This is America, I thought, it isn’t right to deny an adult—a paying customer—a beer.” ...

Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in ...

When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around ...

Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret ...

The novelist and critic Lucy Ives began composing writing prompts, sometimes spontaneously in classes she was teaching. These prompts grew to a collection of three hundred and sixty-five, which will ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John ...

“Who is Madeline?” asks my daughter. We’ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning—“Da da da da da da da who’s Madeline?”; we can’t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline ...

When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.