Politics
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In Defense of Tuning Out March 10, 2025
Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday was a total spectacle from both the president and his Democratic opposition. What’s the point of these speeches anymore? Politicians on both sides of the aisle acted like toddlers and Americans emerged less info...
Joan Didion, Movie Critic March 10, 2025
Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers...
The Reading Life March 10, 2025
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me?...
The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal March 07, 2025
It’s hard to overstate how transformative the past decade has been in American life. One need only to do a quick survey of the political and social landscape at the dawn of 2015.A decade ago, Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. The Supreme Court still allo...
Barbarians at the Gate March 06, 2025
Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain March 06, 2025
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-m...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
The Perverse Reason We Can’t Resist 'The White Lotus' March 05, 2025
Who cares about The White Lotus? For at least eight years now, since the debut of Big Little Lies in 2017, HBO has been pumping out nominal satires of the ultra-wealthy. From the travails of the Monterey Five through Succession, Industry, House of th...
Just Another Liberalism? March 05, 2025
If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideologica...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
Where Hannah Arendt Began March 04, 2025
Buried deep in Hannah Arendt’s archives in the Library of Congress are two typed and handbound books of verse—short, expressive, and written by Arendt herself. Few know that Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher responsible for the dense pr...
Why Politics Kills Comedy February 24, 2025
Humour is a strange thing. Back when Christopher Hitchens was both alive and still playing his assigned role of Naughty Little Provocateur, he attracted some controversy over an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” But the truth is that most peop...
David Rieff Foretells the Fate of Woke February 24, 2025
Donald Trump’s relentless attempt to erase the slightest trace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – it used to be called “woke” – from American institutions has pushed DEI to the margins of a political conflict that is growing more intense by t...
The New Control Society February 24, 2025
Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even break...
Dylan’s Newport Performance Was a Great Political Drama February 24, 2025
Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 was to become, in Clinton Heylin’s words, “the most written about performance in the history of rock.” And not without cause. Dylan’s clash with the constituency from which he’d emerg...
Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy Offers Timely Lessons February 24, 2025
When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940...
The Rise of the New Romanticism February 21, 2025
There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets to Captain America: Brave New World and a good number who are discussing or even lik...
The Rebel Campus Boosters Rising Up Against Wokeness February 20, 2025
In the plummy world of alumni relations, where distinguished graduates are awarded honorary degrees and major donors are fêted at the president’s mansion, it is virtually unheard of for former students to set up shop as a political counterweight to t...
Europe Has a Free Speech Problem February 19, 2025
Last week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked an A-list group of European political and military leaders at the Munich Security Conference in Germany with a blunt message: Europe has gone too far in restricting speech. According to Vance, the mai...
On the Clock February 19, 2025
It is an unusual thing for Hollywood to walk back across the ground that Steven hath trod. Whole subjects become untouchable once Spielberg folds up his director’s chair. The era of truly epic shark films began and ended with Jaws. No more boulders w...
Out on a Limb With Jeremy Strong February 14, 2025
When Jeremy Strong signed on to play Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witchfinder general Roy Cohn in The Apprentice—a man who maintained a full-body tan year-round, collected ornamental frogs, and taught Donald Trump everything he knows about attacking, de...
The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now February 11, 2025
A generation on from the fall of the Soviet Union, the intellectual and political class in the democratic world still fails to grapple with the totalitarian episode that upended civilized life and politics for most of the twentieth century. That fail...
Give the NEA Back to the Public February 10, 2025
For decades, Americans have become increasingly alienated from the American arts establishment. The main source for their discontent is clear: Academics and their allies have successfully insisted upon first modernism, then postmodernism, and finally...
James Madison, Game Theorist February 06, 2025
At least since Edmund Burke, the right has looked askance at mixing mathematics and politics. The French revolutionaries and philosophes, with their elegantly geometric counties and their 10-hour days and their Year Zeroes, were trying to squeeze the...
Immigration Restriction is the Catholic Position February 06, 2025
What are we to make of our Catholic vice president’s moral defense of immigration restriction? Immigration policy, unlike pre-political issues involving the nature of life and family, is an appropriately political issue. It therefore falls within the...
Trickle-Down Culture February 05, 2025
During the summer of 2010, I experienced the inexplicable rampage of Silly Bandz in real time. At a ten-day camp in Washington, D.C. filled mostly with teenagers from the East Coast, everyone seemed to be wearing the same rubber bracelets. They were ...
What Socrates Teaches Us February 05, 2025
Who was Socrates? Everyone has heard his name, and most people are aware of the basics: He lived thousands of years ago in Athens, Greece, and is somehow the father of Western philosophy, though exactly how is a mystery....
Do You Need A.I.? February 05, 2025
When I think about the artificial intelligence revolution, I keep returning to a simple dichotomy: need vs. want....
Moderation as Pursuit of Justice February 04, 2025
There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the c...
Rationalism and its Discontents February 04, 2025
This past December, a wave of collective jouissance swept the internet as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare—a notoriously hated company even by the standards of one of America’s most hated industries—was gunned down by a lone assassin in the center of Manh...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
The Vibe of Things Is the Heart of Things February 03, 2025
A vibe, Aristotle might say, is said in many ways; Becca Rothfeld, in her self-described “rant” against the term “vibeshift,” mentions a few. It can refer to a style or disposition, the way someone cuts through the air or the atmosphere of a street, ...
Publicans and Privateers February 03, 2025
American politics operates on many different axes, from conservative-progressive to populist-elitist. But one underappreciated axis is what one might call the public-private axis. At one end are the private-sector partisans who favor Big Business ove...
The End of the End of Men January 17, 2025
The patriarchy died in its sleep sometime during Obama’s first term. Or so goes the argument of The End of Men, a 2012 polemic that’s being revisited in the wake of the election. As Donald Trump aggressively courted young men on his way to victory, t...
How to Win an Election Against the Communists January 17, 2025
Today's guest is near and dear to my heart. It's my dad, Diego Ruiz. For the record, my dad and I recorded this in person, and we both had the same cold, which you may be able to hear. At some point, you may also hear my son in the background, which ...
Piety, Love, and the Permanent Things January 16, 2025
In the closing sentence of his article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, Sir Roger Scruton wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” He wrote these words as a dying man who believed...
Kurt Russell Hates Commies January 16, 2025
Kurt Russell hates commies. I mean, he has to, right? The actor — and the man — defies definition, boxes, genres, tracts, political hokey-pokey, and celebrity culture. He works hard, plays hard, and loves life. He writes his own rules and dares anyon...
Public Life Beyond Politics January 16, 2025
What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative ...
Zuckerberg Opts for Free Speech—After Thinking It Over January 16, 2025
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to “get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram” marks an astonishing turnaround in the long, twilight struggle over information in the digital age. In this conflict, it should be noted, Zuckerber...
Olga Tokarczuk’s New Rules for Realism January 16, 2025
In his 1956 study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács distinguished between two literary traditions. Comparing the works of Thomas Mann, whom he considers a realist writer, with the works of F...
Yukio Mishima’s Lifelong Death Wish January 14, 2025
In April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur went to the US Congress to deliver some good news. Japan, he said, had “undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history”. From the “ashes left in war’s wake” had risen a nation “dedicated to the ...
