This machine needs us but doesn’t care about us
“I think the pandemic really gave industry workers a footing to stand on and get started,” Hanley went on. “People were patting industry workers on the back, saying we’re ‘essential’…
Poor in Tech
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because one time everyone else in my department quit or was fired in the space of six months,…
In Search of Lost Smell and Taste
“Even though we don’t pay that much attention to our sense of smell, as humans we’re constantly engaged subconsciously with the smells in our world, and that gives us a…
Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In
The esteemed science fiction author on how we may never go "back to normal"—and why that might be a good thing
Against Apocalypse
This approach to storytelling has its origins in what Michael Chabon has called the “utopian world” of the Bay Area and other metro regions along the Pacific coast. California was…
Jem Calder | Notes on Craft
I hated my job, and the longer I remained at that workplace, the more I could feel my identity becoming warped by it; the edges of my personality being steadily…
Thirst Trap by Jason Diamond
Bukowski imagines himself among the Rimbauds and Pounds, and that grandiosity is one reason he continues to attract fans—not necessarily readers—drawn to the image of the writer as the dirty-talking…
I’m an Award-Winning Short Story Writer and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Either
What I’d forgotten: the way I could hold a short story in my head for the entire composition of it, how the first mysterious intimations — a sentence, an image, an exchange…
Of Poetry and Women and the World
I have to say that war is man-made. It’s made by men. It’s their thing, it’s their world, and they’re terribly injured in it.
Portrait of My Father | Alexander Chee | Granta Magazine
‘He left for the US while his father was away on business so he couldn’t stop him.’ Alexander Chee on his father.