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- “Keats at Twenty-Four,” The New Yorker, 11 December 2023
- A short story
- “Fatal Embracements,” New York Review of Books, 7 December 2023
- A review of Tom Crewe’s novel The New Life
- “A Pandemic Novel That Never Says ‘Pandemic,’” New York Times Book Review, 13 November 2023
- A review of Michael Cunningham’s novel Day
- “Pemaquid Lighthouse revisited,” The Atlantic website, 13 August 2023
- A poem about getting older while being gay-married
- “The Letter,” The Paris Review, summer 2023
- A short story
- “Lost Letters,” The Paris Review Daily, 21 July 2023
- About being haunted by Elizabeth Bowen
- “Redux: Raymond Carver,” The Paris Review Newsletter, 25 June 2023
- On Raymond Carver and the Pet Shop Boys, eternally
- “Murder, Espionage and a Thick Slice of Soviet Life,” New York Times Book Review, 6 June 2023
- A review of Paul Goldberg’s novel The Dissident
- “The Ellipse Maker,” n+1, spring 2023
- A short story
- “Sallies,” New York Review of Books, 9 February 2023
- A poem
- “In the Maid’s Room,” The Yale Review, 24 October 2022
- A short story
- “Easter,” The New Yorker, 26 September 2022
- A short story
- “Close Encounters,” The New Yorker, 17 January 2022 (a note on sources)
- The Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem’s experience of the Holocaust
- “Walks,” The Paris Review, Issue 238, Winter 2021
- A short story about dogs and birds
- “When the Nation That Shaped You Is Falling Apart,” New York Times Book Review, 2 November 2021
- A review of Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim
- “Sally Rooney Addresses Her Critics,” The Atlantic, September 2021
- A review of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You
- “Massachusetts,” The Yale Review, Spring 2021
- A short story about two ways of learning
- “The Remainder,” n+1, issue 38
- A short story about feelings at the end of the world
- “Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters,” Public Books, 10 September 2020
- An essay about a comic novel about social climbing, written by a nine-year-old and published in 1919
- “Trajectory,” The Atlantic, 9 September 2020
- A short story about what it feels like to have once been able to fly
- “An Accidental Activist,” The New Yorker, 29 June 2020
- A review of Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America
- “City Limits,” The New Yorker, 27 April 2020 (a note on sources)
- A review of David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
- “Review: Caleb Crain on Pauline Kerschen,” Book Post, 12 March 2020
- A review of Pauline Kerschen’s historical-speculative novel The Warm South, which imagines the life that Keats might have led if he had risen from his deathbed in Rome
- “More or Less,” n+1 online only, 15 November 2019
- A short story about pretending
- “State of the Unions,” The New Yorker, 26 August 2019 (a note on sources)
- A review of Steven Greenhouse’s Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor and Emily Guendelsberger’s On the Clock: How Low-Wage Work Drives America Insane
- “The Theory that Justified Anti-Gay Crime,” Under Review, the New Yorker website, 26 June 2019
- A review of James Polchin’s Indecent Advances, a history of the “gay panic” defense
- “Idea Man,” New York Review of Books, 27 June 2019
- A review of Exhalation, Ted Chiang’s second collection of science fiction stories
- “A Hunk and a Savant Walk into a Poetry Class…,” New York Times Book Review, 9 June 2019
- A review of Lucy Ives’s writing program satire Loudermilk
- “‘When Brooklyn Was Queer’ Evokes the Borough’s Hidden History,” New York Times Book Review, 19 May 2019
- A review of Hugh Ryan’s history of Brooklyn’s LGBTQI past
- “‘Roma’: Through Cuarón’s Intimate Lens,” NYR Daily, the New York Review of Books website, 12 January 2019
- Dog poop and the beauty of life
- “Mr. Hutchinson,” Harper’s, August 2018
- A short story.
- “In One City, 2,000 Years of Gay History,” New York Times Book Review, 24 June 2018
- A review of Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day
- “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited,” Cultural Comment, The New Yorker website, 14 June 2018
- A new look at the data on American reading habits, more than a decade after my first investigation
- “Merchants of Doom,” The New Yorker, 14 May 2018
- A review of Robert Kuttner’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, Barry Eichengreen’s The Populist Temptation, and Dani Rodrik’s Straight Talk on Trade
- “Envoy,” The Paris Review, summer 2017
- A short story.
- “The Sentimental Sadist,” The Atlantic, March 2017
- A review of George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo
- “Ward’s Fool,” n+1, winter 2017
- A short story. After the final presidency, a clerk writes.
- “On Choosing Trump and Being Bad,” Culture Desk, The New Yorker website, 12 November 2016
- In the 2016 election, what was democracy trying to say?