The 2000s and the End of American Optimism January 14, 2025
Over 35 years ago now, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse and President George H.W. Bush worked to secure a peaceful conclusion to the Cold War, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously declared the “end of history.” “Wh...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
"BACKBONE" by Karl Zinsmeister January 13, 2025
Middle America is in rebellion today. Ordinary people are objecting to bureaucratic coercion, manipulations of speech, redefinitions of sex and family, racial nostrums, strictures on economic freedom, and pressure to conform with new progressive narr...
Faces of Transhumanism January 13, 2025
A Critique of Silicon Valley's TranshumanistsA look at the iron age of the last century might teach us that political thought is an exhausted form of radicalism. Great civilizations across the planet clashed, old empires were shattered, and new exper...
Emperor Elon January 10, 2025
It is very strange, the ever-expanding realm of Elon Musk. He is a man whose power crosses vast industries, who now sets the total political agenda for nations around the world, and whose followers are so devoted, they would put his face on a coin th...
Sleep Training the American People January 10, 2025
As a new chapter opens for American politics, it is natural to feel a certain uneasiness. What lies ahead? Will Americans continue to enjoy the peace and prosperity with which we have for so long been blessed, or will our way of life be torn asunder,...
How the New York Post Wins January 10, 2025
Explaining the New York Post to anyone who is not from New York is always difficult. This left-leaning city has a daily newspaper that is owned by a right-wing media tycoon and this newspaper’s politics, generally, aren’t aligning with the 68 percent...
Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers January 10, 2025
The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content polic...
The Anti-Social Century January 09, 2025
The Bar Is ClosedA short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was ...
30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025 January 09, 2025
A new year always brings some uncertainty, and that seems particularly true at the start of 2025. As America grapples with a new (yet familiar) political era, and the larger world faces challenges with few easy solutions, what better way to settle in...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
Burying Settler Colonialism's Ideologiekritik January 07, 2025
In his clearly written, concise little work , Adam Kirsch has done for settler colonialism what John Fonte did for “transnational progressivism” at the turn of the century, Peter W. Wood and Phillip W. Magness did for The 1619 Project in 2020, and Jo...
Bob Dylan’s Famous Moment in 'A Complete Unknown' January 07, 2025
It’s easy to make the mistake that a key scene in A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, involved a mere disagreement about style and instrumentation. The scene depicts the famous moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival w...
The End of Fun in the NBA January 03, 2025
The big power forwards and centers, wide as canyons in the shoulders and waist, used to bludgeon each other in the post like elephant seals. That was basketball once — Charles Barkley backing down defenders like a bulldozer, Shaquille O'Neal shatteri...
A Prophet of Modern Politics January 03, 2025
Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) is the most notable among his early political pamphlets, and perhaps his most famous overall alongside the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While the Reflections ha...
An Outrageous Novel About U.S. Politics January 02, 2025
It was a congressional aide, of all people, who clued me in to “The Public Burning,” Robert Coover’s magnificent novel about American politics, which is even more relevant today than when first published, to puzzlement and acclaim, in 1977. We were e...
My 2024 in Reading January 01, 2025
Every year, I write a piece rounding up all the books I read. I chart almost nothing in my life except reading; I’ve got notebooks listing all the books I’ve read for more than a decade, with little letter grades placed next to them. These grades are...
Why History Is Always Political January 01, 2025
At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support ...
Gen Z’s Politics Are Hard to Categorize December 24, 2024
We live, at first blush, under the absolute dominion of celebrity. The former and future president of the United States spent more than a decade as a reality TV star. Taylor Swift just concluded the largest and most lucrative pop music tour in the hi...
Bet on YouTube December 23, 2024
Over the past year, I’ve been a skeptic various social media platforms and technological developments. I do not think artificial intelligence represents a revolution on the order of what came before us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do ...
A Book to Topple a Regime December 23, 2024
American diplomat George F. Kennan considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation to be the “most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” In i...
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru December 20, 2024
With the publication of Blue Ruin, Hari Kunzru has rounded off a loose trilogy about the cultural and political constitution of our present, stretching from 2017’s White Tears and continuing in 2020’s Red Pill. All are Künstlerromane—novels of the ar...
The Crime of Noticing December 19, 2024
When it comes to political and cultural commentary, Steve Sailer is one of the most influential writers whom most people have never heard of. But if they listen to any popular podcast, conservative or progressive, they will come to see that Sailer’s ...
Is Woke Losing? December 18, 2024
There is much evidence to suggest that modern democracy, and with it modern political consciousness more broadly, is inclined to endless self-radicalization. Wokeness is only the latest manifestation of what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without re...
A Space Novel for Earth Lovers December 17, 2024
I’ve never been a space guy. Earth, like Robert Frost said, seems to be “the right place for love.” While I appreciate the ambition of those of us who want to travel to Mars, I’m not attracted to the idea because I’m not desperately in love with the ...
Motherhood After Christianity December 17, 2024
Does history bend toward progress or does it bend toward chaos? In her new book Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, the classics scholar Nadya Williams argues that any society without a gui...
Pity the Short Story Writer December 16, 2024
In my youth, I submitted many short stories to literary magazines, journals, and websites. A few were accepted, and that was thrilling. There was the immediate high of seeing your name somewhere else—that undeniable ego-gratification—and the greater ...
American Literature and a Liberal Way of Life December 16, 2024
The presidential election was never going to resolve the bitter ideological divides that have become a familiar part of our political culture. The project of peaceful coexistence with fellow citizens who see the world differently—perhaps the most sig...
A Civilization, Not a Voting Bloc December 16, 2024
The U.S. Latino shift to the political right is undeniable. Last month, not only did Donald Trump win more Hispanic-American votes than any Republican candidate in recent history, but he won more in all the border counties in Texas, where he is plann...
The Anti-Woke King of Hollywood Lets Loose December 13, 2024
It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously ...
Why I’ve Grown Skeptical Of Colorblindness December 12, 2024
Following years of censorious race consciousness at elite institutions and among cultural gatekeepers, many principled American liberals have come to a general consensus on how to think and talk about race. In short: with deep skepticism.In his incis...
The Coming Conservative Media Collapse December 12, 2024
The liberal media is in freefall. Ratings are cratering at MSNBC and CNN. The Washington Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars and laying off staff. The Los Angeles Times has gotten so desperate that it’s hiring conservative columnists. Cons...
The Life-Affirming Vitality of Raw Milk December 12, 2024
I've been drinking raw milk for almost 15 years, ever since I made a sudden switch from veganism while visiting my sister in Europe. At the time, she was living in Germany and getting raw milk from a local farmer. I remember mocking her, interrogatin...
Will the Joker Emerge? December 11, 2024
There has been at least one folk song, one look-a-like contest, and one fawning fan account. There is the tripartite catchphrase graffitied on walls across America. There are the gleeful comments and posts, an avalanche of them, thousands and thousan...
The Carpetbagger Who Saw Texas’s Future December 11, 2024
When Edna Ferber’s Giant was published in 1952, Texans were not pleased. Ferber’s sweeping novel about cattle, oil, and the winds of change brought a reform-minded Virginia woman, Leslie Benedict, to a Texas ranch, where she has the temerity to sugge...
Is Literature Losing Its Audience Because of Politics? December 09, 2024
Americans are bored of reading. A 2021 Gallup poll found that the average American now reads 12.6 books per year, down from 18.5 in the late 1990s. The contrast is even starker in college-educated readers, whose yearly book quota has dropped to 14.6 ...
