Tabula Raza
Rachel Khong’s new short‑story collection *My Dear You* (Knopf, 2026) confronts Asian American identity through a series of speculative, often absurd vignettes that oscillate between humor and melancholy. The stories spotlight racial perception, self‑objectification, and the yearning for a mutable sense of self, using devices like heaven’s “shopping‑cart” body‑customizer and a vaccine that makes everyone look like the recipient. While the early tales feel satirical and sometimes shallow, later stories set in China and Malaysia inject genuine emotional depth and hope. Critics see the book as both a continuation and a critique of the identity‑politics surge that defined Asian American literature in the 2010s.
Generational Recurse
Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel Repetition, a 144‑page work translated into English in 2024, revisits the family‑abuse narrative she first explored in Will and Testament. The story follows a sixty‑year‑old novelist who reconstructs a fabricated diary of her teenage sexual awakening,...
Eyes of Lillian Bassman
The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond” (Mar 2‑Jul 26, 2026), positioning the iconic fashion photographer’s work beyond commercial fashion. Bassman’s experimental techniques—blur, smoke, and abstract composition—transform garments into studies of form and movement. The exhibition follows historic museum...
Vigilante Injustice
Two new 2026 releases revisit the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooting, a case that polarized the nation. Heather Ann Thompson’s *Fear and Fury* presents the attack as an attempted modern‑day lynching rooted in Reagan‑era racial capitalism, while Elliot Williams’s *Five Bullets* offers a more...
They Came to See Us Suffer
A wave of recent novels—*Yesteryear*, *Made You Look*, *I Could Be Famous*, *Just Watch Me*—use influencer culture as their central subject, portraying digital fame as a nonstop performance that blurs work and spectacle. The books contrast Hollywood’s traditional star system...
Cloud Control
In early 2025 the Pentagon demanded Anthropic drop its terms‑of‑service limits that barred government use of its Claude model for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused, forfeiting a lucrative defense contract and filing a First Amendment lawsuit that a...
Frothing Mad
Union election petitions with the NLRB more than doubled from 2021 to 2024, driven largely by millennial and Gen Z workers in the service sector. Noam Scheiber’s *Mutiny* argues that college‑educated employees at Starbucks and Apple felt betrayed by meritocratic...
Papers, Please
Age‑verification laws are rapidly spreading across the United States, now covering roughly half the states and forcing adult‑content sites to verify users' identities. The measures have slashed traffic on major platforms—Pornhub saw an 80% drop—and triggered a sharp income decline...
Think Nothing of It
The article warns that generative AI, while boosting productivity, is eroding critical‑thinking skills and memory as users offload cognitive work to machines. Recent studies from Swiss Business School, Microsoft, and EEG research show a negative correlation between AI tool usage...
Digital Leviathan
Jacob Siegel’s new book *The Information State* argues that the United States has evolved into a “digital leviathan” that governs by controlling the codes, algorithms, and attention of the public. Drawing on intellectual history from Bacon to modern technocrats, Siegel...
Situational Unawareness
At 1:15 a.m. EST on Feb 28, the U.S. and Israel launched massive airstrikes on Iran, prompting a flood of real‑time OSINT dashboards such as WorldView that stitch together satellite, traffic and social feeds. Built in days by an ex‑Google Maps manager...
A Healthy, Vigorous National Life
The Library of America has released *George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries*, a 701‑page volume that concentrates on Strong’s entries from November 1860 through 1865. About 45 percent of the material is newly published, offering fresh insight into a Manhattan lawyer’s daily...
The Darkness From the Darkness
Darcey Steinke’s 2026 memoir *This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith* examines how chronic physical ailments, especially debilitating back pain, shape spiritual and existential outlooks. Drawing on personal anecdotes, interviews with artists, writers, and scholars, the book maps...