“I always said when this business got dirty, I’d get out,” Adriel Desautels told me late one summer evening in 2019.

Desautels was a cyberweapon merchant who looked like a milkman. He had an unruly head of curls, frameless glasses, a gap between his front teeth, and a penchant for quoting the astrophysicist Carl Sagan. His original hacker alias, Cyanide, never sat well. He’d eventually change it to the more sensible “Simon Smith.” But in a faceless business, looks meant little. Everyone who was anyone in the game knew Desautels was one of the country’s preeminent zero-day brokers.

When I

What should a crime novelist write about when there is not much crime to write about anymore? This question weighed on the minds of the crime writers Lee Child, Reggie Nadelson, and George Dawes Green during a dis­cussion in 2009 on New York Public Radio’s The Leonard Lopate Show. Invited to chat about “New York City Thrillers,” the three novelists found themselves instead musing about how the city had become less thrilling over the years. “It’s a very benevolent, peaceful place,” Child noted with a touch of sadness. “New York has changed, I think, in terms of crime. It’s relatively crime free,”

Daniel Menaker (1941–2020) was a fiction editor at the New Yorker, the editor in chief of Random House, and the author of seven books, including the celebrated novel The Treatment (1998) and the 2013 memoir My Mistake. Last January, Menaker received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and spent the next months chronicling his illness in verse, writing with mournful honesty and surprising humor about his diagnosis and treatment against the backdrop of the pandemic’s larger “sickness circus.” In his own words, Dan “wrote poetry his whole life, but kept it to himself for a long time, after

Grief memoirs typically meditate on the loss of someone so close to the author that they could have listed the deceased as an emergency contact. Candace Jane Opper’s Certain and Impossible Events is not that kind of memoir. The book revolves around the death of a boy Opper wasn’t exactly close with—a crush whose phone number she memorized when she was thirteen. He died by suicide, at age fourteen, in 1994, eight days after Kurt Cobain’s body was found. More than twenty-five years later, Certain and Impossible Events is Opper’s attempt to map her ongoing obsession with the boy’s death.

Normally,

I’m after a worldview.

—Jack Whitten

When the living conditions that art evinces haven’t changed, one must always make more imaginaries for one to live in.

—Dionne Brand, “Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom”

Another arrangement of the possible . . .

—Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

I have gathered the epigraphs for this essay from the painter Jack Whitten, the poet Dionne Brand, and the theorist Saidiya Hartman because of the ways they speak to the necessary scale of Black responses to these catastrophes

NEAR THE END OF SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN, Nathalie Léger’s guerrilla-critical reckoning with Loden’s 1970 film, Wanda, Léger visits a ghost town in Pennsylvania, not far from where the movie is set. A coal seam has been burning underground there since 1962, “an inferno buried beneath the town that slowly, slyly devastated everything, engulfing gardens, swallowing cars, and sometimes apparently children too.” Though a sign reads, WELCOME TO HELL, Léger notices “no sign of destruction, no trace of those terrible events. . . . This is what hell must be: erasure. And down below, the fire rages on.”