- “None of the Above,” The New Yorker, 7 November 2016
- A review of Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy
- “Peel Her a Grape,” Harper’s, July 2016
- An essay about Sybille Bedford, on the occasion of NYRB Books’s re-issue of her work
- “A Gay Conspiracy in the Arts?” The Guardian, 7 May 2016
- A review of Gregory Woods’s Homintern
- “Lost Illusions,” The New Yorker, 18 April 2016
- A review of Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
- “Head Space,” New York Times Book Review, 20 December 2015
- A review of Simon Critchley’s novella Memory Theater
- “Further and Farther: A Theory,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 23 October 2015
- “Hardly anyone uses the two words for different occasions,” grumbled H. W. Fowler. But I have an idea.
- “Jonathan Franzen Strikes Again,” The Atlantic, September 2015
- A review of Franzen’s novel Purity
- “Counter Culture: Fighting for Literature in an Age of Algorithms,” Harper’s, July 2015
- A new kind of disenchantment has come over literature…
- “The Usual Labyrinth,” Subtropics, spring/summer 2015
- A short story
- “Charlie Hebdo cartoonists: heroes or racists? The answer’s not that simple,” Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2015
- What are we disagreeing about, exactly, when we disagree about honoring the controversial French humor magazine?
- “Blood in the Sky,” New York Review of Books, 23 April 2015
- A review of H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- “Her Struggle: The Reticence of Penelope Fitzgerald,” Harper’s, January 2015
- A review of Hermione Lee’s new biography of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald
- “The Red and the Scarlet,” The New Yorker, 30 June 2014
- A review of a new biography of Stephen Crane by Paul Sorrentino
- “The New York Public Library Comes Around,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 12 May 2014
- The NYPL graciously throws in the towel on its ill-fated Central Library Plan
- “How Much Gay Sex Should a Novel Have?” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 22 April 2014
- A tour of the question, from Henry James to Alan Hollinghurst
- “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” The Paris Review Daily, 3 April 2014
- How Darren Aronofsky’s Noah gets Biblical vegetarianism wrong
- “The Democratic Personality,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 8 January 2014
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day vs. Mike White’s Enlightened: a sociopolitical reading
- “Quitting Time,” Little Star, 2014
- A short story
- “Four Legs Good: The Life of Jack London,” The New Yorker, 28 October 2013
- A review of a new biography by Earle Labor of the author famous for his tales of dogs gone wild
- “Copyright Without Law?” The Nation, 21 October 2013
- A review of Robert Spoo’s Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, a history of how James Joyce got paid even though Ulysses lost its copyright
- “My Teacher’s Shadow,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 22 August 2013
- A memoir of the Czech translator Peter Kussi, with whom I studied Czech
- “Almost History: Plzeň, May 1991,” 21 August 2013
- Photos of a celebration, half a century late, of a small Czech city’s liberation by American troops at the end of World War II
- “On Memorizing Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone,'” By Heart, an Atlantic blog, 13 August 2013
- About the poem’s images and rhythms
- “How Soon It May Be Too Late,” New York Times Book Review, 4 August 2013
- A review of Robert Wilson’s biography of Mathew Brady
- “A Professional Victim: On Ira B. Arnstein,” The Nation, 20 May 2013 (a note on sources)
- The adventures of an early-20th-century music-copyright troll
- “The Thoreau Poison: Shane Carruth’s ‘Upstream Color,'” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 8 May 2013
- A Transcendentalist interpretation of a sci-fi movie about worms, pigs, and the instability of human identity
- “Think Your Taxes Are a Pain? Try filing as a gay married couple,” Slate, 10 April 2013
- The existential pleasures of being taxed while gay
- “What We’re Reading: Charles Williams,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 14 March 2013.
- Satanism, Oxbridge academic publishing, and the Holy Grail, by an Inkling
- “Stalker,” The Nation, 4 March 2013
- A review of James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
- “Postscript: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013),” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 13 January 2013.
- A recollection of the Internet reformer and political activist
- “Unfortunate Events,” The New Yorker, 22 October 2012
- What was the War of 1812 even about?
- “Melville’s Secrets,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 14.3 (October 2012): 6–24
- Are there esoteric meanings in Melville’s novels and poetry? Is Ishmael the last guest at Diotima’s banquet?
- “How Is the Critic Free?” The Paris Review Daily, 4 September 2012
- An essay
- “Havel’s Specter,” The Nation, 9 April 2012
- Václav Havel’s philosophy as manifested in his plays, his essays, and his political career
- “An Introduction to A Game of Hide-and-Seek,” 14 February 2012
- My introduction to the NYRB Classics reprint of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1951 novel
- “Fair and Balanced,” The Nation, 6 February 2012
- A review of two recent books on copyright and fair use by William Patry and by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi
- “Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About Copyright,” Slate, 27 January 2012. Followed by “Loaves, Fishes, and a Nice Marinara,” 2 February 2012.
