You’re about to tell us all about Lydia Millet. Why should we want to know about her? What you’re asking for here is what’s known as “the hook.” The hook is the part of the essay where I try to …

My first understanding—I’m foreign, you see—of Martin Luther King Day came from Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” off Apocalypse 91. The “news announcement” at the start of the song suggests that “the powers that be in …

Of those holding bachelor’s degrees in 2011, 53.6 percent below the age of 25 were either jobless or underemployed. For all but two weeks of the year, I contributed to that statistic. A graduate on an unsuccessful employment tour, I …

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Four years on, the heady idealism of 2008 makes me cringe …

The summers when I was in middle school I spent hiking out West, and we did a lot of putting one foot in front of the other in the most gorgeous places I’ve ever been. But I don’t think that …

If you have spent any significant amount of time in some kind of creative endeavor you have probably also spent a lot of time being bored. Your day tends to be unstructured and open, leaving room to do nothing that …

When Amy Chua published an article in the Wall Street Journal last January entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” people were offended. The article—an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—makes the case for a “Chinese” style of parenting in …

In the summer of 2010, a strange controversy ignited around a proposal to build an Islamic community center roughly two blocks from the former World Trade Center site. The design for the facility included a prayer room, but also a …

In May of 2011, Oprah aired the final episode of her talk show, ending a 25-year run. now that her show is done, Winfrey is not, of course, planning to retreat into a state of respectable semi-obscurity like an ex-president. …

Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, the two most important American writers of their era, both grew up in the Midwest. Franzen describes his childhood in Webster Groves, Missouri as having unfolded “in the middle of the middle [where] there …