Essay

News

A Letter from the Vatican: the Pope Has Things to Say to AI (and He's Publishing Them)

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, comes out August 18 from Melville House: a document on artificial intelligence that blends theology, philosophy and cultural diagnosis with surprising clarity.

Literature

What Gertrude Stein Still Has to Teach Us, via Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is memoir, criticism, and something that resists both labels. It tracks a year in Paris alongside a writer who was central to modernism and systematically underread. Levy pays close attention — which, in the end, is the point.

Reviews

What Robert Macfarlane’s Rivers Know That We Have Forgotten

As ‘Is a River Alive?’ arrives in paperback this June, it feels like the right question for the wrong moment — or perhaps the right moment for the only question that matters.

Literature

The Loneliness That Speaks: Tilda Swinton Narrates Olivia Laing's 'The Lonely City'

Tilda Swinton lends her voice to Olivia Laing's beloved meditation on loneliness and art for a special 10th-anniversary audiobook edition. The pairing feels inevitable.

Authors

The Language We Don't Share: Sara Nović on Deaf Motherhood

In a new piece for Electric Literature, Sara Nović writes about being a deaf mother in a hearing world—about the assumptions buried in the phrase 'mother tongue,' and what it means to raise a child when your own language is invisible to most of the world.

Authors

David Byrne Has a New Book Coming. What a Surprise.

The Talking Heads frontman has announced a new book for autumn 2026, title and subject still undisclosed. A sardonic look at why Byrne remains the rare rock star whose books are worth anticipating.

Authors

Desmond Morris, Who Looked at Humans and Saw Apes, Dies at 98

Desmond Morris, zoologist and author of The Naked Ape -- the 1967 book that sold millions by treating Homo sapiens as just another primate -- has died at 98. He was also, less famously, a surrealist painter.

Reviews

Ada Limón's Case for Poetry as Survival

The US Poet Laureate publishes her first essay collection, a passionate defense of the poem as an act of resistance. For those of us who grew up knowing poetry saves lives, this book was necessary.