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antiart’s viral declaration last year that Dimes Square is dead and nothing good came out of it is almost convincing. After... Read More

I went to Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” expecting a vibe—and in this aspect, at the very least, it does not... Read More

EXT. WASATCH MOUNTAINS—AFTERNOON   THREE MEN stand huddled together in deep snow, beneath a great wall of mountains. Blue sky... Read More

was a big fan of John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal (2022), a compelling drama about working-class life in the... Read More

It may be the first time that a work of fiction has tanked the stock market. Last week, a viral blog post from Citrini Research... Read More

Around the mid-1970s in Latin America raged what the Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama once called the ‘catastrophic... Read More

Every fall, I attempt to convince my yearly cohort of college-counseling students that writing is the single most important skill they will... Read More

It would be an understatement to say that the modern world has not been conducive to human flourishing. There is a sense that every... Read More

Conspiracy thinking is as old as politics. The state names an enemy inside its own house — real or invented — and uses... Read More

Every great invention is also a question. Consider the telescope. It certainly has practical applications—it can help you scope out a... Read More

In the spring of 1929, a philosophical debate was held in the resort town of Davos, Switzerland, that historians now see as a defining moment... Read More

In 2016, Svetlana Satchkova left Moscow for the United States because she was concerned about her son’s and her own safety under... Read More

The odds of filling out a perfect NCAA bracket are one in nine quintillion, two hundred twenty-three quadrillion, three-hundred-seventy-two... Read More

A decade ago, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I was too busy sanitizing baby bottles and washing reusable diapers to read a short story,... Read More

1.Did you always want to be a writer? I didn’t seriously consider what I wanted to be until I was maybe 14 and then, yes I wanted to be... Read More

Before Cormac McCarthy became Cormac McCarthy, the man and the novelist, he was Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., or Charlie McCarthy for short. Read More

One of historians’ favorite parlor games is to debate when the French Revolution — or the Russian, Mexican or Haitian — can... Read More

The antidote to oversharing has arrived. Vagueposting is anything I want to hear, oversharing is anything I don’t want to hear. For... Read More

No one reads a Lionel Shriver novel expecting a cheerful ending, and her latest, A Better Life, will not disillusion readers in this respect.... Read More

In certain shops in Chicago, you will find a bumper sticker reading, “Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for LA.” While grimly... Read More

Movies these days tend to overexplain themselves, telling viewers how to feel while flattening characters into lazy, uncomplicated... Read More

When did reality start to outstrip fiction for good? Philip Roth believed it was all happening around 1961. “The American writer in the... Read More

For five centuries the Western Hemisphere has been contested by successive imperial orders. Iberian dominance gave way in the eighteenth... Read More

Greetings, Pilgrims, It has been an unusually snowy and cold February in New York City, and I’ve taken lots of pictures. So I thought... Read More

“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also... Read More

Frederick Douglass was the most searing critic of American slavery.  Read More

From T.J. Clark’s If These Apples Should Fall: “The orchard in Garden of Maubuisson’s foreground lay... Read More

Jason was absorbed in a game on his phone, so I asked his mom, “how long has Jason had this stomach ache?” Mom responded,... Read More

Paul Burrell was a footman to Queen Elizabeth II from 1976 to 1987, and then an eyewitness to the marriage of Prince Charles, who is now King... Read More

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or... Read More