We’ll back on June 29th. In the meantime, catch up on your backlog with our most read stories of 2026 (so far)!
10. “Talking About Pittsburgh with Michael Chabon”
“From my point of view, I never hesitated, never doubted for a second that Pittsburgh was a good town to set a book and that it should be in the title.”
9. “Networking the Guardian 100”
“If George Eliot’s novel were an English midlands gastropub, you’d better believe some people are tucking in for no better reason than that it’s been open since 1872.”
8. “The Past and Present are Together as One”
“I was trying to articulate how Jason Irwin’s book, ‘These Fragments I Have Shored,’ is the kind of literature I most admire, the kind that is the most important to me as a reader.”
7. “The Cost of Doing Business”
On curating my first exhibition, making impossible things happen, and the people nobody sees doing it.
6. “On Beyond Argument (Or, What I Learned This School Year)”
“What makes school or college debating, and political debates on TV, exciting is the theater. As such, debate is not an entirely separate creature from professional wrestling, even if wrestlers have better costumes.”
5. “A Pope Against the Techbros”
“Being human means being authentically moved in your own heart in mysterious ways by revelations that don’t originate from aggregated data about other people collected by other people. Only you can know what it feels like for you to read Hamlet, see a solar eclipse, or hear your child’s heartbeat.”
4. “Some Counterintuitive Things about Academic Freedom and Democracy”
“Academic freedom is the oxygen of the open society; that truism happens to be true. But it depends on a delicate machinery which is largely known only to people inside academe, who so far have not done enough—and I certainly include myself—to explain why that machinery is important.”
3. “Address to the Class of 2026”
“Literature demands something greater, a more capacious empathy, a more generous soul, and a more daring imagination, which leads us not to brutal solidarity but to radical solidarity.”
2. “Gabriel Rockhill’s 400-Page Conspiracy Theory”
“Like many ‘revisionist’ arguments, Gabriel Rockhill’s argument functions as an academically credentialed, copiously footnoted conspiracy theory.”
1. “Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker”
Writing tips from the acclaimed writer and historian.
