These days, it’s easy to succumb to hopelessness. Whether you’re thinking about the climate crisis, the prospect of AI apocalypse, war or political turmoil, the list of challenges facing humanity can seem... Read more »
The artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger began writing the long-awaited sequel to her bestselling debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, in 2012, just after Obama’s re-election. It was a “rosy” time in American... Read more »
Could the solution to the reading crisis lie in paying people to put down their phones and pick up a book? That’s what one government, at least, is resorting to: this month,... Read more »
Singapore is paying its citizens to pick up a book for at least 15 minutes a day in an effort to fight the rise of doomscrolling. The affluent city-state hopes its gamification... Read more »
It’s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current... Read more »
Isaac Butler is limbering up for an event at Politics and Prose, an independent bookshop and venerable Washington institution, but still has time to explain his arm tattoos. They variously depict: a... Read more »
I’ll confess my heart sank slightly at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of them previously published in the New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier... Read more »
One of the questions Candice Carty-Williams has spent the past few years batting away is whether she is Queenie. It is perhaps inevitable: her bestselling debut novel followed Queenie Jenkins, a twentysomething... Read more »
When the artist Jackie Morris collaborated with the writer Robert Macfarlane to celebrate the names of plants and animals controversially removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, they never imagined their book, The... Read more »