August 12, 2026 Diaries The Bookstore-Slash-Skate-Shop Next to Ballerina Farm By Claire Carusillo Photo by Claire Carusillo. June 12, 2026 Our shop is in an old service station in a charming alpine town nestled within Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Here’s the oomph of it: Avery, the only person who works here besides Galen and me, sells coffee in a waiting room we’ve converted into a bar. In the first garage bay, Galen sells skateboards and enormous pairs of shorts. In the second garage bay, I sell books and art supplies and an assortment of Korean-formulated sunscreens. Some people have been calling the shop “maximalist,” but I’m actually quite particular about the goods we hawk. Sarah’s in from New York to help with our grand opening, and she prices our whole drinks menu and sets up the receipt printer. I’ve known her since I was nineteen, and she’s been doing stuff that I don’t want to do for fifteen years now. Once, during the pandemic, we went glamping near Moab and almost died overnight from carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by a backfiring tent stove. I thought it was because we’d eaten too much bread pudding before tucking in. She got us two free nights in an upgraded safari tent. The first book I sell on our first day in business is a used copy of Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, for seven dollars. It goes home with a high school English teacher on a daytime date. The next is a used copy of The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin, also for seven dollars, to a studious young college student. The third is a copy of Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You, which goes to a girl who pays with her own money even though her parents are present. She seems to be around thirteen, and I worry for a moment that she’s not old enough to read a book with so many lecherous older men skulking through its pages. But nobody ever monitored my reading when I was that age, and I turned out pretty much fine. I read a lot of Janet Evanovich’s bounty hunter series. Read More
August 6, 2026 On Books No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul’s Jonestown By Andrew Holter Courtesy of The Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, via Wikimedia Commons. From the outset there seemed to be little mystery as to the facts of the case at Jonestown. The victims included over nine hundred men, women, and children of People’s Temple, the majority of them Black Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area (which matters). The scene of the crime was an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana (not a coincidence). The murder weapon (the word “suicide” here would be imprecise) was a blend of poisons mixed into a powdered drink called Fla-Vor-Aid. The culprit was the Reverend Jim Jones and his motive was simple: to spare his flock their impending annihilation at the hands of the United States government. Jones had talked about this prospect incessantly, obsessively, for a long time. There had been rehearsals. If the question is why so many people decided to kill themselves, the first answer has to be that a lot of them didn’t. Many syringes were found at the scene among the plastic cups. There was no meaningful notion of choice at Jonestown; Jones’s command to take the poison was enforced by men with guns. A third of the victims were children. Atrocities of that scale tend to have world-historic causes. But in the aftermath of that awful night on November 18, 1978, public inquiries mostly focused on the morbid explanations (cultology, groupthink, leader-worship, etc). Whatever else Jonestown was, it was the result of an accretion of human choices, many of them rational, and yet few writers investigated the political circumstances that had allowed a mad cleric to assume such earthly power in the first place. Read More
August 4, 2026 On Sports Last Days at the Aqueduct: New York’s Rundown Racetrack By Max Callimanopulos Courtesy of Max Callimanopulos. The first one thousand fans through the gates of the Aqueduct Racetrack on the last Sunday of June received a commemorative vial of track dirt. I arrived too late to claim mine, but I spotted several as I walked out to the grandstand. A few old men clutched them tightly while watching the races. Others used them as paperweights to keep their stacks of betting slips from blowing away. “Magic charm,” said a man in a Vietnam War Veteran hat, flashing his little jar at me. After 132 years, the Aqueduct Racetrack was closing. Some lucky people would leave with a bit of it in their pockets. Read More
August 3, 2026 Redux My Year of Tests and Arbitration By The Paris Review Courtesy of Ottessa Moshfegh. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. The first thing you learn about the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” published in issue no. 204 of the Review, is that she pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings. Miss Mooney is a jaded teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school, prone to showing up hungover, faking her students’ state exams, napping on the job in a sleeping bag, and offering such wisdom as: You can’t “get fat from being ejaculated into.” Read More
July 30, 2026 On Film The Soothing Unsubtlety of UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun By Paul Thompson Still from UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun. © 2026 Sincere Films, courtesy of Paulio Shakespeare and NTD. There’s this old joke from the Cold War. An American is on a flight next to someone from the USSR; they strike up a friendly conversation. The American says: “I’m really impressed by your country’s propaganda. It’s so persuasive, so sophisticated.” The Soviet is sheepish. “Thank you, but it’s nothing compared to yours,” he says. The American blanches. “What do you mean? We don’t have propaganda.” The Soviet laughs. Read More
July 29, 2026 One Book The Theater of Sport: Bill Buford Revisits Among the Thugs By Leo Robson Bill Buford with Granta, between 1979 and 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This month, we’re rolling out a new web series, One Book, which is more or less what it sounds like—an interview with an author about the making of just one of their books, not because that book has just been published (it could be decades old) or is in the news (though we’d be thrilled if it was), but because it is very good. This is the first installment. — Tarpley Hitt, online editor. *** In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football hooligans”—a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of violence and vandalism on match days. English soccer in those days was associated with brutality on the “terraces” (the standing area at stadiums) and in the streets before and after matches. Hooliganism was the so-called British disease, a source of national shame. Buford started going around with the Manchester United “firm,” or gang, known as the ICJ, or the Inter-City Jibbers. Later, he sought danger at a disco organized by the far-right group the National Front, and while traveling among England’s supporters at the World Cup. Read More