Lily Meyer
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Articles by Lily Meyer
Good Villains Are Hard to Come By. This One’s Great.
Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.
In Praise of Adult Silliness
Silliness, in general, is not hard for me to come by: I have a toddler who is, as she declares often, a “silly person.” Still, the very pleasure I take in being silly with my child and her friends reveals to me its rarity in adult public life. Few social situations encourage or even allow unadulterated loopiness. In general, art made for adults tends to abide by this taboo. We get satire, scatological jokes, imitations, and absurdity, but rarely do we get silliness.
A Diagnosis for Social Conflict That Gets Lost Along the Way
Weddings, famously, create conflict. Before I got married, my parents and I fought over the guest list. A friend of mine struggled with adding some of her husband’s Protestant traditions to their otherwise Jewish ceremony. Another friend had to decode, and then manage, complicated tensions among her future aunts- and uncles-in-law.
A Peaceful Detective Mystery to Watch
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained.
A Peaceful Detective Mystery to Watch
Avoiding the family drama: How Josh Kushner built a $16-billion legacy and became the newest owner of the Lakers When news broke that Mark Walter’s insurance businesses were under federal investigation and that the Lakers and Dodgers owner might be in financial trouble, Josh Kushner sensed a business opportunity. The New York venture capitalist called former Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger — his partner in a …
The Long Tail of Boyhood Swagger
Tangled themes of violence and masculinity run like buried cables through Chang-rae Lee’s work. One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood, he’s been writing for three decades about assimilation, suburban alienation, and the mystery of how his characters survive loneliness and, often, shocking loss.
The Part of Our Life We Too Often Forget
Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car.
The Wisdom of Holden Caulfield
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s classic of adolescent alienation, turns 75 this summer, though it has the cast-iron reputation of a much older book. Just as Moby-Dick is canonically about whales, Catcher is canonically about phonies. Its narrator, Holden Caulfield, is tormented—though I likely don’t have to tell you this—by his awareness that society rewards and revolves around fakers.
The Classic Novel That Today’s Young Men Should Read Original
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s classic of adolescent alienation, turns 75 this summer, though it has the cast-iron reputation of a much older book. Just as Moby-Dick is canonically about whales, Catcher is canonically about phonies. Its narrator, Holden Caulfield, is tormented—though I likely don’t have to tell you this—by his awareness that society rewards and revolves around fakers.
A Close-Up Look at the Waste of Modern Life
Like many small children, my daughter reveres garbage trucks. In the mornings, she goes to the window and asks, eyes shining, whether today will be a “garbage-truck day.” When she sees or hears one, she reacts with a giddy, half-afraid delight that I imagine she’ll reserve, someday, for roller coasters or getting a body part pierced.
A Close-Up Look at the Waste of Modern Life
I had no idea reading in bed could be causing my 3 a.m. wake-ups — an insomnia expert explains the simple switch for sleeping through My favorite place to read is in bed: it's cozy, comfortable, and people can't distract me when I'm getting to the good bit. I'm happy to spend the …
Saying ‘No’ to an American Loyalty Test
Loyalty—a virtue elementary schoolers can explain clearly—has long seemed to confuse the United States government. Some administrations have equated it to patriotism, others to partisan allegiance. Some have tried to manufacture it: In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower declared May 1 to be Loyalty Day, an anti-Communist alternative to the labor movement’s May Day that hardly anyone now celebrates.
Reimagining George Washington’s Portrait
George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.” Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art.
How Big Is the American Dream House?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. “When I was nine or ten and lived in a dark fourth-floor apartment in a building that had seen better days, I fantasized mansions that were more suited to my romantic nature,” Linda Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 1978.
Is Cohabitation the Feminist Future?
Years ago, I moved into a small, cold house with two women I’d never met. Quickly, we became very close, in part through living communally: divvying up the big chores and scarce hot water, waiting until everyone was home to watch the latest episode of Girls. We were the same age as the show’s characters and had our share of similar dramas, largely related to the boyfriends who, we rightly assumed, would eventually end our cohabitation.
