Writing
fromThe Atlantic
21 hours agoThe Feeling of Becoming Less and Less of a Person
The advent of the smartphone marked a significant shift in human perception and relationships, altering the human sensorium since June 2007.
Both are "idealists," he writes, "deranged by hope, in awe of reassurance, impressed by their pleasures." The book criticizes monogamy as "a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to a minimum," but it doesn't exactly defend infidelity. Phillips's real target may be monotony, the offspring of rote rule-following.
"Even if there is a 20% chance of this happening, people deserve to know and have time to prepare." The people in tech who previously warned about AI's impact were mostly speaking to others in the industry, he said. Shumer said he wanted something that spoke to his dad, a lawyer who is just a few years from retirement and is hopeful he can run out the clock on the potential massive change on the horizon.
If you were an immigrant kid in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, the candy store was the center of your world. You went there to kibbitz and schmooze, to get away from the crush of tenement life and the glare of the beat cop, and, of course, to eat sweets-Tootsie Rolls and Chicken Feeds and as many chocolate pennies as a copper one could buy.
"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we'd never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he'd left, was pray.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
A crack of thunder, a flash of light, and a sulfurous mist flooded my apartment. Marax, President of Hell, stood before me. Marax entered my summoning circle, eyes burning with unholy fire, and I gave him the stack of homework to flip through while I brushed my teeth. Marax marked up the papers and fleshed out my bullet points into thoughtful feedback before I even got to my molars. Then-three hours of my life, saved!-I banished him back to Hell.
We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.
Skip to main content Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph Michael Lionstar Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joseph O'Neill reads his story Light Secrets, from the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. O'Neill is the author of a story collection and five novels, including Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, The Dog, and Godwin, which was published in 2024.
At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as the expression of a predicament a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle.