Books
Story Stream
Capitalism, Baseball, Community, and Loss March 25, 2025
Homestand is a book about baseball, and the author is a Mets fan. Thus, Homestand is a book about loss....
Preparing for the Plunge March 25, 2025
JOHN CHEEVER WAS FAR from my mind, or so I thought, on the late-summer weekend a few years ago when a heat wave settled over Los Angeles. The apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend had become a kiln, our ancient window unit no match for the tripl...
What the “Abundance Agenda” Leaves Out March 25, 2025
I spent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly t...
The Novel Cover Changes and Changes March 25, 2025
Italian designer Bruno Munari wrote in Design as Art that, "Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beaut...
Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes March 25, 2025
The award-winning Black feminist author Toni Morrison converted to Roman Catholicism in her teens, taking Anthony as her baptismal name and using Toni as a pen name. She wrote fiction featuring slavery, racism, sexuality, rape, profanity, police brut...
What Was the Millennial? March 24, 2025
Millennials are a joke now, just not a very funny one. Their quirks and quiddities can be finely itemised, from their tastes in furniture to their favourite drugs. They can be chronologised, their rise and fall from new and interesting to stale and p...
My Vanity Fair Hazing March 24, 2025
In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer, a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I star...
It is Not Good to Read (Only) Alone March 24, 2025
Over the past few years, I have seen a number of debates and research studies critically evaluating the different mediums in which people consume books in the twenty-first century: Reading on paper versus reading on screens (e.g., iPad or Kindle) ver...
"Cigar Gastronomique" by Patrick Potter March 24, 2025
As you delve into the pages of this book, you'll be embarking on a journey that stretches across continents, dips into the very soils that nurture the tobacco leaves and rises with the fragrant smoke of a freshly lit cigar. But more than that, this j...
It's Time for a Serious Adaptation of ‘Starship Troopers’ March 24, 2025
Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoev...
Faith in the Age of AI March 24, 2025
Religious belief can feel like the last refuge from pervasive technology. When New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called our society “decadent” in 2020, the threat of such technologies seemed comparatively distant. Innovation appeared stagnant, an...
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
The Unbearable Weight of the Literary Canon March 21, 2025
Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the ...
The Ecstatic Intimacies of Joe Brainard March 21, 2025
“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this thought in 1969, in a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Bill Berkson. ...
Barry Ritholtz's Excellent 'How Not to Invest' March 21, 2025
Recently a prominent member of the libertarian community died. Notable about the individual’s death is what he left behind.Though he earned good money over the decades, the pay was in no way astronomical. Yet as you’re reading this review of the very...
'Progressive Democracy' & the Totalitarian Temptation March 21, 2025
I’ve counted them all up: the teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle, is already ours. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer by saying that he’s more developed than his victims and couldn’t help killing to get money, ...
Whose Idea of America? March 21, 2025
When Jackie Kennedy died, Peggy Noonan distilled America’s love for its First Lady into a little over a dozen paragraphs, nearly all of them perfect. “A nation watched, and would never forget” how Jackie carried herself the weekend of her husband’s m...
The Beatles’ Brilliant Friendship March 20, 2025
John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the lipstick camp. But if Ziggy was from Mars (magical realism with a dash of science fiction) and the Beatles were from Liverpool (trippy s...
Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe March 20, 2025
All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few righ...
Breaking Up with Facebook March 20, 2025
“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich to San Francisco, traveling back from Davos with Sheryl Sandberg, her heroine and the chief operating officer of Facebook. Wynn-...
The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025 March 19, 2025
The weather is finally turning, and the dark days of winter are over. Earlier this week I was able to sit outside, get some sun, and indulge in some great books — though it’s back to cloudy days in DC for now, it’s a spell of good things to come. Enj...
What’s the Matter with Abundance? March 19, 2025
January of 1992 was a strange time to be thinking optimistically about the future prospects of global communism, but the end of the Soviet experiment prompted Howard University professor (and inveterate red) David Schwartzman to wonder what it would ...
An Extended Argument in Verse March 19, 2025
I am not qualified to review Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry. It’s not clear to me that anyone is, given Ruby’s stated goals: his book-length poem attempts to explain the history of poetry and poetics, “retracing...
The Life of the Mind Can Only Get You So Far March 19, 2025
Every young feminist, at some point, bumps up against the limits of her ideals. For me, it happened in my early 20s. My consciousness freshly raised and my mind spongier than ever, I spent my evenings imbibing the no-nonsense feminism of Vivian Gorni...
Tolkien, Philosopher of War March 19, 2025
“There's nothing in "The Lord of the Rings" except that it's a foundation of one's feeling for trees, flowers and England generally.” J.R.R. TolkienTolkien planned to dedicate his lore “to England; to my country” (Letters, 144 #131; cf. 250 #190)), y...
Marketing Difficulty March 19, 2025
I’m meeting someone at a bar and she says she’s the one in the booth reading Anna Karenina. Indie-lit darling Shy Watson is tackling Infinite Jest for the first time, as is my boyfriend. For her book club, Dua Lipa posed with the blue-and-white Fitzc...
‘Goodnight Moon’ Cements American Icon Status March 18, 2025
What do Elvis, Mr. Rogers, and Rosa Parks have in common? All have been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps due to their status as American icons. Now beloved children’s book Goodnight Moon is joining their ranks with its own set of celebratory stamp...
All My Small Things March 18, 2025
DO PEOPLE KEEP diaries anymore? In the age of social media, the practice can feel twee and artisanal, like contra dancing or making your own soap. Do we really need yet another forum for our narcissism—another corkboard to amass (and potentially disp...
The Joy of Forgotten Books March 18, 2025
For five months in 2023 my wife and I traveled through 28 states across the United States, in a hopeful, slightly crazy, deeply personal, and sometimes grueling search for Little Free Libraries. I had a book to deliver, a copy of my latest novel, Wha...
What Was 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?' February 28, 2025
I’ve got to start with the blurbs. When, 25 years ago this month, I first picked up a copy of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I immediately noticed that the back jacket sported the greatest collection of promotional quotes ev...
Michael Lewis on the Magic of One-Hit Wonders February 28, 2025
Michael Lewis is the award-winning author behind numerous best-sellers, including “Moneyball,” “The Big Short,” and “Going Infinite.” Still, he approaches each new project as if it’s his first, and last. “When I’m at my best as a writer, I’m starting...
Philip Gefter's 'Cocktails with George and Martha' February 28, 2025
It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was tha...
Failure to Launch February 28, 2025
Some technologies always seem to lie just over the horizon. Where, we ask, are our robot servants, jetpacks and flying cars? Closer to hand, where are the self-driving cars that don’t require a human driver, the VR headsets that don’t make you throw ...
Between a W.P.A. Project and the Great American Novel February 28, 2025
In the summer of 1962, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal spent a month in Liuling, China, talking to peasant farmers. Their testimonies were published in English by Pantheon, under the title Report from a Chinese Village. Pantheon’s managing director, An...
Why Are We So Obsessed With Blue? February 28, 2025
“SUPPOSE I WERE to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” reads the first line of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” her 2009 book-length lyric essay about the color blue. “Bluets” — the title refers to the delicate, diminutive wildflower bu...
Inside the S.N.L. Audition Room February 27, 2025
By the time Saturday Night Live had been around for a quarter of a century, in 2000, a folklore developed among S.N.L. aspirants around the way Lorne Michaels hires people. (The protocols have remained consistent during the second 25 years.) There we...
Let Us Now Praise the Supermen February 27, 2025
There’s no reason why the name “Alfredo Stroessner” should mean anything to Americans today, which is why I was surprised to find him mentioned in Bronze Age Mindset, the 2018 book written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, a writer much admired...
Fantasy, Technology & Belief February 27, 2025
In recent years, author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has been a singularly incisive commentator on cultural trends at the intersection of religion, politics, and art. For our second Trialogue, Luke Burgis and I emailed with Ross about th...