- A debate about the economics of copyright, piracy, and content generation.
- “Pronoun Trouble, The Paris Review Daily, 17 January 2012
- On panic attacks and Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings
- “Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited,” The Paris Review Daily, 26 December 2011.
- The rentier class dreams a dream
- “I-Phones vs. the Police”, Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 7 December 2011
- If the whole world is watching, do we need police?
- “The Thief of Time,” The Paris Review Daily, 31 October 2011
- Literalizing the exchange-value of labor in Justin Timberlake’s In Time
- Why I Signed the Occupy Writers Petition,” Page-Turner, a New Yorker blog, 11 October 2011
- On an optimistic moment.
- “On Not Letting Go,” The Paris Review Daily, 6 October 2011
- Finishing a novel, not finishing it, and reading Samuel Daniel
- “Pox: On Contagion,” The Paris Review Daily, 12 September 2011
- A Steven Soderbergh movie and the literature of plagues
- “Lost in the Meritocracy,” New York Times Book Review, 1 May 2011
- A review of Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
- “Tea and Antipathy,” The New Yorker, 20/27 December 2010 (a note on sources)
- Was the Tea Party even such a good idea the first time around?
- “The Early Literature of New York’s Moneyed Class,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, 2010 (a note on sources)
- Lifestyles of the rich and famous, 1852 edition
- “Down the Rabbit Hole,” The Paris Review Daily, 21 July 2010
- The interpretation of dreams according to Christopher Nolan’s Inception
- “Ugly Duckling,” The Paris Review Daily, 16 June 2010
- The science-fiction movie Splice purports to be about genetics, but it’s really about child-rearing, Melanie Klein–style
- “Beer Buddies,” Bookforum, February/March 2010
- A review of Richard Stott’s “Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in 19th-Century America”
- “Terms of Infringement,” The National (Abu Dhabi), 21 January 2010
- A review of Adrian Johns’s “Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates”
- “Semantic Time Travel,” New York Times Magazine, 10 January 2010
- On the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
- “Against Camel Case,” New York Times Magazine, 29 November 2009 (blog notebook)
- A polemic, attacking the corporate practice of capitalizing letters inside compound words
- “Keats Speaks,” New York Times Magazine, 1 November 2009 (reporter’s notebook)
- Did the real Keats talk the way the one in Jane Campion’s movie does?
- “A Very Different Pakistan,” New York Review of Books, 5 November 2009 (reporter’s notebook)
- A review of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”
- “It Happened One Decade,” The New Yorker, 21 September 2009 (related blog posts on Nathanael West and James Agee)
- The arts during the Great Depression
- “Bootylicious,” The New Yorker, 7 September 2009 (reporter’s notebook)
- The anarchy and economics of the pirates of the Caribbean
- “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” The National (Abu Dhabi), 2 July 2009
- A review of Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft”
- “Toil and Trouble,” New York Times Book Review, 28 June 2009
- A review of Alain de Botton’s “Sorrows and Pleasures of Work”
- “Brother, Can You Spare a Room?” New York Times Book Review, 29 March 2009
- On a reprint of a satiric 1857 guide to boardinghouse life in New York, featuring drunken landladies and snoring bedmates
- “Random Facts of Kindness,” The National (Abu Dhabi), 27 February 2009
- Historian Barbara Taylor and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips collaborate on a description and defense of kindness
- “There Was Blood,” The New Yorker, 19 January 2009 (reporter’s notebook). Rpt. in The Energy Reader, ed. Laura Nader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
- Two new books on the 1913-14 Colorado coalminers’ strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre
- “Children of the Left, Unite!” New York Times Book Review, 11 January 2009
- Socialism has been trickling into the ears of American youth for a century
- “Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait,” The Nation, 29 December 2008
- Notes on slang
- “Good at Being Gods,” London Review of Books, 18 December 2008 (reporter’s notebook)
- Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, solar panels, windmills, Jimmy Carter, and the return of ecology as a business model
- “A World of a Different Color,” New York Times Book Review, 30 November 2008 (reporter’s notebook)
- A review of Ann Norton Greene’s Horses at Work
- “Lonely Together,” The National (Abu Dhabi), 31 October 2008
- A review of two books on loneliness, one scientific and one politico-philosophical
- “English, the Omnivorous Tongue,” New York Sun, 4 September 2008
- A review of Henry Hitchings’s “The Secret Life of Words”
- “In Praise of Spiders,” London Review of Books, 11 September 2008
- On Wilkie Collins’s novel “The Woman in White” and the art of training human beings to submit to your nefarious wishes
- “Move Closer, Please,” New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008 (reporter’s notebook)
- The history of the snapshot in America, and how it became art
- “Twilight of the Books,” The New Yorker, 24 December 2007 (reporter’s notebook; en español; en français). Rpt. in The Best of Technology Writing 2008, ed. Clive Thompson (University of Michigan Press, 2008).
