Cozy small-town America is built into the bedrock of our cultural ethos. The charming vision of provincial life extends well into the modern era. One needs to look no further than The Gilmore Girls to ...

For me, the term “mad scientist” brings to mind images of bubbling beakers filled with neon liquids; elongated, menacing silhouettes; and of course (Pinky and) the Brain. There is a long history of ...

2025 has been a year of contradictions: hyperconnectivity and loneliness, political theater and private reckoning, a collective desire to scream without forgetting how to whisper. Each collection on ...

One of the things I try to drive home in my book, How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family, is the value of failure. Of slipping up, recovering, and ...

I’ve always had a thing for strangers. I’m that person who can’t mind my own business at an airport gate, who strikes up a conversation with whoever looks as famished for connection as I feel. I love ...

Growing up, book banning and burning held a strange place in my consciousness. They were part of a distant reality: a relic of the past to learn about in textbooks and a horror of alternate realities ...

We inherit far more from our families than a surname. Our progenitors leave their mark on us in ways we often can’t understand until we pay our own rent. Some of these qualities, of course, are ...

I figured out I was asexual in the early 2000s, back when the official definition in the dictionary related to the biological reproduction of plants and spores. This wasn’t the easiest time to be ace.

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both ...

I grew up watching fights with my father on television, and have always been drawn to the sport—its characters, its rhetoric and, later, the best writing about it by stylists like Hugh McIlvanney, who ...

Queer people have been writing historical fiction since before queerness existed—by which I mean, since before it was hammered into an antithesis to heterosexuality during the long nineteenth century.

It may come as no surprise that we absolutely love a good short story. When you sit down with an all-consuming piece of writing, whirl through it from beginning to end in one sitting, and come out the ...