Essays
Hannah Smart writes about her attempt to diagram a 900-word sentence in David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” and what the efforts taught her about human inertia and meaningless language.
What was lost when Claire Douglas’s archive burned.
In 2025, television offered a primer in principled dissent.
The third installment of ‘The Biden Years On-Screen’ considers the cinematic fallout of cancel culture, the overruling of Roe v. Wade, and the 2022 midterm elections.
Aran Ward Sell reconsiders the legacy and complex overlapping ‘failures’ of Mervyn Peake’s final novel, ‘Titus Alone.’
Lori Marso looks at “Priscilla” within Sofia Coppola’s white girl oeuvre.
On America’s runaway Story Drive.
Tracing the California lineage of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its passionate founder, John Martin.
On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us.
In the 11th essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Michael Rossi shows how American scientists and artists used their discovery of racial ‘types’ to buttress eugenicist notions of aesthetic taste.
LARB presents an excerpt from Gayle Feldman’s forthcoming biography of Bennett Cerf, the legendary American publisher.
Andrew Holter revisits ‘The California Reich’ 50 years on and considers the legacy of the neo-Nazi documentary.
The L.A. fires, one year later.
Drew Bratcher meditates on the legacy of a country music legend.
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