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I. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome Christmastime in Las Vegas: tinsel on the slot machines, Santa hats on the pit bosses, short days, vivid... Read More

Okay so let’s talk about writing. How did you know you wanted to be a writer? You know it’s hard to really know the answer to... Read More

Last week, the books and culture magazine I run, The Metropolitan Review, held the launch party for its first print issue. It was a... Read More

Jaden Ivey is far from the first promising NBA prospect who failed to pan out with the team that drafted him. But few, if any, have washed... Read More

Last year a new Texas law banned students in public K-12 schools from using cell phones during the school day. School... Read More

In his 1971 presidential memoir The Vantage Point, Lyndon Johnson concluded his chapter on the space program as follows: On the morning... Read More

Once upon a time, no conversation about Playboy magazine was complete without a jab at the oft-repeated claim by certain men to read it for... Read More

In 1989, as the Cold War began to fade and the eastern frontier opened, a young, penniless would-be Russian writer made the classic trip from... Read More

The Queen of Mean may have been indelicate, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. I recently took a break from swearing at TurboTax (Thou... Read More

Today’s guest is the one and only Lena Dunham, the writer, actress, and director perhaps best known for... Read More

As we all know by now, Catholic churches around the US saw record numbers of baptisms and confirmations last weekend. This is part and parcel... Read More

I WAS FRESHLY out of undergrad and looking for a charismatic figure to replace my professors. I tried reading Tony Robbins, and when that... Read More

One day there will have to be a biography of Harold Bloom. It is inevitable. And rightly so. No other critic was so forceful and passionate a... Read More

Americans are falling in love with Project Hail Mary, a movie about an astronaut who finds himself alone at the end of the universe,... Read More

It was Dusty Baker’s secret ritual after virtually every home game when he managed the Houston Astros, but one night, he was... Read More

Originally conceived in 1958 and sponsored by the American Library Association, the weeklong celebration is a full seven days set aside to... Read More

In The Palm House, Gwendoline Riley takes a page from Dickens—specifically, the first page of Bleak House—and... Read More

I thought I was being original by asking Kate Folk, the San Francisco-based author of the critically acclaimed novel “Sky Daddy,”... Read More

Right now, as you read this very story, a Wendy’s somewhere is closing. In February, the chain announced that it would... Read More

For evidence of a so-called cultural vibe shift, the pendulum swing away from the extreme sensitivity and irrational wokeness of the... Read More

Last week, as you may have heard, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon Noem was revealed to be... Read More

I’m an English professor with an interest in computers. When the first AI chatbots came out a few years ago, I began fiddling around... Read More

This Easter, Catholic dioceses across America welcomed a surge of converts. According to data collected by the religion... Read More

Professions of personal responsibility are disappearing from common language. Mistakes get made but have no makers. Rules remain hauntingly... Read More

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a family comedy so deft and winsome that only the most sterilely stolid souls could possibly... Read More

Ben Lerner writes about the hardships and humiliations of modern masculinity. His first two novels followed listless young men in their 20s... Read More

This is the second piece in our "Resurrection" collaboration with Still Alive magazine. I’ll call him Scott, because... Read More

In 1958, the United States slipped deeper into a mounting computer panic. Fears of automated job losses gripped organized labor. Industry... Read More

About a hundred pages into historian Douglas Brinkley’s Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson,... Read More

As an unapologetic coffee purist, I loathe what’s happened to the beverage. Frankly, I hold Seattle entirely responsible for this... Read More

A slopocalypse, if you can keep it. Surfing a tidal wave of virality, in part triggered by an apparently incorrect infographic targeting... Read More

The 2003 documentary The Fog of War, tracing the career and late-life musings of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara,... Read More

As the illness of the late Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane escalated, and with it Crane’s pessimism about how much time he had left,... Read More

The best biopics ever made, like the worst, face a simple enough task: tell us the true-ish story of someone's life. But that simplicity... Read More

Like a lot of people today who care passionately about movies, I love A24. I don’t love every movie they make or release. But I love,... Read More