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You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see. You’re in... Read More

Then: I loved being a college prof. That was my career for thirty years. If you get to do something for money, something you are good at,... Read More

Last night, the Americans exited the World Baseball Classic with their second straight silver medal, and the Venezuelan squad that took them... Read More

During the 15th century, the leading critics all agreed that the greatest works of art came from an unusual place. No, not a museum or church... Read More

Lately I’ve been promoting a novel, which means that interviewers sometimes ask me what I’ve been reading. I’m obliged to... Read More

After a newspaper profile of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular, went viral last month,... Read More

When I was a curator and a museum director, I never went to the art fair held by the European Fine Art Foundation, or TEFAF, an annual... Read More

In 2014, the year Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, came out, I was a recent college graduate doing freelance reporting for... Read More

Last April, 600 people gathered for a technology policy conference in downtown Washington, DC. The main speaker, former Google CEO Eric... Read More

Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial... Read More

I recently found myself in a spirited public disagreement with a famous literary critic. Onstage at the front of the theater, two critics... Read More

For many Latinas who came of age after 1995, Shakira taught us exactly how to wield a guitar. She taught us how to assume a power stance.... Read More

Free-minded dissidents in the Soviet era—or today, in the climate of constrained freedoms in twenty-first-century Russia—may... Read More

I grew up in the early 2000s, in the dying days of the Marilyn Manson moral panic, when parents across the land sincerely believed that heavy... Read More

I was two kinds of basketball player as a kid, the one who messed around on the hoop in his backyard, sometimes with a few nerdy friends, and... Read More

Great domestic novelists, like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, routinely create such witty and poignant worlds that readers risk growing... Read More

I came to Aymann Ismail’s memoir Becoming Baba eagerly, not only because I’ve been writing about fatherhood for many... Read More

Luke Combs is not a GQ guy. At least that was how some people—including his former label head—used to... Read More

In deciding to write a “response” to a book published within the last ten years, I landed on an enormously influential book in my... Read More

Isuppose if there’s a hell and I die and go there, Reminders of Him will be the only movie available, and it will play every... Read More

Life on Jan. 9, 2020, was interesting for Joshua Helmer. At 31, he was midway through his second year as CEO of the Erie Art Museum in... Read More

Cuba, 1943. Ernest Hemingway is unhappy. Drinking, fishing, hunting German subs with his private navy: Nothing cheers him because Martha... Read More

The final numbers haven’t been released yet, but if online chatter is any indication, something like nine Americans tuned in Sunday... Read More

In most accounts of the Catholic Church’s twentieth-century transformation, the Second Vatican Council, with its sweeping changes to... Read More

James Joyce wrote the manuscript of Ulysses with a steel pen over seven years. By his typists’ accounts, the Irish author’s... Read More

I have a fantasy. It goes like this: I wave goodbye to urban life and move to a commune—specifically, a commune in the Missouri Ozarks... Read More