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When the sexual-abuse scandal involving Canadian literary legend Alice Munro broke in July 2024, a few months after the writer’s death,... Read More

Ross Barkan’s fourth novel, Colossus, is a thriller. Arriving only a year after his longer, panoramic New York story, Glass... Read More

In 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega got lost on a family hike in the Arkansas wilderness. She was found after three days where she survived... Read More

Bob Dylan and the Beatles were closer than even their most ardent fans may realize. The relationship between the American folk singer and the... Read More

I was kneeling at church, tracing the darkened grooves on the pew in front of me with my pinky finger. Above me, light poured through the... Read More

Among the fresh perplexities of our age is the recrudescence of what Thomas Mann defined as the “German problem”: a pact between... Read More

A friend and I went to see David Lee Roth at the local Spirit Mountain Indian Casino. I had never been to a Casino concert. I was curious to... Read More

One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating... Read More

I’m writing this in the south reading room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Almost all the other occupants of this... Read More

In 1995, dozens of academics and intellectuals descended on Warwick University for the conference “Virtual Futures:... Read More

In 1936, eleven years after the underwhelming publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned $80 total in book royalties... Read More

Once upon a time, I would make a beeline for the drinks if I arrived at a social event. I was a proud ‘chipper’ of cigarettes... Read More

For most of the past decade, Lena Dunham has been offline: no Instagram, no scrolling, with a trusted collaborator managing her... Read More

Working at a 24/7 bodega in the heart of Brooklyn, Tajuken Deli employees are prepared for almost anything – except having guns pointed... Read More

A somewhat under-the-radar decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit earlier this month is, on its surface, focused on the... Read More

We are on the verge of the age of human redundancy. In 2023, IBM’s chief executive told Bloomberg that soon some 7,800 roles might... Read More

Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French economist and legislator, had a semi-famous essay titled “Ce qu’on... Read More

Let's start with the good news. Between January 2023 and May 2025, Fortune 100 companies reduced their use of the term "DEI" by ninety-eight... Read More

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This leftist shibboleth, credited to author and... Read More

Hey, Here’s the entry for the verb form of “ban” over at Dictionary.com: “to prohibit, forbid, or... Read More

Twenty-five years ago, I decided, in the self-conscious manner of late adolescence, to live my life as a skeptic. Having given up the... Read More

There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment... Read More

In 2014, in London for a bookfair, I found myself at dinner with an English editor who expressed his admiration of Ben Lerner’s Leaving... Read More

“Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death. So, when you tell them what they can’t do, they get creative and say,... Read More

BEN LERNER MIGHT BE the youngest writer in America who is permitted to write with luminous intelligence about erudite, urbane intellectuals... Read More

So I was trying to find out more about you online, and I really couldn’t find out a ton —  I’m glad to hear that. So... Read More

Take it from a Cleveland native: The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame doesn’t belong in my hometown. It should be in Memphis, Tenn., the... Read More

Ask your middle-class or wealthy friends with children between the ages of eight and 18 to do something fun on a weekend in the spring or... Read More

What distinguishes human beings from animals? Philosophers have tried to answer this question. For Marx, it was people’s unique ability... Read More

Emoji-faced Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and star of the YouTube-friendly game show What’s My Line?, is no longer... Read More

Ask the average American adult what he thinks of promoting “action civics” in the public school curriculum and his response is... Read More

With a new installment in the Mortal Kombat movie series set for nationwide release in early May, now is an ideal time to revisit... Read More

The presidential call for “unity” is a bipartisan tradition. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Barack Obama urged Americans... Read More