Omnivore
The political divide in the United States
Can America’s two tribes learn to live together? Robert Wright on why pure reason won’t end American tribalism. Is the two-party system doomed? A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear — a messy restructuring of America’s political parties is coming. The contract with authoritarianism: The political divide in the United States now separates people by how open or closed their minds are. It’s time for the United States to divorce before things get dangerous. The great
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Paper Trail
In a press release, George R.R. Martin announced the publication date for his next book, Fire and Blood, and confirmed that “winter is not coming . . . not in 2018, at least.” While The Winds of Winter won’t be arriving any time soon, “imaginary history” Fire and Blood will be published next November. Peter …Syllabi
Marriage Reimagined
Laura SmithIt is easy to view the vast and varied landscape of marriage in the present day as a radical departure from a more conservative past. But many of these marriage alternatives—including polyamory, open …- "We Are Revolution": Introducing Asia's Proletarian Lit Matt Turner
- The Manson Family Eric Banks
Daily Review
A Neutral Innocence of the Heart
Picture the carefree swagger of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging himself into a pristine tree-lined body of water from a rope as if there were no history, no context, no world. Instead, simply the body and the self it manages, flying gracefully with no net, nothing to carry that body to safety but its own faith that nothing will squash it down. … 
Interviews
Wayne Koestenbaum
Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions.
…- TAO LIN’S EIGHTH BOOK, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, …
- Lately I’ve been preoccupied with a strange thought, what one might call a blip of …
- When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, …
- A fan of Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece The Line of Beauty has created a Twitter …
- As relations between Russia and the United States continue to worsen, one of the …
- When Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation came out in 2014, I couldn’t elbow my way to …
- PICTURE THE CAREFREE SWAGGER of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging …
- Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a …
- IN “STAGES OF LAUGHTER,” Art in America’s 2015 roundup of artists’ insights into humor, …
Reviews
Essay
A Poet of the Archives: On Susan Howe
Emily LaBarge
Howe has long been interested in distilling signs and symbols, whether “art objects” or words themselves, into something more revelatory. Considering riddles, lost languages, doubled surfaces, spells, magical thinking, and other elusive forms of expression, Howe sounds the depths.
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