John Goodman on Tom Cruise, the Coen brothers, and his lifelong quest to feel at ease in his own skin.

The author George Saunders reads his short story from this week’s issue. Listen here.

“Shortcut,” by Diane Mehta: “I can’t remember how to reach / the end of my own sentences.”

“The Woodcutter,” by Nick Laird: “In the earliest version / by Perrault the story is finished / when the girl gets eaten.”

Your story “Appeasement, Ohio” revolves around a family visit: a man named Leo goes to see his cousin Maribeth and her son, Kip, because Kip has agreed to donate some tissue to help remedy an issue that Leo’s having with his eyes. What Leo discovers on arrival…

With the opening of Faux, in Tribeca, Keith McNally’s son steps into the family business. Is it ambition or hubris?

In his sweeping new novel, “The Brightness,” Chad Harbach studies the crisis of being a college student in 2015—and of being a writer trying to redeem ambitious realist fiction.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück made an art of being a regular.

“Woodward, Darman,” he said. It was how every phone call from him began over two decades. Richard G. Darman was what I call a “hide in plain sight” source, because it was widely known that we were close friends. Not known, but perhaps suspected, was that…

Blockers, by Michael Lewis (Norton). In the early months of 2025, Elon Musk, then a consultant for the Trump Administration, launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the aim of cutting two trillion dollars in federal spending. A cohort…

Fresh from playing the Cyclops in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” Bill Irwin chats about reviving and starring in Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” on Broadway.

A new biography of the director Frank Capra inspires wonder at his irresistible vision of America and his immigrant journey.

Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand.

Neil and Brenda met just days after Neil invented his time machine, which proved to be a handy access pass. They watched the Beatles play at the Cavern Club. They figured out which religion’s version of God was the right one. They prevented the Hindenburg…

Game on.

On Amsterdam Avenue by the Metropolitan Opera House—a day before Mayor Mamdani announced his new free-opera-tickets initiative—two supernumerary performers in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” the Met’s most popular opera, disembarked from a horse trailer. Wanda, a…

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Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who filmed the attack, describes the significant increase in West Bank violence on the eve of the Israeli election.