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In the opening beats of The Bride!, the second feature written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie... Read More

I was not an accomplished student in high school. To this day, many of my oldest friends recall placing bets on whether or not I would show... Read More

When it is quiet at night, I hear it again. A flash of sound streaks across my mind like a jet fighter tearing low out of nowhere and... Read More

“If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.” So proclaims the final... Read More

Down Time is a touching and very funny novel about a group of interconnected friends who spend their time fucking, fucking up, masking,... Read More

Brace yourself for hot peptide summer. In late February, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Joe Rogan on his podcast, revealing... Read More

It’s finally warming up here in Washington, DC, and earlier this month was the first instance I was able to comfortably sit on our roof... Read More

In the 20th century, when Freudian theory clung on as tightly as Hamlet to his mother, everybody had a complex. We struggled with inferiority... Read More

Oscars Season is upon us, and consistent readers can probably guess which films I favor for the biggest awards. One Battle After... Read More

Fanny Howe wrote to the end of her 84 years, leaving behind more than fifty books of poetry, prose, and essays, published across a half... Read More

I spent the month of February re-reading Les Miserables. This novel is 1,500 pages long. It’s basically the same story as the... Read More

WILL THERE EVER BE Another You, Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, is a lyrical portrait of life with long COVID, a colorful and intimate... Read More

Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., it has... Read More

As a tool for hubristic elites bent on radical upheaval, propaganda is a prelude to monophony. Read More

You’ve previously published a novel and a collection of stories. Down Time is somewhere in between. How did you land on its... Read More

So if you didn’t know, Michelle Zauner wrote the foreword to the recent 30th anniversary re-release of Infinite Jest. Now, if you... Read More

As a professor of African American history, whenever I come across a black-oriented historical movie, the first thing I think about is... Read More

Yesterday, I was at the gym, struggling to squat properly and sweatily listening to Ezra Klein interview an Anthropic executive, when it... Read More

The Academy Awards might be just as famous for their perceived blunders as their prestige; that’s what happens when you have... Read More

The Short American Century, which began in 1945 and continued until 2016, was made up of four distinct eras. The first, from the victory in... Read More

Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial... Read More

Giancarlo DiTrapano was a friend, so take all this with a gram of salt. Gian had two arts at which he was preternaturally talented, what... Read More

Watching Harry Styles’s performance of “Aperture” at the Brit Awards, there was a moment when I thought: is this the... Read More

“This discovery, oh king,” said the god, “will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories: it’s a magic... Read More

A Laundry List Read More

A fool says that Point Blank lacks character development. A second fool, the kind moved to disputation, hence to stating the... Read More

Drifting around urban Japan in his 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker paused to contemplate the video game Pac-Man, manufactured... Read More

Several prominent basketball coaches, including current and past college and professional coaches, released a letter last week denouncing the... Read More

When I was in business school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 2010s, I played in my one and only fantasy football league. I was... Read More

For years, Donald Trump has been among the most vociferous critics of cancel culture, saying it has “absolutely no place in the United... Read More

Harry Styles’s fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, is thrilling if you aren’t paying much attention to it. It... Read More

On the banks of the Rhine rises one of the most recognizable structures in Europe — a cathedral whose story spans centuries of faith,... Read More

She’s alive! Finally. When Maggie Gyllenhaal sat down to rewatch “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the 1935 James... Read More