America’s Impotent Elite December 09, 2024
Has the celebrity era in American politics come to a close?This might seem like a peculiar question to ask in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. Here he comes, again, the faded reality TV star-turned-world-historical disruptor, a...
The Best Books of 2024 December 09, 2024
The second half of an election year can be a fraught one for books. Publishers tend to front-load their most interesting titles away from the election to try to keep them from being swallowed up by politics come the fall. After an election, books can...
A Resilience Paradigm for Trade December 09, 2024
After several decades during which tariffs were discarded by the bipartisan establishment, trade protectionism is back at the center of American politics. Donald Trump ran and won on tariffs in 2016, put them at the heart of his triumphant 2024 campa...
Dawn’s Early Light December 09, 2024
To receive the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals is truly an honor. The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic i...
There Is No Surplus Elite in America December 06, 2024
Over the course of the last decade, a seductive idea has conquered the discourse: the notion that the sudden surge in political instability in democracies like the United States has been due to “elite overproduction” and the subsequent formation of a...
Yes, the World Ended on November 5 December 06, 2024
“Empire is the US from roughly WWII to a little after 9/11. It was at the height of its power, its prestige, and its economic worth. Then it lost a lot of those things. In the face of technology and social media, the mask of pride has been slowly era...
Dawn’s Early Light December 06, 2024
To receive the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals is truly an honor. The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic i...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Trust the Critic? December 05, 2024
I have a working theory that honest criticism, when it comes to new fiction, is getting more difficult to find. This is the fault of institutions—professional book review sections, magazines, and journals. As the mainstream media withers, so do book ...
Gen Z Is Super Weird December 05, 2024
Since February 2023, artist, university lecturer, and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella has been conducting interviews with a wide array of subjects who have formed their politics out of internet subcultures. It would be a crude oversimplifica...
On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman” December 04, 2024
In an interview with Montez Press, Hannah Regel recommends Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. Published two years before Bachmann’s death in 1971, Malina was to be the first entry in her Todesarten cycle, meaning “Death Styles.” Set in post-war Austri...
Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves December 04, 2024
Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.“In Grim Times, Art Finds a Way” is a pious, flowery, and tiresome essay about how “the arts com...
The People’s Champ Has Lost His People November 26, 2024
Picture this, because it really happened: Dwayne Johnson stands in an IMAX theater, taking Christopher Nolan's seat. "I even asked to let me sit where Chris sits," he said in a recent interview with Imax. "They said, 'Chris sits here.'" He watches Op...
The Shallowness of Celebrity Politics November 26, 2024
The plot of Fritz Lang’s enigmatic 1927 silent film Metropolis revolves around a group of powerful elites determined to maintain their hold over the masses. To do so, they set out to invent artificial crises with the intention to set the everyday fol...
A Review of Kevin Vallier’s 'All The Kingdoms of the World' November 26, 2024
For nearly a decade, a strain of political theology known as “integralism” was ascendant. Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World (2023) tells the story of integralism’s rising star and explores the limits of its case for illiberal political ru...
Is The Woke Era Really Over? November 25, 2024
Depending on what kind of echo chamber you hang out in, the victory cries of the anti-woke crowd have been reverberating at increasing volume. And why not? The trouncing of Democrats on November 5 and the decisive resurrection of Donald Trump has bee...
Would Bill Buckley Yell Stop? November 22, 2024
The year 2025 marks the centenary of modern conservativism’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr. But given the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, whether conservative still means what it once did is an open question. In these times it’s na...
High Noonan November 22, 2024
To say Peggy Noonan is one of our finest political columnists is not wholly fair to her, since she writes so often about topics and people that are not political, or at least not overtly so. She is deeply fair and empathetic, and she writes in such a...
Why RealClear Needs Its Readers November 22, 2024
Dear RealClear Reader,This is RealClearPolitics’ seventh presidential election. More than two decades ago, RCP set out to provide one-stop shopping for those who care about campaigns, elections, and governance.Fulfilling this mission means showcasing...
A Conversation with Caleb Caudell November 22, 2024
One of the more exciting aspects of 2024, for me personally, was discovering the bounty of new, unheralded writing out there. Ten years ago, perhaps, there was an argument to made that the largest publishers were still elevating the best novelists in...
The Guardian’s Retreat from the Battlefield of Ideas November 21, 2024
It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organization would no longer post on X. “The U.S. presidenti...
No Expectations November 21, 2024
When I read Emily Witt’s new memoir, Health and Safety, earlier this year, the sections I found the most striking weren’t the ones featuring big ideas about psychedelic drugs, Brooklyn’s underground party culture or Witt’s own second thoughts about j...
The Ethics of Self-Interpretation November 21, 2024
The polemical intensity that made a set of radical ideas about race and gender seem, for a time, to be the new moral consensus of media, academia, and corporate management, is over—maybe. Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign was muted in its i...
Time Is Never Time at All: Why the 1990s Matter November 21, 2024
Calendars to the contrary, most people who talk about the 1990s close the decade with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This is telling: the bliss of the ’90s was American bliss, and the victory over history posited by Francis Fukuyama, Py...
America Will Always Be Hooked on Drugs November 21, 2024
America is the greatest democracy in the world: a place where an incoherent system of contradictory beliefs has produced an equally incoherent politics. In the irrational ferment of what it may be best to call simply the thing that happened — the con...
Randy Newman’s Genius for Political Irony November 20, 2024
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seege...
The Painted Protest November 20, 2024
My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford ...
The Case of Justine Bateman November 19, 2024
Three days after the election, Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties star, catapulted herself into the political muck with a tweetstorm to her 140,000 followers that began: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.” ...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
The Outer Borough Mind November 18, 2024
The professional class can never fully comprehend Donald Trump; most of the professional class did not grow up in the boroughs surrounding Manhattan. This does not mean there’s any great folk wisdom to be had on Parsons Boulevard or the Grand Concour...
Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button November 15, 2024
All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of this essay—Can modernity survive for much longer?—I want to start with a small one: Will the recent change of government make a difference to the people of Britain?...
How the Democrats Bud Lighted Their Brand November 15, 2024
Last spring, a marketing grunt at Bud Light sent TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman, custom cans of beer featuring her picture. As intended, Mulvaney posted about the beer on social media, igniting a firestorm and a boycott of the brand. Men r...
The Real Problem with X November 15, 2024
Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, particularly in light of Elon Musk’s highly visible support for his campaign, has again raised the question of the political significance of X (formerly Twitter). Since Musk acquired the platf...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
A Question November 13, 2024
Something I’ve been thinking about for the past several years but that I’ve been fully brooding about since the election (and the attendant flurry of takes about “polarization”) is this: when and under what circumstances is it possible to be friends ...
Come to Harm November 12, 2024
Politics—and electoral politics most flagrantly—is the projection of the illusion of competence onto the illusion of understanding. Its field of concern is what are called “issues,” a large part of which comprises the aspects of a society it refuses ...
From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series November 12, 2024
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Ba...
Can We Please Have Less Political Art Now? November 11, 2024
As dawn breaks on a nation still processing the election results, let us recall how it felt to wake up in America on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016 — that is, assuming you slept at all the previous night. (I didn’t.) For me and other left-leaning people...
How to Understand the Election Results November 11, 2024
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about college students reacting to the election, which has made me think about my own college days, which coincided with the 2008 presidential election. This was a pretty happy time for me. No one I knew was terribly i...
