Culture & Arts

Film, music, visual art, design

Barthelme, the Houstonian

“Barthelme died in 1989, at the age of fifty-eight. I was at college and heard the news from a friend who worked at a Kinko’s to which one of the Barthelme brothers had brought Don Jr.’s will.”

Susan Choi·May 22, 2026

The Paris Review

Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota

“A tech company worth trillions is fighting, hard, to transform Pine Island, a town whose Wikipedia page claims just two notable people: Ralph Samuelson, the inventor of waterskiing, and Lucas Helder, a.k.a. the Midwest Pipe Bomber.”

Thomas John Weber·May 21, 2026

The Conversation

Poet, playwright, spy: Stephen Greenblatt conjures the brilliant life of Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe’s artistic brilliance was arguably more concentrated, his imagination more original and his ideas more daring than Shakespeare’s.

Kate Flaherty, Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National University·May 20, 2026

Nautilus

Illustrating the Precarious

How our cover artist sees these quaking times The post Illustrating the Precarious appeared first on Nautilus.

Kevin Berger·May 20, 2026

The Paris Review

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Perte Loss”

“To traverse Cha's archive is to register the force of an artistic imagination that is itself not ‘fixe, mort’ but constantly mutating.”

Katie Kirkland·May 20, 2026

The Paris Review

The Ignorant Art Historian: Sackcloth 1953

“We associate burlap not with art but with use, indeed with waste.”

Hal Foster·May 19, 2026

The Conversation

Most mainstream films already use AI. The new Oscars rules won’t stop that

The Academy has decided to ban AI actors and scripts from the Oscars. But machine learning systems are actually used in cinema more often than most people realise.

Meg Thomas, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland·May 18, 2026

The Conversation

Why indie sleaze feels nostalgic – even for people who never lived it

The original indie sleaze moment emerged in the early-mid 2000s, connecting with music, fashion, nightlife and online culture.

Lucy Bennett, Lecturer in Popular Music, Digital Culture and Fandom, Cardiff University·May 18, 2026

Literary Hub

Here are the finalists for this year’s $20,000 DAG Prize for Literature.

Today, the DAG Foundation announced the five finalists for the DAG Prize for Literature, which grants $20,000 to “an early-career prose writer whose work expands the possibilities for American writing.” The prize, now in its second year, is given by musicians

Literary Hub·May 18, 2026

Literary Hub

This Week in Literary History: James Joyce and Marcel Proust Meet for the First (and Only) Time

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On May 18, 1922, the wealthy British art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff hosted a dinner at the fashionable Hotel Majestic in Paris, ostensibly to celebrate Igor Stravinsky’s Renard, which had

Literary Hub·May 18, 2026

The Paris Review

When the Confederacy Came to LA

“The nation is splattered with these zombie structures, or sutures, with nowhere to be and no path to total erasure.”

Harmony Holiday·May 1, 2026

The Paris Review

My Friend Bambi

“When the baddest bitch in the room makes you feel seen you never forget it.”

Brontez Purnell·May 4, 2026

The Paris Review

Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality

“The man was writing like his typewriter was on fire and in flaming succession produced three books that have been called a trilogy through proximity alone.”

Joshua Cohen·May 4, 2026

The Paris Review

The Ignorant Art Historian: Ice Floes

“This is a river you can’t step in even once.”

Hal Foster·May 5, 2026

The Paris Review

Rotten Dot Com

“Rotten.com was a haunted arcade, dispensing trauma in gumball-machine doses straight to kids with dial-up, who chewed on images never meant for their half-formed stomachs.”

Dena Yago·May 6, 2026

The Paris Review

Elegant Dirty Diary Entry

New books by César Aira, Dylan Gottlieb, Xiao Hai, Maïa Hruska, and Missouri Williams.

Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling·May 7, 2026

The Paris Review

Sheila Heti on Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria

“With certain books, you feel like you started writing them when you were ten years old, and again at twenty-four when you had a certain dream, and again when you wrote the first sentence.”

Sheila Heti·May 12, 2026

The Paris Review

The Ignorant Art Historian: The Blind Man’s Meal

“Perhaps he is tubercular as well as blind. Certainly he is poor.”

Hal Foster·May 12, 2026

The New Inquiry

Seoul to Squeeze

The Seoul neighborhood of Bogwang-dong sits on a steep hill rising over the Han River. In Korean, neighborhoods built on hazardous slopes are called dal-dongnae,…

James Constant·Oct 30, 2024

The New Inquiry

AMLO All Along

Victor Sebastyen, Lenin, Pantheon 2017, 363. In 1917, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Lenin was preoccupied with appointing the people that would run…

Pedro Gerson·Nov 26, 2024

The New Inquiry

Health Equity Capture

“The Nisha Chicken Salad” on Weight Watchers’s website bears little resemblance to the salad Nisha Godfrey went viral for in 2022. It is two cups…

Marquisele Mercedes·Nov 27, 2024

The New Inquiry

A Thorn in the Occupier's Eye

South Lebanon is a lesson in steadfastness — an obstinate and determined testament to the willingness of an indigenous people to confront their occupier and…

Roqayah Chamsedinne·Dec 9, 2024

The New Inquiry

Korea Under Ceasefire

On February 6, 2025 the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Lee Jae-myung spoke to the Economist and confirmed South Korea’s geopolitical dilemma.…

Minju Bae·May 27, 2025

The New Inquiry

New Neighbor, Who's This?

On Friday nights in the 1990s, the American family came under attack. Intruders penetrated the home: they stole food, lured children into moral decay, and…

Ryan Carroll·May 27, 2025