Living With Your Friends Won’t Solve Your Problems
Years ago, I moved into a small, cold house with two women I’d never met. Quickly, we became very close, in part through living communally: divvying up the big chores and scarce hot water, waiting until everyone was home to watch the latest episode of Girls. We were the same age as the show’s characters and had our share of similar dramas, largely related to the boyfriends who, we rightly assumed, would eventually end our cohabitation.
Living With Your Friends Won’t Solve Your Problems
Living With Your Friends Won’t Solve Your Problems Stories about women cohabitating are proliferating—and are far from simply idyllic. Years ago, I moved into a small, cold house with two women I’d never met. Quickly, we became very close, in part through living communally: divvying up the big chores and scarce hot water, waiting until everyone was …
How Long Can You Live Your Ideals? Original
Early in One Battle After Another, the director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning tale of insurgency in slow decline, Pat Calhoun, a guerrilla explosives expert played by Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a choice that sets the course of both his life and the movie: He picks parenthood over radicalism. As Pat drives into the night with his infant daughter snuggled in a laundry basket, viewers understand that he has forsaken one set of ideals—and battles—for another.
The Seinfeld Principle of COVID Fiction
“We’re living in a society!” the Seinfeld character George Costanza sputters when strangers wrong him. It’s a justly famous line. Seinfeld’s nine seasons are an extended ode to irritation as the greatest enforcer of social norms, made funnier by the fact that the show’s protagonists are all irritating. The series demonstrates the joys of fictional annoyance.
The 'Seinfeld' Principle of COVID Fiction
Be Water, My Friend: 9 Bruce Lee Lines That Turned Philosophy Into Action Yes, Bruce Lee was the first Asian-American actor to ever have a lead role in a Hollywood film, and yes, his kicks were too fast for the cameras to …
The ‘Seinfeld’ Theory of Fiction
3 hours ago Catch me with bare lips? Never. These are the juicy, color-packed formulas worth stocking (and restocking). The best Korean lip tints are—and have been—at the top of their game, and as a beauty editor who almost exclusively wears them, this story practically writes itself. If you’re in the market …
Tayari Jones Makes the Old-Fashioned Novel Modern
At the end of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, an aging Newland Archer, who as a young man broke his own heart by choosing propriety over love, tells himself that the mark of the modern era is that everyone is too busy to care about their neighbors’ standing. Archer, shaped by the hierarchies of the Gilded Age, is disoriented by this new egalitarianism.
When Did Literature Get Less Dirty?
When Philip Roth published his novel Zuckerman Unbound 45 years ago, The New York Times called it an “act of contrition.” The literary critic George Stade read it as an autobiographical account of Roth’s experiences as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, the virtuosically neurotic tale of a nice Jewish boy trying to either shake or embrace his sex obsession, which made Roth famous when it came out, in 1969.
The End of Romance
Skip to main content Join a community of readers who are committed to Jewish stories Sign up for JBC’s Nu Reads, a curated selection of Jewish books delivered straight to your door! Review By – February 19, 2026 Reading The End of Romance, Lily Meyer’s second novel, brought to mind the recent film The Materialists (2025), starring Dakota Johnson — another “anti-romance” that sets out, at least initially, to challenge our assumptions about monogamy and marriage.
What the Kennedy Center Closure Really Means for Art
On Sunday evening, as stars walked the red carpet at the Grammy Awards, President Trump announced without warning his intention to close and renovate the Kennedy Center. His statement contained scant details, though it did mention that the venue will shut on July 4, “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” and reopen in roughly two years—that is, while he’s still in the White House.
Lily Meyer on Philip Roth, Anti-Zionism, and Her Relationship to American Judaism
Philip Roth, Zadie Smith writes in her essay collection Dead and Alive, was a patriot. An “unusually patriotic writer,” in fact. Smith met Roth when he was in his eighties, retired from writing, and she recalls that he devoted the bulk of his time to reading American history, especially slave narratives and books about slavery. To Smith, this was emblematic of Roth’s particular version of patriotism. His “love for his country,” she explains, “never outweighed or obscured his curiosity about it.