Get in the Crystal November 11, 2024
“Are you on the list? We’re at capacity.” I wasn’t. The election night party at Sovereign House, a new-right event space in downtown Manhattan, was co-sponsored by Polymarket, the Thiel-backed online betting market, and Remilia Corporation, a crypto ...
The Exploitation of Compassion November 08, 2024
For a book about the perils of empathy’s excesses, Allie Beth Stuckey’s newly released Toxic Empathy (2024) is rife with respect for empathy itself.Christian compassion, Stuckey acknowledges, is a positive force in our daily lives. When we see a frie...
Revolt of the Normies November 08, 2024
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump came back with a bang. The former president is on track to win not just the Electoral College but the popular vote. Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t overperform in a single state, and lost significantly in many of th...
Why RealClear Needs Its Readers October 31, 2024
Dear RealClear Reader,This is RealClearPolitics’ seventh presidential election. More than two decades ago, RCP set out to provide one-stop shopping for those who care about campaigns, elections, and governance.Fulfilling this mission means showcasing...
Is Election Betting Bad for Democracy? October 31, 2024
Politics nerds rejoice: You can now legally bet on elections. After a protracted legal battle, earlier this month the financial exchange Kalshi secured a court ruling that allowed it to accept American wagers on political outcomes. The decision is a ...
Politics Makes for Bad Wrestling October 31, 2024
Which professional wrestler are you siding with this November?This might sound like a preposterous thing to say—a sentence from Mad Libs, perhaps. Yet somehow it has become a valid theme in political discourse as we approach the U.S. presidential ele...
We Are All on the Bus October 31, 2024
Asingle usage of “star-studded” was simply not enough to portray the majesty of a Kamala Harris campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, according to a Sept. 20 article in The Washington Post. “A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusias...
Bonfire of The Vanities October 31, 2024
In the summer of 1789 Louis XVI called the États generaux or Estates General, an old, pseudo-parliament, that had not been assembled in over a 150 years. The Third Estate, representing the majority of the population, took the occasion on 17th of June...
Civilizational Ethics Precede National Self-Interest October 30, 2024
Anyone who’s taken Psychology 101 will recall Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid-shaped analysis of how humans prioritize their lives. At the most foundational level are food, water, and shelter. Next, there are physical safety and security. Last...
25 Years of Indecision With Jon Stewart October 30, 2024
November 7, 2000, prime time, and everything at The Daily Show’s studio on West 54th Street in New York City was rolling along on schedule. The program’s producers and stars were in a celebratory mood. That night’s broadcast would cap months of succe...
Lost in the Forest of Symbols October 30, 2024
AMONG A SMALL BUT VOCAL SUBSET of readers, the arrival of a new doorstopper on poetry and philosophy by Canadian thinker Charles Taylor is liable to induce swooning.For at least fifteen years, other thinkers have been describing him as an “elder stat...
Can’t Keep A Great Man Down October 29, 2024
The Western world began to look inward during the 1990s. The Cold War was over, but there were other problems on the horizon. In 1988, French President François Mitterrand declared quite casually that the movement of immigrants from the Global South ...
Blown Away October 28, 2024
I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of p...
The Tech Divide Driving Male and Female Voters Apart October 28, 2024
From the moment JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” became a media firestorm, the divide between the sexes has dominated much of this US presidential race.On the Republican side, the messaging has been aggressively masculine. At the part...
Behind the Mask of 𝕏's Anonymous Influencers October 28, 2024
“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.”—Thomas SowellThroughout history, anonymity has been a powerful tool for truth-seekers, heretics, and anyone pushing boundaries. In American politics, distributing...
All Education Is Political October 28, 2024
The Left has spent the better part of the last century marching through our institutions, and among its greatest victories have been in education. Many conservatives have responded to Left hegemony by protesting that “politics” and “indoctrination” h...
What Hillary Left Out About The Garden October 27, 2024
Donald Trump is planning to hold one of his legendary rallies at Madison Square Garden this Sunday. Taking place only 9 days before Election Day, this event will be one of the last in the former president’s career as a candidate.Even if you have neve...
A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide October 25, 2024
THE YEAR IS 1906. Theodore Roosevelt is in the White House. In New York, the newspapers are reporting on the political aspirations of William Randolph Hearst, unrest in Russia, and the latest dividends from US Steel. Scientific American is running ar...
A Review of 'An Image of My Name Enters America' October 25, 2024
When Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie came out last year, I was inundated with essays that analyzed the film’s joys, flaws, and gender politics. They often did so using a popular formula: mix high culture and low—children’s toys with critical theory—to rev...
The Dead End of Political Misogyny October 25, 2024
The erosion of social trust is a defining mark of our time, a commonplace of today’s jeremiads. From government and ecclesial leaders to corporations, universities, and the media, Americans are weary of our institutions and disappointed by our leader...
Turning Down the Electoral Temperature October 25, 2024
Anew poll from NBC News finds that 62% of respondents believe that who wins the 2024 election will “make a great deal of difference in [their] life.” Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter notes that this finding continues an upward trend: 56% of respond...
Hunter S. Thompson Was a Weird Visionary October 24, 2024
In the fall of 2004, Hunter S. Thompson visited Los Angeles for a signing at a place on the Sunset Strip called Book Soup. Even though he’d barely written anything worthwhile since I’d been born, he remained one of my few heroes still breathing. A my...
Inside the Political Book Machine October 24, 2024
In late June of 2016, the flagship imprint of HarperCollins published a debut memoir by an Ohio-born lawyer named J.D. Vance. As was expected from a memoir without a known name attached, it initially received modest attention from both the media and ...
Punk Rock Feminist Has Revelation While Stripping October 24, 2024
A striking passage from Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, the recently published memoir by musician and political activist Kathleen Hanna offers some insight into why I think serious conservatives ought to shed their resistance to familiarizing...
Does 'Reagan' the Movie Do Justice to Reagan? October 23, 2024
There’s never been a major Reagan movie until 2024. Yet there’s a need for such storytelling. The most important president of the 20th century after FDR is in danger of being forgotten with the change of generations, of political conflicts, and even ...
A Principled Revolution October 23, 2024
Paul Seaton is a patient, methodical, and incredibly enlightening political thinker. By day, he teaches Catholic seminarians metaphysics, philosophy, and political thought, cutting against the braindead soft progressivism that has too often undermine...
World Series! October 22, 2024
On the morning after the New York Yankees won their first pennant in fifteen years, I was playing softball in Brooklyn’s Dyker Park. Sunday morning softball is, for me, a mostly nonnegotiable ritual that runs from the beginning of April into November...
Norman Mailer vs. the Big Empty October 22, 2024
In 1962, Norman Mailer sat down to debate his friend William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was America’s most influential conservative, and Mailer was a homegrown radical. Mailer boldly proposed, “End the Cold War. Pull back our boundaries ... Let the Commu...
Our Very Online Politics Is Just Around the Corner October 22, 2024
When Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate back in July, the predictable scrutiny a vice presidential nominee typically gets quickly devolved into a very online spectacle....
Tri-State Turmoil October 21, 2024
Welcome to the latest edition of Barkan’s Briefly Noted, my review of contemporary books. For prior editions, go here, here, and here....
What Happens When Your City is Deemed Illegal? October 21, 2024
Zones for Employment and Economic Development were an experimental approach to addressing Honduras’ endemic poverty, violent crime, and corruption established by the country’s government in 2013. Commonly known as ZEDEs (Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo ...
