Mat Cusick

“Allegory of Sight“ (1659) | Jan van Kessel / CC0 1.0 Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post, an editor at the Point, and a contributing editor at Boston Review.

Artificial Intelligence Concept Collage (2024)| KitohodkA / Shutterstock Emily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic. Her newest book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV (Random House, 2024), was published this June to great fanfare.

Image credit: Henri-Edmond Cross “Venice: Night of the Festival of the Redeemer” (1903). Met Open Access. Content note: this piece contains extensive discussion of eating disorders. The summer I got my period was the summer I stopped eating.