Reading the world from my New York City apartment

Like so many others, I was transfixed this past week by the awe-inspiring Artemis II mission to circle the moon, and by the perilous re-entry and dramatic splashdown that brought our astronauts safely back to Earth. Even before Artemis blasted off, I had been thinking about how the moon is emblematic of so many things: madness, danger, melancholy, longing, romance and more. I had just finished reading a book with "moon" in the title, though I'm saving that discussion for anot

Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans. Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun , his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become

A company in South Korea made headlines last year when it announced it would award employees 100 million won (about $75,000) for every baby that they have. It's part of an effort to reverse the country’s low birth rate, which has been fueled by high living costs, a grinding work culture, and the growing sentiment among many young women that marriage isn't worth the hassle. In the short and sly novel Apartment Women , first published in Korean in 2018 and translated into Engli

Literature is full of characters who find their way to New York to remake themselves, from Jay Gatsby to Holly Golightly. In Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz , Joe and Violet Trace arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration with hopes of moving past the violence and indignities of the rural South, only to find that the city offers no escape. I just finished reading Jazz and found it to be dazzling and thought-provoking, just like every other Toni Morrison novel I have read.

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once

I'm very interested in learning more about the Vietnam War, and in better understanding both how the United States got entangled in the conflict and what has happened in the decades since we withdrew. Today, Vietnam has transformed into one of the most dynamic economies in Asia. I also hear that it's an amazing place to visit. One book that came highly recommended is The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, and I already have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. It is wide