The New Republic’s Best Books of the Fall October 21, 2024
An election year is notoriously tricky for book publishers: What author wants their book to come out in the weeks immediately before Americans go to the polls, when the news is consumed by the race? But the weeks and months that follow an unexpected ...
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter October 18, 2024
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-i...
The Subversive Genius of Melania Trump September 24, 2024
Melania Trump stands by her nude modeling work. There’s a video that makes this abundantly clear, posted last week to Melania’s X account. “Why do I stand by my nude modeling work?” she asks in voiceover, then goes on to answer her own question by di...
The Greatest of All Time September 24, 2024
I think, at some point in my youth, I was a decent tennis player. I took lessons at the park, I competed in tournaments, and played, for two years, on the varsity team. I was in possession of a few physical attributes. Though I wasn’t tall, and would...
Credentialist Cretins September 23, 2024
I’ve noticed something about literary, chattering-class New York: no one really talks about politics anymore. Everybody even seems to be talking about politics less as the election approaches. Political discourse is largely avoided, and deeply uncool...
Rejecting Rejection September 20, 2024
The late philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known for his concept of the rhizome, defined as a network that connects any point to any other point. The most obvious example of a rhizome is the internet: instead of having a linear structure, the internet al...
Defining Liberty September 20, 2024
Nobody who is interested in writing about liberty can avoid Abraham Lincoln’s famous line on the topic: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.” But why should this be so? The difficulty may have to do with a related question:...
Barkan's Briefly Noted, Vol. 3 September 19, 2024
Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis (Arcade Publishing)Alt-lit. Internet lit. Dimes Square lit. It is either about digital life or the consciousness consumed by it; it is disdainful, usually, of conventional narrative. It favors the deadpan, the pared ...
One Cheer for Populism September 19, 2024
Donald Trump and his supporters are often called populists, although Trump himself does not use the term.In some quarters, calling someone populist implies badness. But is populism inherently bad? Populist comes from the Latin word populus, which mea...
Carl Hiaasen is the Mark Twain of Florida Men September 18, 2024
Carl Hiaasen and I were talking about recent absurdities in Florida politics, namely Moms for Liberty and their fight against a public liberal arts college, which ended with the school’s new administration literally trashing hundreds of books about g...
Essential Reading on the Constitution September 17, 2024
As Constitution Day falls on September 17, we are in the midst of an historically divisive election season. The gaps between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservative have never seemed wider – and many Americans even feel alienated from th...
Constitution Day Reflections September 17, 2024
When it comes to celebrating Constitution Day, it may be considered atypical to think of the Declaration of Independence. After all, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were two separate documents authored 11 years apart, written for...
Constructing Conservatism September 17, 2024
Conservatives rightly recognize that the common good, and thus a coherent politics, requires a shared definition of virtue derived from a shared moral vision and set of values, which in turn must reflect the traditions and character of the nation and...
The First Great Memoir of the Trump Years September 17, 2024
Emily Witt didn’t set out to write the first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency, the beginning of the pandemic, and the radical moral and political shifts that happened in America between 2016 and 2020. Instead, sh...
This Constitution Day, Let’s Lower the Temperature September 17, 2024
Escalating lawfare sealed the collapse of the Roman Republic after 500 years of extraordinary success. For the last century or so of its existence, the Republic saw dramatic lurches between leading parties, and as each new leader came into office he ...
On 'Creation Lake' September 16, 2024
The thematic and historical reach of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel is ambitiously broad, taking in the lives and art of Neanderthals, the mysterious medieval culture of the persecuted Cagot minority in France, and the political sundering of that coun...
At the Center of Things September 16, 2024
Over the last year, I have noticed that, absent a few publications at a very particular moment, my writing on Substack will go further. I don’t measure this in terms of page views or “likes” or anything like that; my assessment is more anecdotal and,...
Review: 'Annihilation' by Michel Houellebecq September 16, 2024
French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, 2019’s Serotonin, practically dared the reader to abandon it. Bitter, bigoted narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste sprayed venom in all directions, but reserved the worst for his near-silent, spectacularl...
How Hollywood Bombed 9/11 September 13, 2024
Sometime recently we came to the end of the era of 9/11 movies. Our politics have changed, as have the generations and the preferred technologies for entertainment. We are also ready, perhaps, even to forget that there was an attempt to destroy the W...
Never Trumpers Are on a War Footing September 13, 2024
If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped fou...
The Power of Taylor Swift’s Politics September 12, 2024
It’s an important lesson for politicians: never give your enemies a name. Hillary Clinton did it, disastrously, with her off-the-cuff announcement about a “basket of deplorables”. Did it cost her the election? On its own, no, but it certainly didn’t ...
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
Why Do Democrats Covet Taylor Swift’s Support? September 10, 2024
One of the most important figures in this year’s US presidential election isn’t a politician, political operator or political commentator. It’s the pop star Taylor Swift.Her endorsement has been a long time coming, and is apparently so valuable that ...
Pavel Durov’s Arrest Leaves Questions September 10, 2024
Last month, Pavel Durov’s arrest at Le Bourget airport in Paris ignited a flurry of speculation about the judicial and political dynamics underlying the apprehension. Was the American national security apparatus reigning in a wayward asset? Was Macro...
Coming from the Hat September 09, 2024
May you all be so blessed as to have a mother who sends you books. Mine sent me How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto, for no other reason than that it is really, really good. Most of what can be said about its major virtues has been said elsewhe...
The Rise of Post-Literate History September 09, 2024
The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature. “To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult,” he said. “It is impossible.” Froude’s words came to mind the...
Danzy Senna’s Trick Mirror September 09, 2024
No one has more fun with racial terminology than Danzy Senna. In her 2007 short story “Resemblance,” the N-word—as in the politically correct referent to the racial slur—drives a hilarious Who’s on First?–style gag. “Some white kids called their blac...
A Conversation with Tony Tulathimutte September 09, 2024
In 2016, I was lolling around Miami on the eve of Florida’s Republican presidential primary. I had time to kill in the March sun, and with me was a new book called Private Citizens. The debut novel of Tony Tulathimutte, a graduate of the famed Iowa W...
Celebrating the Centennial of the Most Underappreciated American of Our Time September 06, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) September 7th marks the one-hundredth birthday of one of the most extraordinary and inspiring...
Pundit Don't Preach September 06, 2024
It has become a truism to say that “everything is political.” But being obsessed with politics is not the same thing as being good at thinking politically. It is striking, in fact, how many political discussions are conducted in essentially judicial ...
Not Another Presidential Biopic August 29, 2024
Earlier this month, Dennis Quaid went on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote Reagan, a long-delayed historical drama about the life and times of the 40th American president. (The film was originally shot in 2020 and had to shut down production due to...
Conservatives Need a Positive Governing Vision August 29, 2024
When Ronald Reagan said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” he articulated perhaps the core Republican philosophy of governance. It’s a negative philosophy, one based on what ...
How Not to Do a Dark Political Comedy August 28, 2024
Dark political comedy is an underrated genre, as it enables us to see both the horror and the humor in a given political situation. Politicians often behave in ridiculous ways, but because of their incredible power, their actions have serious real-wo...
Ballard Predicted the Collapse of the Middle Class August 28, 2024
These lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance h...
