Ismail Muhammad

Ads for consumer A.I. are struggling to imagine how the product could improve your day — unless you’re a barely functioning idiot.

Roy Wood Jr. performs in small clubs from Georgia to Wyoming, finding humor in the moments that leave us humbled and confused.

There’s something uniquely American in both its wanton borrowing from existing tradition and its naked admission of artificiality.

Players love recreating memorable images from basketball’s past.

The filmmaker has made it clear that “Civil War” is a warning. Instead, the ugliness of war comes across as comforting thrills.

He ​had what must have been the wildly alienating experience of ​being upstaged by a cartoon character.

There’s something uniquely American in both its wanton borrowing from existing tradition and its naked admission of artificiality.

A video appeared to show Dodger Stadium in ruins. Was it a religious sign, climate disaster or something else entirely?

In the essay collection “Dark Days,” Roger Reeves tries to sidestep mainstream arguments to engage deeply with the way people actually live and think.

What used to seem like an admission of defeat became a source of strength.

It was all so calm and unhurried. Sometimes, somehow, the fear of violence shakes people more than violence itself.

After a celebrated career of making oblique work that refused autobiography, he is making his most personal work yet.

Martin Puchner’s new book is a forceful rebuke to those who argue that culture can be owned by groups, nations, religions or races.

The essays in “Black and Female” recount the Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker’s life in the context of colonialism and its aftermaths.

A crop of recent novels strains against the expectations of a publishing industry attempting to embrace diversity.

Decade after decade, waves of migration have remade New York. What kind of city will the latest one create?

One of rap’s more confounding artists uses his popularity to assert his humanity.

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

He bore the kind of pain Black men rarely get to air in public, hoping that transparency would manifest the tenderness he desired.

“Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone,” his latest collection, erodes the boundaries between fiction, memoir and essay.