A Bonkers Artist Heart February 27, 2025
Once a year at my Catholic elementary school, all the second, third, and fourth graders would head down to the school chapel, where we’d sit in the pews in alphabetical order and wait for our turn to confess our sins. It was easy to tell when you wer...
On Julia Kornberg’s 'Berlin Atomized' February 27, 2025
I used to play a game when I lived in Moscow in my early twenties. I would see how deep into a flirtation I could get while pretending to be a Russian girl; in actuality, I am American. My Russian-language skills were limited, but in a famously patri...
The Power of American Originals February 26, 2025
“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”Karl Zinsmeister, 2025BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about Ameri...
Michel Houellebecq Explains Himself February 26, 2025
In his debut novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq wrote that “the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness.” And yet, the 1994 bildungsroman—which featured an unnamed, vividly sullen, and suicidal narrator—inspired an entir...
When You Ain't Got Nothing February 26, 2025
Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the ...
Secrets Of A Book Publisher February 26, 2025
When Chelsea Hodson announced that she was starting her own independent book press, Rose Books, in 2022, there was a collective cultural response: Finally, something cool is happening.Hodson became a literary darling with the release of 2018’s Tonigh...
The Painter Novel February 26, 2025
“IN MY EXPERIENCE painters are far less conventional than writers,” says Rachel Cusk in her 2014 novel Outline. Writers, hesitant about filling their novels with authorial doubles, have a tendency to put their self-inserts in smocks. These painter pr...
Moby-Dick Is a Novel That Is Mostly About Whales February 26, 2025
According to my records, I read Moby-Dick for the first time in April of 2010. My journey into the book started off quite well. Like most readers, I was surprised by the overt, barely-subtextual homoeroticism—I loved the relationship between Queequeg...
Can Economics Explain America’s Gun Violence? February 26, 2025
In the 2022 BBC show Inside Man, Stanley Tucci’s character (Jefferson Grieff), an inmate on death row, says something dramatic about murder: “There are moments that make murderers of us all… all it takes is a good reason and a bad day.”In Unforgiving...
Michael Dirda Is Incredibly Fortunate February 26, 2025
“I keep a button on my desk that says ‘Life?’ Of course I have a life. It’s a life filled with books.” Those are the words of Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Price-winning book critic for the Washington Post.In a recent Post interview, Dirda explained his de...
Don’t Call It a Comeback February 25, 2025
In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, femin...
The Banty, Blustering Genius of Earl Weaver February 25, 2025
The greatest sight in Major League Baseball during the 1970s was almost certainly this one: the Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver storming out of the dugout to remonstrate over some perceived injustice to his players. He would be so incensed at t...
American Renaissance Man February 24, 2025
American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character is mistitled. The title, and the advertising that has accompanied the book, suggests a biography of Buckley and his role in American life. (Something I was still ant...
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...
Lorne’s Prime Time February 24, 2025
In a season five episode of the estimable sitcom 30 Rock, itself based on the goings-on of a network television show closely modeled on Saturday Night Live, the writer and producer Aaron Sorkin makes a cameo as himself. Introduced to Tina Fey’s ever-...
Interstellar Ineptitude February 24, 2025
The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of p...
Welcome to the Bizarro Awokening February 24, 2025
A week ago, conservative influencer and children’s book author Ashley St. Clair sent shockwaves across X by announcing that she was the proud mother of a five-month old baby fathered by none other than that same platform’s owner. She didn’t detail th...
Against High Brodernism February 24, 2025
AMERICANS CAN ONLY ACCEPT foreign literature once they have washed it with superlatives. Nothing less than a disinfectant exaltation—“masterpiece!” “genius!”—will do if the book is to be read. If you believe critics like me, every translated novel de...
Down and Out in Hollywood February 21, 2025
LOU MATHEWS’S NEW NOVEL Hollywoodski demonstrates that the Hollywood novel is alive and well in the 21st century, albeit as a kind of zombie genre lacking any real sense of direction—a perfect description of the career trajectory of protagonist Dale ...