The Russian Lit Plot Twist of Today’s American Politics August 27, 2024
When Russian literature becomes necessary to explain democratic elections in the West, something has gone very, very wrong. As John Adams said, the American republic was designed for moral and religious people. So, when unambiguous machinations at th...
Against Lists of Books August 26, 2024
Once you’re done being US President, I think they should kill you. You get four or eight years to kill anyone you want, destroy entire countries at will, throw around billions of dollars at whatever cretinous idea catches your fancy—but once it’s all...
Nate Silver and the Addiction to Prediction August 26, 2024
In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Nate Silver revolutionized the way we talk about politics, bringing cold, hard, numerical facts to a world that had been dominated by the gut feelings of reporters and opinion columnists. Sixteen years later, he r...
The Meaning of Political Philosophy August 26, 2024
Klingenstein: What is political philosophy?Ellmers: It has two parts: the philosophic study of politics, and the political study of philosophy. The second one means that the human things are always the gateway to thinking about abstract ideas like tr...
The Business—and Politics—of Storytelling August 26, 2024
Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional bur...
How a Citizen Can Think Like a King August 23, 2024
In my mid-twenties, I found myself at a crossroads. Down one path, if I stayed the course as a graduate student in political science, I could pursue a life in academia. Down another path, I could go back to my hometown in Washington state to challeng...
The Confidence Man in American Politics August 23, 2024
Former Congressman George Santos pled guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft on Monday in Federal District Court in New York to avoid his trial scheduled for next month. He faced 23 counts, including multiple charges of wire fraud, money ...
Make America Beautiful Again August 23, 2024
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin thought that “every form of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and the Religious Faith of nations.” It makes sense, then, that throughout history statesmen and other le...
Book Burners for Our Year Zero August 22, 2024
The George Floyd riots of 2020 left scores dead and caused billions of dollars in property damage. A clangorous bonfire of physical and political upheaval transformed the national landscape overnight. Both Democrats and Republicans committed themselv...
A Fresh Look at Frida Kahlo August 22, 2024
MEXICO CITY — Tote bags, city walls, carnival costumes, dolls. We see her everywhere, the black hair tightly pulled back, flowers framing the face, the eyebrows with a light bridge of hair between them, the firm look, the red lips with a delicate mus...
The Resilience of Natural Law August 21, 2024
At its inception in seventeenth-century England, our liberal order held that law must be humble. Brutal political conflict had proved that we are incapable of knowing basic moral and social truths. With fundamental disagreement inescapable, law must ...
Colorblindness in the Public and Private Sphere August 20, 2024
Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, has provoked a lot of discussion here and elsewhere. Though I have all the respect in the world for Coleman and his ideas, and I think his prominence is a net good f...
The Beginning and End of Postmodern America August 20, 2024
Do we live in normal times, times of bounded contestation and turmoil, of chaos and disarray that still operate within the paradigm of normal American politics? Or is that paradigm collapsing, from atrophy or from antipathy? For conservatives living ...
The Tech Right Galvanized Lana Del Rey August 19, 2024
With J.D. Vance selected for the Trump admin, it’s apparent that MAGA has a new type of company infiltrating its ranks. Vance, with Peter Thiel’s support, represents what Richard Hanania has dubbed the “Tech Right.” Alongside Elon Musk, these types f...
Does It Take a Government to Censor? August 19, 2024
Certain sorts of events, none of which directly involve government action, are what we often think of when contemporary notions of freedom of speech, political correctness, and cancel culture come up in conversation: A speaker is disinvited from a co...
A Conversation with Naomi Kanakia August 19, 2024
I first discovered Naomi Kanakia, as I find most talented writers these days, on Substack. In her eclectic newsletter, Women of Letters, she can be found expounding on the history of Hinduism, the sociology of literature, Tolstoy, and whatever else m...
Language and the Politics of the Swarm August 19, 2024
Last week, I learned the term “murmuration.” It refers to the simultaneous movement of a large group of birds, typically starlings, who fly and change direction together. I’m clearly no ornithologist, but I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon late...
The Gray Lady Sings August 16, 2024
On Monday, the New York Times editorial board announced that it will no longer endorse candidates for mayor of New York City and governor of New York State. The abrupt change ends a tradition that has played a crucial role in local politics since 189...
Culture Froze in the Biden Era. Is It Finally Heating Up? August 15, 2024
Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the ...
The Surprising Truth About Loneliness in America August 15, 2024
Who are the loneliest people in America?American men were said to be in a “friendship recession,” with a survey finding the number of men without any close friends increased fivefold since 1990. Meanwhile, resurfaced comments from Republican vice pre...
Our Civilizational Moment August 14, 2024
Vexed by the apocalyptic vibes of the last few months, I recently went back and re-read the controversial book Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington. The book was controversial...
Nate Silver Knows Who Will Win August 14, 2024
It’s a gray and muggy Sunday afternoon, and Nate Silver had just a few hours earlier republished his widely followed election model. After months of Trump’s being ahead, Kamala Harris was his new front-runner with a 52.8 percent chance of victory. No...
Visit the Glenstone Museum August 14, 2024
If you’re in Washington and want a break before election year madness begins, check out the Glenstone Museum. The Glenstone, about 20 miles outside of Washington in Potomac, Maryland, offers, as the brochure says, “a holistic experience of art, archi...
Will They Carry My Book? August 13, 2024
Barnes & Noble is returning to Georgetown. As Washingtonian reports:“Barnes & Noble is having a renaissance. Under new CEO James Daunt, the bookstore chain is doing away with its cookie-cutter spaces stuffed with board games and toys, and giving its ...
Wokeness and the “Sick Animal” August 12, 2024
My X feed has recently been flooded with parodies of the “White Women for Kamala” Zoom call, where a kindergarten teacher turned social media influencer “gentle parented” a group of white women, explaining that “our BIPOC sisters have tapped us in as...
Another Long, Hot Summer August 12, 2024
All I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.— Joan Didion, “The White Album”The latest picture: euphoric Democrats flipping ove...
Rest in Peace, Lapham July 30, 2024
Lewis Lapham’s influence on the shape of the American magazine through his work at Harper’s can hardly be overstated. Many tributes have been written to this effect in the past few days, and I suspect many more will be written in the weeks and months...
The Audacity of Nope July 30, 2024
Our “national conversation” about race is a nesting doll of clichés. Each time a racially charged incident makes news in America, we are reminded of the “conversation” we must have, often as an end in itself, to atone for America’s history of racism....
The Puzzle of Generational Politics July 30, 2024
Age is a big deal. We saw just how big a deal it is from the deterioration of President Biden evident during the recent debate with Donald Trump. There’s a growing sense that the world is being run by a gerontocracy—Biden, Trump, Putin, Xi, Khamenei—...
'Fly Me to the Moon’s' Failure to Launch July 30, 2024
American film and television have long imagined the mid–twentieth century as a moment of security and confidence, a time when you could order liberal political consensus with your milkshake at the local Woolworth’s. Movies and shows of the 1990s were...
The War on Genius July 29, 2024
What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope...
Political Beliefs: An Impressionistic Reflection July 29, 2024
This month, I visited the offices of The Critic for our summer party. Sat outside the office, waiting for someone to let me in, I looked up and saw police officers striding towards me.With faultless professionalism, they explained that they had had r...
