On the writer W.G. Sebald.

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

Exploring the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

On the work of Vivian Gornick.

For a rebellious, Korean-American teen like myself who was awkwardly trying to situate himself, without much success, Jackson’s writing, with its rap and jazz references and its relentless, engaging voice, provided a vision of Black agency that felt almost illicit.

On the anti-communist genocide known by the Indonesian Army as Operation Annihilation.

On loving and hating and living in Manhattan.

On young love.

Punitive notions of disease have a long history, and such notions are particularly active with cancer. There is the “fight” or “crusade” against cancer; cancer is the “killer” disease; people who have cancer are “cancer victims.” Ostensibly, the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable.

An exchange on faith and politics in America.

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

In defense of fiction.

Another inmate was unable to complete his application, and assented to voluntary departure, in which an immigrant agrees to leave the country at his or her own expense. “You’ll be on your way back to Mexico today,” said the judge.

An essay from inside Sing Sing.

What climate change means for kids in New York.

On the choices Fred Rogers made.

In the wings of this great drama were the unseen. Hidden in the rainforest where the violence was staged, in the eerie aftermath of the tragedy, were three people whose stories cue political contexts in both the US and Guyana crucial to understanding how and why Jonestown may have happened.

On Bob Woodward’s “rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him.”

On the ubiquity of forest fires.

On the Central Park jogger case.

When New York was perpetually on fire.

On the fallibility of memory.

Watching the jazz singer in New York.

A dispatch from the Philippine capital, where “no one will be safe until many, many more have died.”