The Arts Archives - Page 5 of 37

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Artificial Intelligence

Writing Was Always Magical

On Literary Theory for Robots and divining the text of the future

June 12, 2025 • by Tsering Dolka Gurung and Dennis Yi Tenen

Rather than focus on techno-utopian fantasies or doomsday predictions in which technology replaces humans, scholar Dennis Yi Tenen inspects writing itself as a human technology. In his new book, Literary Theory for Robots (W. W. Norton, 2024), the English professor and former Microsoft engineer asks: How will AI change the ...

Artificial Intelligence

The Monster Became My Companion

A conversation on Cyborg Fever, the cold stream of data, and why entropy wins out

June 11, 2025 • by Matthew Kosinski and Laurie Sheck

Any book worth reading will refuse to be paraphrased. So it goes with Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025). Even the truncated plot summary, rich as it is—a young orphan falls into a coma when his beloved nun suddenly stops speaking to him, and in the ...

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Literature

Blurb Me

Promotion uber alles in Ada Calhoun’s Crush

June 3, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A ...

Interviews

Can Poetry Still Unite Us?

An interview with Sarah V. Schweig on her new poetry collection The Ocean in the Next Room

May 28, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr and Sarah V. Schweig

For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has always been a question of looking for the most truthful way to record things that had seemed otherwise inscrutable or difficult to understand. Her new collection, The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels back the noise of daily life to ...

Literature

The Blue House

An excerpt from The Ocean in the Next Room

May 28, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

I'm still here in the city I entered years ago.I've been in the city all this time.I don't look up and around much anymore.I've been studying philosophy and having a sonand killing time. I follow my son from roomto room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,I kill a roach ...

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

Activism

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

When Russian students decided to stop studying at the institutions where they get educated by the whip

May 15, 2025 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya and Leo Tolstoy

Some lines written very long ago seem to have been written for the current moment. At the University of St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899, students protested the government’s policies and their pressure on university administration. Upon learning about student unrest and being urged by student delegates who were ...

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

Literature

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify

May 14, 2025 • by Yahia Lababidi

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the ...

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

Interviews

Mining Memories for Fiction

May 13, 2025 • by Gina Chung and Mikayla Emerson

Author Gina Chung finds herself interrogating real life through fiction—so much so that she curated a collection before realizing the stories were obsessed with the same things. She’s the author of Sea Change (Vintage Books, 2023) and most recently Green Frog (Vintage Books, 2024), the winner of the 2025 O. ...