Nicholson Baker, prose writer beyond category, has a new book for COVID time, speaking directly to the dread of weaponized biology as only Nick Baker could treat it, in history...| More

Songs are no joke. I’m not being ironic with these songs. I’ve never done anything in which I feel more vulnerable to my own failings and inadequacies. Nicholson Baker in...| More

How quaint, just months ago, talking with Nicholson Baker about his inside-poetry novel, The Anthologist, to suppose his idle moments were consumed with Swinburne’s rhymes and the march time of...| More

Nicholson Baker: history by hyperlink A wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions....| More

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholson Baker. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat...| More

There’s a swerve in the road, signs that say “Sharp Curves Ahead,” in the origin story of the COVID pandemic. Where did that virus come from? And how did it...| More

One of the most popular Medium pieces Open Source has ever published is producer emeritus Kunal Jasty’s list of solutions to Fermi’s paradox. The paradox runs like this: there are...| More

This August, that summer-cinema experience of cataclysm and crash has escaped the theaters and invaded our everyday lives. The panic is real: about politics and economics, terrorism and temperature. So we’re taking a...| More

  By Max Larkin As a companion to our show on John Updike — now gone five years and at the same time back with us thanks to our guest...| More

David Shields practices what he preaches. Aphorisms in the Nietzsche manner are the coin of the literary realm that surfaces in his manifesto, Reality Hunger. In conversation, aphorisms seem to...| More