Laura Miller
Culture Gabfest
The Culture Gabfest “Unkindest Cut of All” EditionSlate’s Culture Gabfest on Hereditary, The Staircase, and Lend Me Your Ears.
Wide Angle
The Mystery of CaliphateThe New York Times podcast focuses on a charismatic detective—but what case is she solving?
Books
The Trip of a LifetimeMichael Pollan explores what LSD and other psychedelics can do for the no longer young.
Books
Ginned UpLeslie Jamison’s 500-page exploration of recovery gets trapped in the thin tropes of the addiction memoir.
Downtime
Ready Critic OneIn real life, I’m a middle-aged writer living in an apartment crammed with books. In my gaming life, I’m allowed to be someone else.
Books
Rising to the Sunlit SurfaceThe characters in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels have mastered the exquisite semaphore of 20th-century gay life.
Books
Michelle McNamara’s Search for TruthThe true-crime writer died while hunting for a killer. Her final book is a testament to her gifts.
The Audio Book Club
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of DarknessHow does the novel hold up almost 50 years after it first appeared?
Books
The First Rough Draft of HistoryAli Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels is being written as we live it.
Culture Gabfest
The Culture Gabfest “Why Wouldn’t King Kong Want a Lady Gorilla?” EditionSlate’s Culture Gabfest on The Shape of Water, the Golden Globes, and sleep.
Books
The 8 Best Audiobooks of 2017From the dulcet tones of Michael Sheen to the irresistible deadpan of Sherman Alexie.
Brow Beat
TNY’s “Cat Person” Story Is Great. Too Bad the Internet Turned It Into a Piping-Hot Thinkpiece.
Books
Errol Morris Refutes It ThusThe filmmaker’s new book continues an argument with the philosopher Thomas Kuhn begun in 1972.
Brow Beat
The Long Shadow of the “Billion-Footed Beast”Tom Wolfe helped ignite an explosion in 21st-century fiction. It just wasn’t his novels that did it.
The Audio Book Club
The Sparsholt AffairHow does Alan Hollinghurst’s multigenerational saga represent the gay experience?
Brow Beat
CluelessThe true-crime podcast Atlanta Monster is a meandering mess of a mystery with a hapless detective at its center.
Books
The Ultimate Overdetermined TextTwo sex memoirs remind us that one woman’s degrading encounter can be another’s delirium of abandon.
Downtime
Why Do We Share Facebook Algorumors?Your news feed is not about to be limited to 26 friends.
Brow Beat
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Three ObstaclesWhat the science-fiction writer still has to overcome to be recognized as the titan she was.
Books
Laura Miller’s 10 Favorite Books of 2017Pankaj Mishra’s urgent political analysis, Ali Smith’s blissful prose, and David Grann’s latest journo-thriller.
Books
These Happy Golden YearsA new biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder untangles her story from the American myths her novels helped create.