The Stones That Keep On Rolling February 21, 2025
Most books about the history of rock music are written by people who weren’t there when that history was made. It’s something they have in common with books about World War II: the authors may know all the facts, but they don’t feel the chronology in...
Nobody Writes About Violence Like Han Kang January 23, 2025
Han Kang is a private person. When she won last year’s Nobel Prize for literature, it was widely reported in the South Korean press that she was married to the literary critic Hong Yong-hee. They have actually been divorced for years. She has written...
10 Winter Reads for Cold Nights January 23, 2025
Frigid storms, heaps of snow and subzero temperatures are not exactly pleasant to live through, but winter weather can make for an irresistible setting for a book. From the cool surface of a frozen lake to the dizzying frenzy of a white-out squall, t...
Literature & Magic: The Marriage of Word and Image January 22, 2025
Is literature the same as writing? The historian would say “yes.” Out of the song cycles and ritual performances of an oral culture, the discriminated genres of poetry and prose—epic, dramatic, lyric—accompanied the development of a literate culture....
NASA Did Not Invent Velcro January 22, 2025
Innovation is vital to our prosperity. Without trailblazing entrepreneurs and inventors, we would not be able to live the long and comfortable lives that we live today compared to how our ancestors lived. Some economists argue that government directi...
Island Royalty January 22, 2025
Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today...
Puzder On Stakeholder Capitalism January 22, 2025
Andrew Walworth spoke to Andrew F. Puzder about his new book, "A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism," which makes the case that BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and other large asset managers have impos...
The 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2025 January 22, 2025
Somehow, we’ve made it to the midpoint of the 2020s. The decade has been a great one for readers so far, with new classics like Percival Everett’s James and Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King winning awards and hitting bestseller lists. But 2025 ...
Ill Legal January 22, 2025
There were some things I really loved about working for Columbia Law School. I had a fantastic team of colleagues in the Office of Public Affairs who taught me much of what I know about journalism and PR alike. It was a great honor to get to work wit...
We Also Need Democracy in Aesthetics January 21, 2025
In a new book entitled BACKBONE: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared, author Karl Zinsmeister reports on middle Americans living all across the country, and why they want dramatic change in the direction of our country. He examines p...
Unquitting Social Media January 21, 2025
In 2013, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I Never Joined Facebook.” Social media had grown so ubiquitous that I felt obligated to justify my abstention; I pointed out that I didn’t need it because it didn’t solve any actual problems in my life. The po...
The Truth About Fiction January 21, 2025
In September 2023, Linda Coombs published Colonization and the Wampanoag Story with Penguin Random House, about the Wampanoag people’s contact with Europeans. The book was categorised under ‘children’s nonfiction’. A year later, a citizen committee i...
The Late, Great David Lodge Helped Us to Relax January 20, 2025
I was first introduced to David Lodge’s endlessly great novels when a college girlfriend gave me her copy of Nice Work. The book was assigned to her in a senior-year English literature class at left-leaning University of Texas at Austin, and the fact...
David Lynch and The Art Spirit January 20, 2025
I recently watched the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life”. It focused on Lynch’s early years: his childhood, his difficulties at school, his art student period, up to the making of his first feature film Eraserhead (1977).I like these “e...
Edna Ferber’s Frontier Life January 20, 2025
Released Nov. 24, 1956, the movie Giant was a blockbuster hit. It earned $35 million in ticket sales during its original studio release as well as $12 million in rentals in the United States and Canada alone. It won several Academy Awards including b...
The Unbearable Burden January 17, 2025
You already have an opinion on this man. You may like him, you may dislike him. You may have a long list of gripes about things he has said or things you imagine he has said: “He claimed that dragons are real! He wanted to give bride-slaves to incels...
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...
The Troubled Upbringing Trend January 17, 2025
It is fitting that Vice President-Elect J. D. Vance, having overcome a difficult upbringing himself, helped Rob Henderson with his drafts of Troubled, a memoir about Henderson’s improbable path from a troubled childhood in California to recently comp...
