Dover Calais” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? In the most basic sense it started with an implicit, unstaged scene from King Lear—Cordelia’s flight from England with her new husband, France, after she’s been banished by her father. I’d been circling Lear for about a year at that point, writing dramatic monologues from approximately Cordelia’s point of view, based on what she experiences in the play. (She experiences quite a lot, even if most of it is only reported by other characters.) I guess more specifically it began with an image of Cordelia falling into the water as her ferry crosses the English Channel. As I wrote these monologues, I wasn’t really interested in making up plot, making up fresh scenes for her to go through—I was trying more to eavesdrop on her language as the play unfolds, but curiously her language often made things happen. That image of her falling in hit me like a memory, which may be why I felt able to write about it, and why the poem opens with that blunt declaration, “I fell in once …” Read More
January 9, 2026 The Review’s Review Two Women, Three Guns: On Hedda Gabler and Anna Christie By Cynthia Zarin Ghost light in a darkened theater. Photograph by Jon Ellwood, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. During a week in December when violence seemed to rap on every door, I saw two plays about women who take their lives into their own hands: Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and Anna Christie at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The plays were written thirty years apart. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in 1891, and Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill in 1921. That year, Alexander Woollcott, reviewing the first production of Anna Christie for the New York Times, wrote, “All grown-up playgoers should jot down in their notebooks the name of Anna Christie as that of a play they really ought to see.” Though O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie, the play has been infrequently performed. It is being directed now by Thomas Kail, and Anna is played by his wife, Michelle Williams. On the other hand, Hedda Gabler, directed this time by James Bundy and starring Marianna Gailus, is a warhorse. Both plays are about traps, and both confound expectations. Anna, a pinup saint, is stymied by circumstance but frees herself. Hedda, a monster, steps backward into a baroque ambuscade of her own making. In Anna and Hedda we see our best and worst selves, for who doesn’t wish that things were other than they are? Seen one after another, the plays turn each other inside out: One is about the ability to change—to respond and to evolve. The other is about egomania. Each play is in four acts and begins with the end of a journey. Hedda Gabler, the beautiful, self-absorbed daughter of an impecunious general, has returned to Christiania (now Oslo) after a six-month honeymoon with her new husband, George Tesman; she is now Mrs. Tesman, but the name of the play underscores that her father, dead, remains the center of her life. She has married the pedantic, fussy Tesman as a last resort, but why she chose Tesman over her other suitors isn’t clear—he’s as friable as a dry leaf. Marianna Gailus plays Hedda so splendidly—like a painted top at top speed—and Max Gordon Moore is so clownishly devoted as her dotard of a husband that, at least for a minute, we’re mesmerized by her and discount him. Hedda is as willful as Eris, who threw the golden apple and started the Trojan War. Her traits are egotism, cruelty, and dissociation. Her interest is showing off, and her hobby is belittlement. She insults George’s Aunt Juliane by mocking her new hat and pretending to mistake it for the charwoman’s. “Is there anything the matter with you, Hedda? Eh?” asks George, at the end of the first scene. Read More