The Best American Essays 2026

The fantasy of the university

Audrey Wollen examines the handbag as a symbol of femininity, desire, and control, unpacking its cultural weight through feminist theory and alternative…

When martial law is declared in Korea in winter 2024 by a president seeking to stage an autocoup, the writer is pushed to revisit her teenage years spent under military rule and confront the damage and despair encountered by her family as she approached the cusp of a precarious adulthood.

How the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide

Is consciousness God?

The daughter of Caroline Kennedy writes about receiving a terminal diagnosis following the birth of her daughter, and watching Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., cut funding for the health-care system she relies on.

It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution, the term they tend to prefer is “elite”, and odds are that eventually someone who was a student there, who maybe resided only on the…

After open-heart surgery

Zadie Smith, the author of “Swing Time,” “The Fraud,” and “Dead and Alive,” reflects on how the essay-writing habits of her school days still influence her writing today.

Mary Turfah writes on Gaza and the limits of the war photograph, in an essay from the upcoming issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 46: “Alien.”

What years of witnessing executions taught me about sin, mercy, and the possibility of redemption.

Insomnia has become a public-health emergency.

Hilton Als writes about his college days and first love: Leaving Brooklyn for a new life as a student in Manhattan was in itself an act of becoming.

Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. Jia Tolentino writes that more and more of the world is slipping beyond her comprehension.

For years, my friend’s father asked me to recount his childhood escape from the Nazis. Why did it take me this long?

‘The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory.’ Fernanda Eberstadt on Andy Warhol.

Columnist Pamela Paul is leaving the New York Times “Opinion” section. She exemplified an intellectual movement that emerged as the liberal optimism of the Obama years curdled into an open contempt for the very idea of liberation.

For the Super Bowl, New Orleans forced unhoused people into a grim warehouse, and paid a private contractor $17.5 million for it, while billionaires’ superyachts floated on the Mississippi. How much longer will we tolerate this obscene inequality?

I’m learning that crying is what it is, not bad, not good. And that dementia is what it is, not bad, not good. And anything can happen in anyone’s life, anywhere, anytime. Not bad, not good.

Dawn in Podil. The Jewish quarter of Kyiv from times past. March 21, 2024, sunrise and missiles over the Dnipro river, although it was impossible to see the sunrise from inside the bomb shelter. In a frame on my desk there is a scrap of paper that Václav Havel once left behind on a...