Glenn Loury’s Augustinian Turn January 17, 2025
Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University, a position befitting someone who has had an enormous impact on both the field of economics and American discussions of race. Over...
Gay Talese Keeps Notes, Especially on Everyone’s Clothes January 17, 2025
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” begins the essay that opens “A Town Without Time,” a new collection of Gay Talese’s New York writings. Talese then proceeds to list, with deceptive economy, the things he has noticed: chestnut vendors, pigeon...
The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon January 16, 2025
In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reported...
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...
Ridley Scott Is Not Looking Back January 16, 2025
On a bookcase in the London offices of Ridley Scott Associates sits a framed memento: a Pupil’s Report Book from the County of Durham Education Committee’s Stockton Grammar School. On the front cover, filled in by hand, is the name of the pupil in qu...
Two Dad Memoirs and the End of Fatherhood January 16, 2025
In 2005 I married a man whose detailed thoughts about parenting, childcare and family life I knew very little about. We’d agreed that we wanted children—or, rather, I’d said I wanted a large family and he’d said, “well maybe not too large,” and we’d ...
The New Semantics of the Kafkaesque January 15, 2025
In conversation with a friend who is well versed in neologism, the discussion often returns to Franz Kafka. Trace the roots of any word back far enough and you’ll find historical context largely removed from contemporary meaning, but Franz Kafka and ...
The Enigmatic Artistry of Terrence Malick January 15, 2025
Biographies of great artists are of inherent interest, but in the case of Terrence Malick, one of the greatest living filmmakers, there’s an extra fascination because of the great question mark that looms over his career: the twenty-year gap between ...
The Great Winter 2025 Book Preview January 15, 2025
It’s cold, it’s grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’...
The Happiest of the Poets January 15, 2025
W. B. Yeats’s association with the English designer, poet, and socialist William Morris lasted from 1887 to 1890, during which time the young Irish poet attended Sunday lectures Morris delivered to a group of mostly self-educated workingmen and would...
Books of 2024: A Year in Reading December 31, 2024
This year proved to be one of the wilder presidential election years in our nation’s history. As I followed the constant ups and downs, I found, as always, that the most soothing balms in tumultuous times are good books. Fortunately, 2024 gave me man...
In His Reading, Jimmy Carter Favored 'Anything but Politics' December 31, 2024
When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was new to the national scene. Of the many questions reporters asked to fill in the picture of the man, one was almost impossible for him to answer: his favorite book. A voracious speed reader, proficie...
Maeve Brennan’s New York December 31, 2024
It sounds like Maeve Brennan had the easiest job in the world.From 1954 to 1981, the Irish journalist and short-story writer sat in Manhattan’s cheaper bars and restaurants, martini in hand, and wrote down what she saw for The New Yorker.In fact, Bre...
Books We Loved Reading in 2024 December 30, 2024
Hi Everyone,To round out our 2024 coverage, we thought we’d let our team—the people who work so hard to bring our content to you, but usually remain behind the scenes—share a book they loved reading in the past twelve months. Perhaps you’ll enjoy one...
A “Modern-Day Casablanca” December 30, 2024
In the early 1980s, Hill Street Blues writer Anthony Yerkovich was reading The Wall Street Journal when he came across a startling statistic. According to the newspaper, one-fifth of all the unreported income in the U.S. passed through a single city:...
A Misdiagnosis of Substance Abuse December 27, 2024
Six pages into his latest contribution to the literature of recovery, William Cope Moyers tells us that the "tried and true routes to recovery" failed him in his battle against a slip into opioid addiction. The venerable combination of meetings, the ...
20 Books Coming in January December 27, 2024
Novels by Adam Ross, Han Kang and Nnedi Okorafor; nonfiction by Imani Perry and the “Hipster Grifter”; and more....
Best Books of 2024 December 25, 2024
“Please, not another piece on the role of the critic,” Wilfrid Sheed writes in Max Jamison, his 1970 novel about a splenetic drama critic going through a series of personal and professional crises. Sorry, Sheed: as I started thinking back on my year ...