Humans of a Certain Caliber July 29, 2024
“We don’t need better publics. We need better elites.”So declared political scientist Nils Gilman in a talk on “institutional decay” at a conference I helped organize in 2017. Since then, it’s become something of a refrain of his. Gilman argued that ...
Trump, the Magic Candidate July 26, 2024
We keep looking at that photograph: Trump’s fist bump, his scowl, the blood on his ear. We who support Trump, and we who oppose him. We mock it. We regret it. We put it on T-shirts. We make it into memes. We don’t stop looking. It reminds me, in mood...
America, Honor, and Building a Grocery Store from Scratch July 26, 2024
We had just finished installing the shelves for the bakery section when the music system popped to life. The first song it played? Salt ’n’ Pepa’s “Whatta Man.”It was appropriate on many levels. For one, we were building a grocery store from the grou...
The Politics of Enmity July 25, 2024
You would think that the attempted assassination of a president would be a moment in which Americans could briefly set aside their differences and denounce political violence with one voice. But there was no such comity to be had after a gunman nearl...
What Happened to 'The Boys'? July 25, 2024
Back when it premiered, The Boys was the perfect show for its moment. In 2019, the box office was eclipsed by Avengers: Endgame, the apex of global Marvel mania, which came equipped with a flimsy set of politics positioned, implicitly, against the ri...
The Season of Lost Souls July 23, 2024
I’M NOT THE FIRST to say it, nor will I be the last: Irish writers are kicking arse, forging narratives for our fraught and fevered moment, spinning tensions between English and their Indigenous tongue into gold. Consider the gems from this past deca...
It’s Okay to Take a Book Seriously July 22, 2024
You know something? I don’t think it’s wrong for an author to have a political standpoint or ideology that they seek to advance with their books. Nor do I think it’s wrong to take a book’s ideas at face value. When I read Tolstoy, I don’t think, “Oh,...
Frontier Cities July 22, 2024
April 2009. Peter Thiel publishes his essay “The Education of a Libertarian” in the Cato Institute’s journal Cato Unbound. Arguing that “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology” his text describes his disillusionment with American dem...
The Paradoxical Paradise of the Garden July 19, 2024
The reader of “Paradise Lost” encounters the Garden of Eden at the same time that Satan does. Having leapt over the garden wall, Milton’s athletic antihero flies up into a tree to survey his new surroundings. “Beneath him with new wonder now he views...
Frank Stallone Suggests Trump Use ‘Far From Over' July 18, 2024
Recording artist Frank Stallone, Sylvester Stallone's younger brother, suggested on Monday that former President Trump, the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, should use his hit song, "Far From Over" as a new campaign theme song after he survived an assa...
The Changes in Vibes — Why Did They Happen? July 18, 2024
Clearly it has happened, and it has been accelerated and publicized by the Biden failings and the attempted Trump assassination. But it was already underway. If you need a single, unambiguous sign of it, I would cite MSNBC pulling off Morning Joe f...
American Berserk July 17, 2024
Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, died at twenty, which means he was born in September of 2003. For the youth, there is nothing remarkable about this fact, but if you’re even a decade older, you remember these as science fictio...
Thoughts and Prayers for “Literally Hitler” July 17, 2024
What to do about a dictator. I was in New Jersey with my family when I got the first text. My sister sent her kids to the other room to play, out of earshot of the television, and we watched the mainstream channels with my mom and dad while I scrolle...
Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania July 16, 2024
On 13 July, under a clear blue sky in Butler, Pennsylvania, bullets sliced through the air piercing the ear of the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. While he escaped death thanks to the tilt of his head, a stray bullet fatally i...
The Portal July 16, 2024
The photograph of a bloodied former President Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air beneath the American flag as his Secret Service minders struggle to protect him was immediately among the most indelible political images of the past half-centu...
The Woke Program Is Our American Pogrom July 16, 2024
“A pogrom,” the definition goes, “is an organized massacre of a people.” The events of October 7 in Israel are one example of a pogrom. 9/11 was another. A pogrom is limited only by the existence of external authorities — political and moral — that c...
The Coming Divergence of Tech and Culture July 15, 2024
We are, as an advanced twenty-first century American society, increasingly devoid of awe. There is little that can surprise or excite us; we are weary of the gadgets, wary of artificial intelligence, and prepared to legislate, if possible, the poison...
Against Protest Songs July 15, 2024
The past several months have provided much fuel for political fears both at home and abroad. But there is one worrisome political development in particular that has received too little attention: Are we in danger of a protest song revival?In May, for...
Only For a Moral and Religious People July 15, 2024
The short clip from The New Norm Show that’s been circulating almost seems perfectly timed to prove Spencer Klavan’s point: the Right’s approach to culture is an abysmal failure. Nearly universally panned, the “anti-woke sitcom” is everything wrong w...
Prague Calling July 09, 2024
“The medium is the message,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1964. This rings true today, but was it always the case? What’s more, how can this phrase illuminate the political and ideological forces of a particular time and place?In Red Tape: Radio and Pol...
The Power of Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul July 09, 2024
Nellie Bowles recently appeared at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to promote her new book Morning After the Revolution. I was in the audience that night, sitting near the front of the relatively small room. It felt like a mildly rebellious ac...
The Concept of the Political Belief July 08, 2024
Some books are most profitably read backward, or at least with their endings in mind. Once you’ve read an Agatha Christie novel, you derive a new enjoyment from finding and parsing the clues and hints she leaves throughout the book that point to the ...
The Abject Misery of the UK July 05, 2024
British people hate happiness. You will not understand this country or its politics unless you first understand the deep vein of misery that runs through absolutely everything we do. We wallow in it. It’s why we eat that slop; it’s why we live in suc...
The Politics of the Heart on Stage July 05, 2024
“The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked about,” notes Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in Our American Queen, the new play by Thomas Klingenstein (at the Flea Theatre through June 29). Chase is directing his comment, or warning, at his daug...
'Do the Right Thing' Revisited June 06, 2024
Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is known for having sparked debates over conflicting methods of addressing racial oppression, namely, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent, integrationist approach and Malcom X’s separatist and–when necessa...
De Niro’s Downfall (and Ours) June 06, 2024
By now, we should be accustomed to seeing favorite performers betray us, risking years of good will and fond memories to express petulant political bias and empty promises. (“I’ll leave America if . . . ”) But the utter disgrace that actor Robert De ...
Is TikTok Breaking Young Voters’ Brains? June 06, 2024
I don’t remember looking for anything in particular when I opened TikTok one February evening.What I do remember was one video that dared me to examine my digital diet. “Check your TikTok screen time,” user @katherout challenged me. “Then check how m...
Getting to the Mountaintop June 05, 2024
In today’s America, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope that black people might be judged by “the content of their character” is increasingly dismissed as quaint or even inconvenient. The new idea is to pose an eternal opposition between “whiteness” and “...
The Opportunity in Macrocultural Failure June 05, 2024
It was the worst Memorial Day box office in almost thirty years. Furiosa narrowly topped The Garfield Movie with an estimated $32 million for the four-day weekend, barely edging out Casper’s $22.5 million in 1995—not adjusted for inflation. The hope,...
Supreme Court to Decide the Future of Free Speech June 05, 2024
The current Supreme Court term includes a cluster of cases that could well shape the future of online free speech. These cases invite the Court to determine the power of both government officials and social media platforms concerning “content moderat...