- How the decline of reading may alter the social world
- “Sweet Grafton,” n+1, Winter 2007-08
- A novella
- “There She Blew,” The New Yorker, 23 July 2007 (reporter’s notebook)
- The rise and fall of U.S. whaling, and the truth about sperm-squeezing
- “The Miracle Woman,” New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007 (reporter’s notebook)
- The mysterious disappearance and continuing legacy of early 20th-century radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson
- “The Good Boy; or, Is Christ Necessary?” Published on this blog, April 2007.
- A review of Dean Grodzins’s biography of the Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker
- “Bad Precedent,” The New Yorker, 29 January 2007 (reporter’s notebook)
- Andrew Jackson, habeas corpus, and the War of 1812
- “Mother of Exiles,” New York Times Book Review, 31 December 2006
- Review of “Emma Lazarus,” by Esther Schor
- “The Courtship of Henry Wikoff; or, A Spinster’s Apprehensions,” American Literary History, Winter 2006
- How a con man kidnapped an heiress, went to jail, and turned his adventure into a best-seller
- “Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life,” The New Yorker, 11 September 2006 (reporter’s notebook)
- How a poet, a filmmaker, and an anthropologist convinced 1930s Britain to observe and document itself
- “Academic Criticism,” n+1, Spring 2006
- How single-author criticism resembles music fandom, or ought to
- “Reverie on a Breeze,” Boston Globe, 6 August 2006
- On a sleepless night, thinking of literature when the electric fan fails
- “The Terror Last Time,” The New Yorker, 13 March 2006 (reporter’s notebook)
- What really happened in Chicago’s Haymarket in 1886?
- “Rail-Splitting,” The New Yorker, 7 November 2005
- A review of Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals
- “The Murder of Lucy Pollard,” The New York Review of Books, 15 July 2004
- A review of Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia and Ann Field Alexander’s Race Man
- “Approaching Infinity,” Boston Globe, October 2003 (blog supplement). Rpt. in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
- An interview with David Foster Wallace about writing novels, riding the Green Line, and higher math
- An introduction to Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (Modern Library Classics, 2002)
- An essay introducing a comic American novel from 1797 about a Yankee schoolteacher sold into slavery
- An introduction to Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (Modern Library Classics, 2002)
- An essay introducing one of America’s first Gothic novels
- “In Search of Lost Crime,” Legal Affairs, 1.2 (July/August 2002): 28-33
- Bloated bodies, bigamous love, drunk stenographers, and other literary pleasures of the 19th-century trial transcript
- “A Star Is Born,” The New York Review of Books, 23 May 2002
- On Margaret Fuller’s letters and journalism
- “The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed,” The Nation, 11 April 2002
- A review of several novels by L. P. Hartley
- “The Artistic Animal,” Lingua Franca, October 2001
- The self-made scholar Ellen Dissanayake links evolution and the arts
- “The Monarch of Dreams,” The New Republic 224 (28 May 2001), pp. 41-48
- On the fantasy life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, abolitionist and Emily Dickinson’s friend
- “The Seeded Self,” The New Republic, 27 March 2000
- A review of Bradley P. Dean’s edition of Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau
- “Infidelity: Milan Kundera Is on the Outs with His Translators, but Who’s Betraying Whom?” Lingua Franca, October 1999
- After years of feuding with his translators, Kundera began not only retranslating his novels but also rewriting them.
- “Did a Germ Make You Gay?” Out magazine, August 1999
- Is homosexuality something you catch?
- “What I Have to Say about Queer Theory,” Remarks at the New York Association of Scholars for Reasoned Discourse in a Free Society, 18 September 1998
- A (somewhat dated) primer on queer theory, as well as an argument that it was a wrong turn
- “The Bard’s Fingerprints” (PDF), Lingua Franca, July/August 1998
- Donald Foster uses high-powered computer tests to search for Shakespeare’s hidden hand. His critics challenge him on every move.
- “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired’ Self,” American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 287-308
- Reading O’Hara’s poems in light of the psychology of D. W. Winnicott
- “Pleasure Principles: Queer Theorists and Gay Journalists Wrestle Over the Politics of Gay Sex,” Lingua Franca, October 1997
- An account of the controversy surrounding the academic group Sex Panic
- “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels,” American Literature 66.1 (March 1994): 25–53
- The unspeakable things that can happen in a boat