The Best Music Books of 2024 December 24, 2024
Our favorite books this year (listed here in alphabetical order) included deep dives into groundbreaking groups like R.E.M. and De La Soul, explorations of scene’s like New York’s Greenwich Village and Oklahoma’s Red Dirt, and a gritty, entertaining ...
Our Holiday Reading Picks December 24, 2024
As life slows down for most of us, the Christmas season is a great time for extra reading. Law & Liberty‘s staff, contributing editors, and senior writers offer some recommendations....
The Betty Friedan Mystique December 24, 2024
This Betty Friedan biography is likely to be the last. Today, the story of her life and career is an inconvenient and unwelcome reminder of a past that many feminists would rather forget. ...
In Search of a New 20th-Century Canon December 24, 2024
The photo of the author on the jacket of Stranger Than Fiction tells you something. Edwin Frank sits at a small desk, entirely hemmed in by overflowing bookshelves and teetering stacks of books. His reading glasses have been pushed back on his head, ...
Best Books of 2024 December 24, 2024
Here are our contributors’ four favourite books in five genres....
Notes on Reading December 24, 2024
For many years I’ve kept a list of everything I’ve recently read on the inside cover of my notebook, but at the start of 2024, I found that Moleskine was no longer making this exact journal— cahier, kraft cover, grid interior, 8x5— of which I’d been ...
The Great American Incel Novel December 23, 2024
Within the first 10 pages of Rejection, a new book by Tony Tulathimutte about incels, a 25-year-old named Craig masturbates so much, and so forcefully, he permanently dulls the nerve endings in his penis. ...
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...
The Great Whitexican Novel December 23, 2024
Full disclosure: Nicolás Medina Mora once did a mean tweet about my book. He hadn’t read it, but he criticized it publicly anyway, dismissing me as just another gringo who didn’t understand Mexico.This hurt my feelings. But I didn’t fight back. Inste...
One of the World’s Most Elusive Writers Still Haunts December 23, 2024
“Paul Celan’s poems reach us, but we miss them,” wrote the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, giving succinct expression to the allure of one of Europe’s most important postwar poets, who remains as intriguing as he is perplexing more than 50 years afte...
Publishers Have Killed Lit Fiction December 20, 2024
Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste,...
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 Queen of Caricature December 20, 2024
You expect to find witty artwork in a book titled Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist, especially if the publisher is Fantagraphics, the gold standard when it comes to anthologizing classic comic strips. (The house is also a patron sai...
Didion, Babitz & the Biographer Who Missed the Point December 19, 2024
In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them,...
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 ...
Jahner's 'Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany' December 19, 2024
They "ate, slept, made love, raised children, and tried to keep body and soul together by finding ways to make a living." Those were the words of the late, great Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor George Melloan in his excellent and ess...
The 20 Best Books of 2024 December 18, 2024
The New Statesman’s choice of the year’s essential fiction and non-fiction....
Remembering Lee Edwards December 18, 2024
I have known Lee for more than 60 years, and here is the truth: He was the nicest person I have ever met. And at the same time, he was a prodigious author and exponent for our modern conservative movement — writing and editing 25 books plus uncountab...
A Year in Reading December 18, 2024
I have long made lists of my favorite cultural artifacts of the year—as a college blogger blathering about movies to a single-digit readership, as a Pitchfork voter trying to advocate for Fred Thomas’s “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II” for the Best of 2010s L...
Books of the Year December 18, 2024
This year Granta invited contributors to reflect on what they read in 2024....
Sofia Coppola Is Launching an Imprint December 18, 2024
Sofia Coppola has often thought that if she weren’t a filmmaker, she’d want to be the editor-in-chief of a magazine—or at least her own zine. The Oscar-winning auteur’s favorite way to unwind after a long day on set is by cutting out her favorite pho...
