Sara Nics

Two mothers meet on the playground, and things get weird.

Welcome to the thoughtsphere. What’s a thoughtsphere?

E. M. Forster’s “Maurice” was something entirely new: a gay love story with a happy ending. The Merchant Ivory film adaptation, from 1987, has just been re-released.    

The poet Ellen Bass explores the habits that take us through life and death.

Hours before Lena Dunham’s thirtieth-birthday party, she joined David Remnick to drink champagne and discuss the end of her twenties, and the end of "Girls."

As a child, Bruce Eric Kaplan loved TV so much that he wanted to crawl inside it. Then he did.

The New Yorker’s poetry editor recommends a painter, a poet, and a rocker.

Hilton Als on winning the Pulitzer Prize.

A conversation about Sophocles in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars.    

Conservative and liberal legal scholars make history their battleground.    

At the Vive shelter, immigrants hoping for asylum in the United States or Canada sometimes find themselves in limbo, with no end in sight.

The cartoonist Emily Flake recommends a book of philosophy from the nineteen-thirties that presciently describes our current moment.  

Once an anonymous cook struggling with addiction, Anthony Bourdain wrote a ribald memoir and rose to food stardom. Now he chows down with Presidents.

Cartoonist Liana Finck likes to work on the train, but she doesn’t commute.  She just needs a place to work.

Ian Frazier visits the farm of the future, in an industrial building in New Jersey.

Lincoln was not only a great political leader but a great spiritual figure in the eyes of the fiction writer George Saunders.

A young man learns about love by analyzing the work of Motown’s songwriting geniuses

A food court with heavenly pho and crispy duck is a home away from home for an immigrant poet.

Two mothers meet on the playground, and things get weird.

David Remnick spent days interviewing Leonard Cohen, one of the great songwriters, not long before the musician’s death.