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
February 19, 2026 On Technology Looking at Attention By D. Graham Burnett Robbie Cooper’s Immersion Project (2013). The English artist-photographer Robbie Cooper became semifamous in 2008 with the widespread online release of a roughly three-and-a-half-minute video titled Immersion. It still lives on the internet and is unlikely ever to go away. The short film consists of a set of sequential cuts, all similarly framed and ranging from six to fifteen seconds, of kids playing various video games. Sometimes, one sees only a single player. In others, the player is accompanied by one or more friends, who appear only to be looking on at the action; they are not “playing.” Across all the shots, the only sound is that of the game itself—together with whatever yawps and comments the humans add in the throes of their gaming. What made the whole thing go viral (-ish; 2008 was a long time ago—the iPhone had only just come out, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube were all still in their infancy) was the uncanny intimacy of the camera: one watched the kids playing the games through the screen at which they were looking. The intensity of their searching gazes, the strained grimaces or unsettling complacency, the lip-biting trance-field of total absorption—all this is directed at you, directly. It is shot from the point of view of the screen itself. Read More
February 18, 2026 Unfinished Reading at Random with Virginia Woolf By Frances Lindemann Georg-Johann, random pixels, colored by Polyominoe, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. “Let us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion,” Virginia Woolf writes in one of many fragmentary drafts of her final book, a history of English literature whose working titles included “Reading at Random.” It was to be nothing less than her own philosophy of reading. More than mere absorption of the written word, reading, for Woolf, was an active expression of the mind and a mode of “actual experience.” At the time of her death in March 1941, Woolf had begun work on only two chapters of the book, titled “Anon” and “The Reader.” The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection holds the full archive of “Reading at Random,” including multiple manuscript and typescript drafts of each chapter, as well as Woolf’s initial reading notes. The project is little-known and hardly legible, composed as it is of disintegrating notebooks and unbound pages, the letters jumbled, the margins mottled with penciled and penned notes, the versos soiled, the edges crinkled, the handwriting spidery. To make any sense of the matter, the reader must squint her eyes and relax her mind and allow the words to occasionally, here and there, flower into meaning. Read More