The End of Romance: A Guest Post by Lily Meyer
The End of Romance: A Guest Post by Lily Meyer When her marriage ends, “no strings attached” becomes Sylvie’s motto, but her cynical rebellion turns into a tender love story when two men enter her life. Read on for an exclusive essay from Lily Meyer on writing The End of Romance. Hardcover $29.00 By Lily Meyer In Stock Online Hardcover $29.00 Please enable javascript to add items to the cart.
The Post-Ambition Trap
Millennials love to talk—and gripe—about ambition. What was once a virtue has become a generational bugbear. Millennial women, raised on Girl Power and rom-coms in which the heroine gets the job and the man, joined the workforce just in time for the girlboss culture of the 2010s, which promised that hard work would lead not only to personal success but also to feminist victory. For many American women, no piece of that promise has come true.
The Post-Ambition Trap
1 hour ago '90s babies, it's your time to shine! IYKYK, the '90s were one of the best decades. From the pop stars to the cult-classic films, it was everything! And if you grew up in this decade, now's the time to show how well you *really* remember it. How does this quiz work? If you answer a question …
The Real Fight for the Smithsonian
“The object of the Museum is to acquire power,” announces a crusty old archaeologist in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1977 satire, The Golden Child. It isn’t a goal he respects. He wants the museum where he’s settled into semiretirement to genuinely devote itself to educating its visitors. Instead, he correctly charges, its curators act like a pack of Gollums, hoarding “the art and treasures of the earth” for their own self-aggrandizement and pleasure.
Rabih Alameddine: A Writer Fueled by Life’s Randomness
“When I’m told I should write a certain way, I bristle,” Rabih Alameddine wrote in a 2018 Harper’s essay. “I even attempt to write in opposition to the most recent book I finished. If my previous novel was expansive, I begin to write microscopically; if quiet, I write loudly.
Tamar Adler and the Case for Kitchen Scraps
Broccoli stems don’t tend to rouse strong emotions. Most home cooks toss them in the trash or compost without a second thought. But when I threw out some broccoli stalks—tough and woody ones, let it be known—while cooking dinner recently, guilt overcame me. I could have pickled those stalks; I could have boiled them and turned them into pesto. Instead, I had turned them into landfill. Waste is endemic to American cooking and eating.
AI Is Coming for Your Toddler’s Bedtime Story
I began this morning, as I do every morning, by reading my daughter a book. Today it was Arthur Dorros’ Abuela, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Abuela is a sweet story about a girl who imagines that she and her grandmother leap into the sky and soar around New York City. Dorros does an elegant job weaving Spanish words and phrases throughout the text, often allowing readers to glean their meaning rather than translating them directly.
Like Fireflies Hanging from the Tamarind Tree
Early in Stolen Flower, a collection of poems by the Isthmus Zapotec poet and activist Irma Pineda, newly translated into English by Wendy Call, a speaker recounts an exchange with an unnamed second person who asks, “Where is the precise place / that a man’s heart might be split / before it cracks open / like an eggshell on the hearth?” The you asking this question is young, with a “green-stemmed voice,” and seemingly alone: the poem ends with “thousands of footprints” that “lead away on the...
Madeleine Arenivar on the Rhythm of Translation, Preserving Poetic Language, and Letting a Novel’s Voice Shine
The translator Madeleine Arenivar, who lives in Quito, Ecuador, was a student in perhaps the most enjoyable class I’ve ever taught: an online translation course whose participants were, without exception, eager, gifted, and giving. We were unanimously delighted with Madeleine’s workshop contribution, an excerpt from the Ecuadorean writer Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s debut novel Carnaval Fever.
Whose Jewish Dystopia?
In 1895, the journalist Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary that he had “been occupied with a work of infinite grandeur”; that is, developing his vision of Zionism. Despite his utter commitment—“for days and weeks it has possessed me beyond the limits of consciousness”—he wasn’t yet sure what would come of his “mighty dream.” But even if the “conception is not translated into reality,” he mused, “at least out of my activity can come a novel.
Feminist Art Is Getting Fun Original
Before Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend appeared in English, no one thought it would be a smash hit. The novel and its three sequels, collectively known as the Neapolitan Quartet, follow two women, Lila and Elena, through a tempestuous, competitive, and emotionally intense friendship that doubles as a history of postwar feminism and postwar Italy.
