Are we there yet
Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a “fairy-tale,” “otherworldly,” and fictional Ottoman island—a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,” or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm … Read More “Orhan Pamuk’s Literature of Paranoia” »
The celebrity appeal of Billy Eichner has always rested on his outrageous causticity. The host of the viral series Billy on the Street, Eichner would barge around New York, holding a microphone in one hand and often dragging a celebrity with the other, barking questions at passersby. He’d typically goad them into rudeness by demanding … Read More “Bros Is a Rom-Com as Entertaining as It Is Therapeutic” »
My wife and I are lifelong runners. It’s the sport we fell in love with, and ended up excelling at—during our wedding, every speaker from the preacher to the best man mentioned some variation of “Can you imagine how fast their future kids are going to be?” My wife, Hillary, is by far the more … Read More “There’s Good Reason for Sports to Be Separated by Sex” »
When the director James Cameron was working on Avatar, he was holding the biggest bargaining chip imaginable. His last major feature, 1997’s Titanic, was the most successful film in Hollywood history, overcoming its budgetary woes and behind-the-scenes drama to become a box-office phenomenon unlike any other. Avatar was another risky bet in theory, an original … Read More “Hollywood Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Avatar“ »
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Small epiphanies seem to arrive when good food is on the table and great friends are gathered around it. And so it … Read More “The Simple Secret of French Baking” »
Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Madhuri Vijay about her writing process. I. They had been driving for hours, and the city still hadn’t loosened its grimy hold. Now there were bungalows and shops that clung to both sides of the highway; roadside tea stalls with corrugated roofs, where truck drivers stopped to stretch their … Read More “Hill Station” »
