Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Rachel Heng reads her story “A Very Safe Place,” from the October 12, 2026, issue of the magazine. Heng is the author of the novels “Suicide…

It has taken the Trump Administration less than two years to make violent encounters with federal immigration agents a regular fact of American life. On a single day late last month, a citizen and a noncitizen—one in Illinois, the other in Texas—became the…

Most Democratic voters say that they favor a wealth tax, but a California ballot initiative has plenty of liberal opponents.

Gertrude Aronow, the grandmother of the restaurateur Nate Adler, was, by Adler’s account, an eccentric woman of uncommon charisma, the sort of person who made any room feel like a party. Adler and his wife-cum-business partner, Rachel Jackson, who together…

Always those horses up on the hill, eachTo their own pasture, the higher ground Trued until one cannot see the other—How great the grass of no one else, the silence Of four corners made clear. But resolute the windRattling each gate as if to open, as if the…

I have been working in Maternal Intelligence for the past eighteen years, because of a profound belief that, with care and attention, human offspring can grow to accomplish important things—such as curing diseases, preventing wars, and giving their neighbors…

My cousin Laura had a diva’s charisma and a siren’s voice. She also had a mysterious past. When she died, she left me to write the story of how she triumphed over hardship to become herself.

For the cover of the October 12, 2026, issue, the artist Peter de Sève depicts a scene around Central Park’s reservoir, a cherished spot in a city where access to exercise and the outdoors is at a premium. “There is nothing like going for a long run,” de…

Is Arthur Jafa a rearguard artist or an avant-garde one in disguise? It’s hard to say. “I Am Tony,” a major retrospective at the New Museum, doesn’t frame him one way or the other, but it does make you wonder about the moat of praise around his work, and…

Test engineers stage reality, sometimes by extreme means, to make sure airplanes don’t fall apart, children can’t open pill bottles, and bears won’t break into coolers.

The Vanishing Family, by Robert Kolker (Doubleday). Unlike Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia often begins in midlife. In this searching and suspenseful chronicle, nine adult siblings reckon with the disease’s imprint on their family—their mother began…

Ellen Allien is an electronic musician, d.j., and producer who has adopted the mantle “the matriarch of Berlin techno.” In 1992, she was one of the first women to play a set at Bunker, known as the “hardest club on Earth,” situated in a former Nazi bomb shelter…

Usually, an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is a validation of cultural relevance, even coolness. Less so if your name appeared on the show in a list, from 1976, of “people who dolphins are definitely more intelligent than.” Among the sub-dolphinites…

The first time I saw a mausoleum, I felt like I was home free.

For decades, the Heritage Foundation was a conservative powerhouse. Can it stay relevant in the influencer age?

Romanch Mahajan, an eighteen-year-old from Pathankot, India, visited New York City with his family in June to celebrate his high-school graduation. A tall, ambitious kid who loved cars, playing guitar, and collecting Jordans, Romanch dreamed of expanding…

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A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published her second most famous essay. “On Being Ill,” from 1926, cedes first place in the Woolf nonfiction canon to the feminist cornerstone “A Room of One’s Own,” from 1929, but the two essays share a preoccupation with…

After MacKenzie Scott quietly published her third novel—“Last Days in Two Nations,” a work of dystopian fiction set in a near-future America—in installments on Substack, in August, there was much speculation about her choice of venue. Was Scott, whose first…