All Our Brilliant Friends
Latvian MPs vote to pull out of treaty on protecting women from violence Latvian MPs have voted to withdraw from an international accord aimed at protecting women from violence, including domestic abuse, after a long and intense debate in parliament. Several thousand people protested against the vote this week in Riga. It is now up to President Edgars Rinkevics to decide …
The Tale of a Guardian, a Thief and the Fine Line Between
India: Broad daylight robbery unfolds as thief breaks through roof into government building Guwahati, India - October 12, 2025 The thief climbed to the roof using stairs through the gallery, smashed the skylight glass, and entered the land department officer’s room. During the attempt, he fell while trying to break through the false ceiling, suffering an unexpected mishap. The incident took place at the land department officer's room.
Book Review: ‘A Guardian and a Thief,’ by Megha Majumdar
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Fiction Megha Majumdar’s new novel follows two disastrously entangled lives in a famine-ridden future. By Lily Meyer Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic and the author of the novels “The End of Romance” and “Short War.” Oct.
A human rights lawyer’s personal quest for international justice
A human rights lawyer’s personal quest for international justice (washingtonpost.com) A human rights lawyer’s personal quest for international justice By Lily Meyer 2025100813000000 In his acclaimed book "East West Street" (2016), the British-French human rights lawyer Philippe Sands intertwines two stories that, to him, are squarely if not quite equally personal.
How "Antisemitism" Became a Weapon of the Right Original
Not long after Hamas's October 7, 2023, assault on Israel and the start of that country's brutal and ongoing war of retaliation, students at Columbia University-as well as many other colleges-set up an encampment to protest against Israel's bombardment of Palestinian civilians. Both Columbia's administration and New York City's elites panicked. A group of billionaires began lobbying the mayor to get rid of the encampment.
'Snowy Day': A Book Only a Filmmaker Could Have Written Original
At the beginning of the South Korean writer and director Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 thriller Burning, a movie adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, a young woman named Haemi invites a childhood acquaintance, Jongsu, to her apartment, which she complains gets natural light for only one moment a day, when the sun bounces off the Seoul Tower to shine in her window. She and Jongsu quickly begin having sex, which Lee shoots from Jongsu’s perspective.
The World Chaim Grade Lost
July 9, 2025 The World Chaim Grade Lost The Yiddish writer’s lost masterpiece, Sons & Daughters, brought back to life, in all its humor and beauty, the Jewish shtetl of his youth. Edit Ad Policy Chaim Grade in Vilne, Lithuania, 1945.
'The Antidote' to Guilty Memories
If literature and pop culture are to be trusted, many of us are drawn to the idea of eliminating memories—cordoning them off, storing them outside ourselves, or getting rid of them completely. In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a former couple pays to have their memories of each other erased after a bad breakup.
Catherine Lacey’s Disappointing Fusion of Fiction and Memoir
Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, which came out in 2023, is one of the most formally and intellectually interesting books of the decade so far. It’s an audacious, compelling collage of truth and invention, a story of a made-up artist that draws on bits of real artists’ lives in a biographic sense and repurposes them to fictional ends. It’s good enough to read over and over, searching for the line where reality crosses into imagination.
Catherine Lacey’s Disappointing Fusion of Fiction and Memoir
Generate Key Takeaways Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, which came out in 2023, is one of the most formally and intellectually interesting books of the decade so far. It’s an audacious, compelling collage of truth and invention, a story of a made-up artist that draws on bits of real artists’ lives in a biographic sense and repurposes them to fictional ends. It’s good enough to read over and over, searching for the line where reality crosses into imagination.
Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia’s campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The Novelist Who Learned to Write Anger—And Its Aftermath Original
Following up on a profoundly angry book that made her a literary star is the daunting challenge Susan Choi faces with Flashlight, her sixth novel. Its predecessor, Trust Exercise (2019), broke out in a way that her earlier fiction, though well received, hadn’t.
The Novelist Who Learned to Write Anger—And Its Aftermath | Flipboard
Did ChatGPT ruin the em dash? Here’s how to stop it from putting them everywhere Punctuation can be like spices in food. They flavor and enhance the dish, but too much can overwhelm the blend and ruin the meal. The em dash has …
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