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Is it even a week in America if everyone isn’t losing their minds over something Sydney Sweeney said, sold, promoted, or performed?... Read More

In 2020, as the pandemic gripped the world, Cord Jefferson, Max Read, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann spent their days in a Zoom writers... Read More

Unlike political scientists and social critics, who can diagnose the illnesses of a specific body politic without speculating on the best... Read More

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse isn’t a towering colossus looming over the coast of Troy. It’s sinking. Half-submerged, it... Read More

Earlier this year, after a tumultuous period serving as the former second-in-command at the FBI, Dan Bongino went back to what he is perhaps... Read More

LeBron’s Lakers Run Was Obviously a Success Read More

In the movies, nobody is better at being alone than Tony Leung. In 1994’s Chungking Express, the film that made him a global arthouse... Read More

In November 2014, less than a year into his tenure as NBA commissioner, Adam Silver quietly staked his claim to the most consequential... Read More

Karl Urban walks into the room like a goddamn movie star. Meticulously coiffed hair, a brown-green henley that highlights his shoulders,... Read More

I used to have an athlete’s intimacy with my own body. I could make it do almost anything I wanted: leap to the ceiling, stretch like... Read More

My wife gave birth to our son, Theodore, in 2023. He was delivered a few days after his due date, and in the week leading to his birth much... Read More

Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University. Still teaching at the age of 94, he has just... Read More

You might think that the world of children’s books is a warm and cozy place. You might think that people in the industry wish, by means... Read More

This past November, I headed to the National Book Award gala, after another day of bad news. I cannot even recall what calamity had just... Read More

William H. Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel, recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press, is not a comfortable book. Its narrator, the... Read More

Like it or not, generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in the process of seeking information, sharing ideas, and producing images.... Read More

In systems engineering, the concept of graceful degradation describes how a well-designed system behaves when components fail — like... Read More

At the end of my Women’s Writing course this semester, I assigned a novel that I could tell unnerved some of my students. In The... Read More

Let’s get the bad news over with first. We’ve grown used to book banners going after novels like Beloved, 1984, and The... Read More

Nancy Lemann is the author of five novels and one work of nonfiction, the glorious and strange Ritz of the Bayou (1987). New Orleans features... Read More

One morning, the phone in Tony Asher’s office rang. He was sure, at first, it was a prank. “Hello, Tony? This is Brian Wilson. I... Read More

What do oranges, deep time, and the Swiss Army have in common? Very little, I would think, except John McPhee, who has written about all of... Read More

Painters think in brushstrokes. Directors think in scenes. Women under 30 think in Instagram stories. Young women’s travel, clothing,... Read More

More than half of Americans think their life warrants a book deal, which is funny because it seems most Americans barely read books at all.... Read More

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus of Nazareth warns his followers against forfeiting their individual souls for earthly things. Read More

In the 1980s, a young American student named George B. Moore sent an extensive telegram to José Emilio Pacheco, one of Mexico’s... Read More

The premise is tantalizing: the queen of the tradwives wakes up in 1855 and is forced to live out the old-fashioned life she play-acts on the... Read More

I resisted the siren song of Costco for much of my adult life. This has increasingly made me feel like an anomaly: it is the third-largest... Read More

Lane Kiffin looked like a fugitive. He was standing in a scrubby field divided by a chain-link fence, shifting his weight anxiously from one... Read More

For years, conventional wisdom held that the suburban shopping mall was dying. Seph Laws’s book Abandoned Malls, published in 2020,... Read More

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us,... Read More

A few years ago, while I was covering the rise of AI slop on Facebook, I asked my friends and family if they were getting AI spam fed into... Read More

When I imagine the future I imagine Houellebecq meets Yudkowsky meets Nick Land meets Mark Fisher meets The Book of Revelation and these... Read More

In the 1980s, of course, we had the original TV show starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as hip Miami detectives... Read More

However immersive Keeping Up With the Kardashians might have been, it was limited to two dimensions on-screen; few viewers would likely make... Read More

There is a familiar arc to the type of mathematical genius that captivated audiences in the days when Americans had sex, won wars, and shoved... Read More