Parents Take Control June 04, 2024
During Covid, America’s public school teachers received full pay to stop doing their jobs, often for over a year. Officially, to be clear, Zoom school was in session. But “teaching” via Zoom was barely better than nothing. Zoom schools offered little...
Reinhold Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, The Year of Our Lord 1943 June 04, 2024
Reinhold Niebuhr has long been something of a Rorshach test: “someone in whose work readers have infused all their sundry preoccupations, a thinker they ultimately interpret in their own image,” as Matthew Sitman put it. While Sitman is rightly conce...
A Veteran Teacher’s Audacious Plan for Staving Off American Decline June 03, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book LESSONS IN LIBERTY: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) by Jeremy S. Adams Decades and centuries in the future, historians will look back at our pecu...
The Sexy Mind Games of “Hit Man” June 03, 2024
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase “the banality of evil,” popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “M...
A Conversation with Cally Fiedorek June 03, 2024
Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of litera...
Optimizing to Nowhere May 24, 2024
The other day, I was in my mother’s apartment trying to watch television. The remote could not change the channel. The television was stuck on the USA Network—a Fast and Furious movie was playing—and I could not watch anything else. The volume, for r...
The Virtues of Settler Colonialism May 24, 2024
A few years ago, law professor Gail Heriot pointed out a problem that some on the Right have been noticing for quite some time: “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” She argued that at its core, dispara...
Ali Abbasi’s Gift to Donald Trump at Cannes May 23, 2024
The Apprentice, a new fictional biopic based on Donald Trump, features scenes of “rape, erectile dysfunction, baldness and betrayal”. On Monday it received an eight-minute standing ovation from celebrities and movie moguls at Cannes, a glittery film ...
The Breslin Era May 22, 2024
When I was 23, and tasked with covering a mayoral race in New York, the dazzling dungeon of a city in which I was raised, I read and reread a long magazine article written by Jimmy Breslin. The first-person feature, published in a July 1969 issue of ...
An Interview With Dennis Hale and Marc Landy May 21, 2024
JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago sat down with JMC faculty partners Dennis Hale and Marc Landy to discuss their new book, Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism. Both Dr. Hale and Dr. Landy teach political science at Bosto...
Talking About WNBA Team Names May 21, 2024
Welcome to my second post about a media firestorm following a Nate Silver tweet. He’s potent that way. In recent years Silver’s become a magnet for hysterical overreaction due to a range of reasons, mostly related to media neuroticism regarding polit...
What Replaced the Village Voice? May 20, 2024
In Jacobin, Alex Press offered a worthy review of Tricia Romano’s new oral history of the Village Voice, a book that mattered to me as an ex-Voice writer and New York nostalgist. The Voice was, at its various peaks, a remarkable hub for cultural deba...
Gen Z’s Gender Stalemate May 20, 2024
Sex and politics are clickbait material, so it’s little surprise that The Economist’s early March article “Why Young Men and Women Are Drifting Apart” went viral. In this case, the attention was warranted. The article adds to our understanding of the...
What Glenn Loury Taught Me May 20, 2024
It’s difficult to overstate how barren and lonely intellectual life at Brown University felt as a policy major circa mid-2005, at least if one was more interested in policy than politics. It’s not that there weren’t a bunch of very bright people arou...
Inside the Movement to Bring the Arts to Outer Space May 20, 2024
I’m on the moon. Or on a floor on the moon. Actually, on a metal floor in a space-analog building in the desert where I am simulating, with three other people, being on the moon. We’re here to imagine space, keep house, and make art. We’re calling it...
The Internet Infection May 17, 2024
The viscerally negative reaction (one Tweet got upwards of 1.3 million views) of The DiscourseTM to Honor Levy's My First Book, or rather, more importantly to Honor Levy's recent profile in The Cut, is enough to make the reviewer a partisan: a defend...
Beyond Grievance Politics May 17, 2024
The summer of 2020, when George Floyd’s murder inspired America’s “racial reckoning,” seems a distant memory. Although talk of a right-wing backlash is often overstated, we have witnessed some effective pushback against left-wing identity politics fr...
How The New York Times Went Woke May 16, 2024
It’s been a little while now, and it might be hard to remember that it was ever any different, but remember the pandemic and the rage. Remember many of us isolated, on our phones, on our computers, the stock market strangely rising as the government ...
Is Common Sense Realism Making a Comeback? May 16, 2024
One of the largest political rallies ever held in the state of New Jersey took place in Wildwood on Saturday. Between 80,000 and 100,000 people are reported to have shown up for Donald Trump’s rally. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, the sky-hi...
The Cult of Nonfiction May 16, 2024
What, other than literary fiction, is occupying the young male today? I posited, among other attractions, online gambling and video gaming. This drew strong reactions, particularly from gamers who suggested almost as many women are playing today. Fai...
Lenin 100 Hundred Years Later May 15, 2024
It has been a century since Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet State, died in 1924 at the age of fifty-three, a victim of poor health and multiple strokes. He was once considered by Communists everywhere as a theoretician of the rank of Karl Ma...
Scrutinising Scruton May 14, 2024
It has been four years since Sir Roger Scruton passed away, leaving a significant gap within the sphere of intellectual conservatism. The void is evident due to the undeniable impact that Scruton had, earning him the title of one of the best-known Br...
Glenn Loury’s Rise, Fall and Rise May 13, 2024
In 1984, when he was 35, Glenn Loury made Martin Luther King’s widow cry. A young black professor at Harvard, he was addressing a meeting of African-American political leaders in Washington, and as he spoke, he could see that Coretta Scott King had t...
The Night Taylor Swift Conquered Europe May 13, 2024
I’m just off the train at Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, and walking down a pedestrianised avenue to Paris La Defense Arena, a hulking, 40,000-capacity quadrilateral that’s the largest indoor arena in Europe. “Welcome to New York”, sings one of th...
From Misogyny to No Man's Land May 13, 2024
In 1963, Mary McCarthy published The Group. A ranging social novel that follows eight female friends after their graduation from Vassar College in 1933, The Group was a smashing success, soaring to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and b...
Arendt Chic May 09, 2024
Hannah Arendt was a titan of political theory, an original thinker who put modern politics in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition and helped the 20th century understand itself. She was also, as University of Birmingham professor Lyndsey...
Sitcom King Lear May 07, 2024
The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.I...
A Conversation Between Rachel Cusk and Ira Sachs May 07, 2024
ONE MIGHT CALL Ira Sachs a writer’s filmmaker. His subtle scenarios adhere to—and glory in—the confines of the same reality the writer apprehends through language, a reality whose moral composition and problems of subjectivity are as tangible as its ...
Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Incoherent May 07, 2024
Recently the actress Victoria Justice made waves by saying that her experience filming a sex scene was uncomfortable. This was catnip to a particularly voluble slice of the People Who Yell Online, those who think that movies should simply not have se...
Our Dystopian Future Is Inside Your Gambling App May 07, 2024
Earlier this month, basketball player Jontay Porter, former Toronto Raptors benchwarmer, saw his short and unimpressive NBA career come to an abrupt end. This severe penalty stems from his involvement in a gambling scheme that exploited his access to...
'Dune' and Progressive Media Illiteracy May 06, 2024
Leftists have completely lost the plot — literally. Every time a new blockbuster film is released, the discourse predictably devolves into a debate over its problematic themes. This is nothing new; leftists have been highly critical of media depictio...
