When the FBI was fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness.

Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends…

The ghost of one of the murdered, misburied underage models begins to haunt Benson. She has bells for eyes, tiny brass ones dangling from the top of each socket…

Enter the double: the curated profile, the version of you that bears all your identifying information—name, clothes, job, appearance, place of birth—but whose social grace is impeccable, whose interests are noble and fascinating, whose biography is impressive yet humbly presented, whose comments are edited for maximum wit.

If in recent years one type of writing has managed to at least hint at the genuine problem in education, it is the adolescent fantasy novel. [...] The structuring desire of every novel of this sort is the same: a well-resourced school that offers a meaningful education. The anxiety that eventually takes over the story is also the same: that the school will turn out to be just as authoritarian, just as banal and arbitrary as its real-life counterparts.

I Am Here to Take Back the Clickbait. In Three Simple Steps, Find Out How Upworthy Titles Create Cognitive Problems In Readers. But What Happens If You Don’t Click? You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.

A decent strategy with TED might be to reclaim our teenage capacities and treat these videos as hopelessly passé—ignore them to death. Critiquing them, even as I have done, will do what criticism has done for television: creating an added enjoyment as you go on consuming the crap you despise…

The American Reader is proud to feature ten emerging writers, whose work speaks not only to the variety but the vitality and inventiveness of contemporary American literature.

How does the most acclaimed show on television end up pulling a high school writing trick of injecting a few famous lines to anoint itself in seriousness and relevance?

One time I was in therapy for being sad, and while I was there I learned about The Power of Positive Thought. I know this sounds like magic and/or fake and/or antithetical to the open-eyed truth telling to which we’ve all dedicated ourselves as writers, but if you would like to not kill yourself after years and years of sitting at a desk with little or nothing to show for it, it’s a really great option…

What is Emily Apter really against, what is she really for, and why does she invoke world literature to make that case?

The convicted Norwegian murderer and black metal icon, Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes, is to appear at a hearing before the public prosecutor, having been charged with one count of public provocation of racial hatred, and one of glorifying crimes of war and crimes against humanity…

And darkness was all around them, as if they were in someone’s mouth…

Why is poetry these days so hard to remember?