Janet Malcolm

A Second Chance

A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing.

Lovesick

Drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.

A Work of Art

On real and fake snapshots

‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’

Norman Podhoretz’s memoir ‘Making It’

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Translation & Revelation

‘A Very Sadistic Man’

Jonathan Bate’s ‘Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life’

Dreams and Anna Karenina

Tolstoy’s understanding of the sly techniques of dream-creation is at the heart of his novelist’s enterprise

The Master Writer of the City

Joseph Mitchell’s notorious nonfiction inventions revealed a hybrid genre for which he had a singular genius.

Charlotte Brontë & Nora Ephron

Michelle: Surviving in a Fixed World

The Fate of Michelle Malakova: ‘Oppositional Behavior’

What Happened to Michelle in Forest Hills?

Behind the tabloid story of the “murder orphan” in Queens

Free Associations

Last winter, I came into possession of the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. The archive included a collection of manila envelopes, around six by ten inches, stuffed with folded sheets of thin paper covered with single-spaced typing: the notes the psychiatrist made after seeing patients (many of them fellow émigrés) in his office. As I studied the sheets with their inky typewriting and 60-year-old paper clips holding them together and leaving rust marks on the surface, my collagist’s imagination began to stir. I began to “see” some version of the collages on view here.

Special Needs

Comedy Central on the Mall

Jon Stewart confirmed that we had all come to the rally in Washington in order to congratulate ourselves on our decency and rationality. We were at a giant preen-in.

Comedy Central on the Mall

On October 31, Peter Clothier, a seventy-four-year-old author and retired professor, posted an entry on his blog, called The Buddha Diaries, about the wonderful day he and his wife Ellie had spent at the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30 at the Mall in Washington, D.C., between noon and 3 PM. “We stood there trapped for a good two hours, surrounded by people who, like us, had showed up. We saw nothing, heard nothing of what was happening on the stage. It was great!” Clothier writes.

Levin’s Moral Mowing

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly.