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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

I think the rooster appeared sometime during the pandemic. It’s hard to say, but I’m pretty sure I first saw it during one of... Read More

“Never love a wild thing,” Holly Golightly advises. Because “you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you... Read More

I bit into the best tomato I’ve ever eaten on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in the shadow of the hulking headquarters of the... Read More

While watching Mortal Kombat II, a cheesy '90s throwback that's essentially a family-friendly fantasy picture with copious R-rated gore, I... Read More

I always imagined I would write something about Edmund White after his death. What I never imagined was the death itself. It came on the... Read More

I spent my twenties and early thirties immersed in the world of “Red Pill” content, an online, male-centric subculture. I began... Read More

The class I am teaching this semester is an undergraduate survey of lyric poetry. It’s a class I enjoy teaching and one I offer... Read More

I loved Bobby Cox. So did every soul who ever met the man. Those close to Cox knew this day was coming, and really were preparing since he... Read More

Jonathan Swift’s genius was to be understood by everyone. He was so insistent that his prose be plain enough for all readers that he... Read More

On the eve of America's bicentennial, the American Enterprise Institute published Irving Kristol's lecture, "The American Revolution as a... Read More

Jack Thorne has been thinking a lot lately about the evil that men do. It tends to start with boys, and it’s nourished by... Read More

Not too long ago, I had the privilege of spending a summer carrying out research at the University of Chicago for a book I am writing about... Read More

We still use the phrase “Big Tech” in some contexts—it has a righteous, trust-busting ring to it—but down off the... Read More

Fifty years ago, my mother, my two sisters, and I pulled into our local drive-in theater to see a newly released comedy about a little league... Read More

As a child, I loved to dress up in costumes and make-believe I had barely enough to survive. I played Little House on the Prairie or I played... Read More

“Advocatus sed non latro, res miranda populo.” The above Latin tag, usually applied to St. Ives (or Yves or Ivo), Patron of... Read More

In mid-2025, Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to the company she had left fourteen months earlier and offered a blunt... Read More

The American South has a rich and complex history that is layered with difficult social structures and racial tensions, yet also... Read More