“My mother and I were very close, but when she died last year there was still so much I didn’t know about her.”

Notes on Beirut’s broken sewage system.

‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.

Reckoning with the American flag.

On eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.

On loving and hating and living in Manhattan.

A Covid diary: This is what I saw as the pandemic engulfed our hospitals.

At 28, I thought my life was pretty settled. Nope.

The author unearths the story of Frank Yerby, one of the the most prolific African-American novelists in history.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

On theme parks in America.

On living in dark times.

After sitting alone in a forest and not moving for 24 hours, the author reflects on time, mortality, and turning 40.

On infertility.

I imagine my breath filling every part of my body: My little toe. My ankle. My calf. My knees. My thighs. My pelvis. When I get to my belly, I picture my breath filling the cavities in which my organs float, planets in space. I think about the planet of my uterus, which no longer carries an embryo. Tears slide into my ears as my teacher bends over me to press oil that smells like almonds into my third eye.

The difficult final year of a much-loved and legendarily difficult woman.

Confronting a body excluded from beauty amid Italy’s natural splendor.

How the #MeToo movement paved the way for a new era of food writing.

At the world’s largest gathering of psychics and mediums, two brothers confront a painful secret.

I sometimes miss believing, and look toward the days when I was satisfied by testimony—by the feeling that there were encounters everywhere, all seeming to attest to some great mystery.

“I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?”

An essay on insomnia.

How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look.

He sawed out the bottom. Nailed the crate to the telephone pole out in front of the house. New hoop. ... I’d be out there shooting until 10 at night. That’s when I started getting really good. The pole was round so you couldn’t bank the ball in. And you weren’t getting a friendly bounce on a square rim. You had to hit it dead-on, wet.

“Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools.”

There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped.