Across the country, sewers are attempting to fill the vast, yawning gaps in our national pandemic preparedness. Some in the fashion industry, including designer Christian Siriano and Brooks Brothers, have turned at least part of their operations over to the effort, producing protective masks for hospitals. But there’s…

The celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin has become her generation’s greatest storyteller through ambitious and inventive world-building in novels like her Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy. Which is why her latest novel, the New York Times bestselling The City We Became, can feel like an…

With the coronavirus crisis worsening in the UK and around the world, Queen Elizabeth II took the rare step on Sunday of issuing a special address to the nation—one of just a few she’s done outside of her annual Christmas Day speech. Unsurprisingly, she turned to the metaphor that has dominated in recent days, as the…

In the opening chapters of Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical, 15-year-old Francisca has just moved from Colombia to Miami, where she lives in an ugly townhouse with her mother, sister, and grandmother. She likes smoking and reading Sylvia Plath, whose suffocating sadness goes well with Francisca’s black…

In the early days of social distance, during my first weekends crammed into my house, I struggled to read the big, ambitious books that I had squirreled away for all this time alone. I bought Ducks, Newburyport, a whopper of a novel that’s refreshing thanks simply to its structure. The novel is written as one long…

Life feels kind of like a Karen Thompson Walker novel right now—specifically, the author’s novel The Dreamers, in which a mysterious sleeping disease tears through a small California community. Quarantine life, makeshift hospitals, having to visit with sick family members through glass—elements of our global reality…

After a flurry of beautifully costumed final engagements, Harry and Meghan have officially left the Firm, and as of April 1, they are no longer “working royals.” They’ve said farewell to their Sussex Royal Instagram account, as they will no longer be using the brand, and they’re settling into their new home base in…

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) is not often a novel that comes to mind when we think about Victorian literature. There are no youths entangled in agonized romantic longing, nor plucky orphans determined to distinguish themselves in a rapidly industrializing London, nor labyrinthine mysteries surrounding inherited…

Despite a seeming increase in fictionalized versions of undocumented Americans, the true and endlessly varied stories of contemporary undocumented Americans are still largely untold. Marginalized and criminalized by a country enamored to the point of smugness with its own “open arms” mythos, entire communities across…

While everyone turning to Netflix seems to be watching Outbreak and Gwyneth Paltrow is on every other laptop, I’ve found myself craving depictions of pandemics that are a little more old school. Less protective gear, more protective incense. Fewer calls for medicine and more calls for preemptive jumping jacks. From The…

Buckingham Palace has canceled large public royal engagements from garden parties to the annual Maundy Thursday church service for the foreseeable future, and Queen Elizabeth has decamped to the relatively suburban surroundings of Windsor Castle. “Her Majesty will move to Windsor Castle for the Easter period on…

A handful of life-size miniature horse toys to ride. A sleek, tiny ball-pit and accompanying slide. A stage with karaoke microphones and enough instruments to support a professional band. These are just some of the toys in the white-walled Kardashian-West playroom, which Kim Kardashian recently posted on Instagram.

The abrupt shift of the internet to full-time coronavirus content has prompted a wealth of guides on how to work from home, what to wear when working from home, and, curiously, a service hit on a filter in the telecommuting app Zoom that replicates an Instagram filter, so that your coworkers might see you as you see…

Evelyn Nesbit was scarcely a woman when she posed for Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. for the first time. She was 16, maybe, or 17—the year of her birth is uncertain, and Evelyn didn’t know herself when she actually came of age. She had been modeling for years by that point anyway. She’d seen more of the world, and more of men,…

Over their long history, critics have often dismissed soap operas as unserious or downright harmful to women; the very term is a joke about the genre’s supposed combination of melodrama and commercial crassness. That is, of course, yet another instance of cultural arbiters looking at something wholly associated with…

Minimalism—as a lifestyle and an aesthetic—is on its way out. Buoyed by the enduring popularity of mid-century modern design, minimalist and minimalist-adjacent interiors are so ubiquitous that seemingly every public space, be it a doctor’s office, a women’s coworking space, or a bougie Vietnamese restaurant offering…

In the summer of 2016, I had my cancerous tits cut off and began six rounds of chemo to catch any stray illness my body might still be secretly housing. Because chemotherapy works by killing perfectly good white blood cells along with the cancerous ones, the chance of getting seriously sick from a typically mild virus…

It has become painfully clear that Covid-19 is both serious and spreading internationally; now, we’re simply waiting to see just how bad it’ll get. The picture from Italy is not encouraging, with accounts of hospitals struggling to keep pace. The best preventative measure any of us can take at this point is “social…

In 1999, Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a black bra and polka-dot panties, clutching a stuffed Teletubby in one hand and a pink princess phone in the other. Beside her, a caption calls her a “Teen Dream,” and in the first line of the accompanying interview, Steven Daly writes, “Britney Spears…

There was an interesting detail tucked into one of the many postmortems on the Sussexes’ split from the monarchy. It came from Tom Bradby, a journalist friendly enough with the couple that he did the TV interviews in Africa where Harry and Meghan spoke about the tough time they were having. In January, he reported in…