The Bible According to Jordan B. Peterson December 18, 2024
What’s Jordan Peterson’s favorite Bible story? The Canadian psychologist and cultural commentator’s new book provides commentary on Old Testament stories, expanding on his last two works, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, w...
No Ordinary Joe November 29, 2024
Joe Brainard had a reputation for being sweet. Contemporaries of the visual artist and poet often sidelined his accomplishments to speak or write about his interpersonal kindness. “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as...
21 Best Books of 2024 to Read Right Now November 29, 2024
Another year, another Best Books list. We’ve spent the last 12 months speaking with authors, from pop star-turned-poet Marina Diamandis, to novelist R.O. Kwon. ...
9 Books Coming in December November 29, 2024
A Hitchcockian thriller, an off-the-grid memoir, novels by Weike Wang and Lily Tuck, and more....
A Student of the American Character November 28, 2024
The Rutgers professor T.J. Jackson Lears is one of the most original historians of our time—so original, in fact, that it is hard to say exactly what he is a historian of. American thought and culture are his subject. His period is Reconstruction, th...
Every Academy Award for Best Picture November 28, 2024
The Academy Award for best picture is considered the highest honor in movies. Winning that marquee Oscar also means cementing a place in the history books–though the anointed films are not exempt from reassessment, and any given winner won’t necessar...
The Election Story Nobody Is Talking About November 28, 2024
Last year, I published a book that diagnosed a major problem in society, and offered a solution. The problem is growing numbers of young women choosing to forgo or delay marriage and motherhood, in favor of “living their best lives” as atomized caree...
100 Notable Books of 2024 November 27, 2024
Here is the standout fiction and nonfiction of the year, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review....
The Pleasure and Peril of the Aftermath November 27, 2024
When I was a kid, the end of any athletic season brought with it an inexplicable, overwhelming emptiness. After winning the championship basketball game in seventh grade, I dug my face into the backseat of our Subaru and cried. It wasn’t that I had p...
A New “Realist” Look at Religion November 27, 2024
Sociology professor Samuel Perry’s new book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion isn’t the first time a Protestant intellectual has attempted to articulate a “realist” view on religion. The most prominent example be...
Rawdogging 'Ulysses' November 27, 2024
Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated is 694 pages long and retails for $35 on Amazon. The paperback edition is a doorstop, bulging with more ink than Ulysses itself, indexing the thousands of oblique references to classical literature, continental philoso...
I’m Not Like Other Gift Guides November 27, 2024
Every book is a gift <3 But while the holidays are notoriously a time for a well-meaning aunt to gift you a copy of a memoir by an Obama, we all deserve more. We put together a list of Language Arts-approved books for everyone on your list....
Remembering Julian Mazor November 27, 2024
When I was 14 and was suspended from school, my father gave me a book that changed my life. Washington and Baltimore is a collection of short stories by Julian Mazor (1929-2018). Mazor wrote several short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in th...
My Friend the Chatbot November 27, 2024
Of all the ways people expect Artificial Intelligence to change their lives, making new friends is not high on anybody’s list. I wrote an entire book called Artificial Intimacy about AI-powered technologies that capable of socialising with human bein...
The Napkin Project (Thanksgiving Edition) November 27, 2024
In 2007, Esquire mailed 250 cocktail napkins to writers across the country with this request: Fill the blank space with fiction. We received nearly 100 napkin stories and published them all as part of the Napkin Project....
Malaise at the Monoprix November 26, 2024
Michel Houellebecq’s characters spend a lot of time in supermarkets. In the opening pages of The Elementary Particles, the depressed main character scarfs down a prepackaged fillet of monkfish, sold under the “gourmet” line of the French supermarket ...
Alice Munro’s Retreat November 26, 2024
In July, two months after Alice Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed not only that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for several years starting when she was nine but that when confronted with this truth sixteen years later he...
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...
America’s Literacy Crisis Isn’t What You Think November 26, 2024
“Kids can’t read anymore.”We heard this refrain earlier this month, when some connected a decline in reading among young people, as well as a shift toward getting news and information from short-form video, with the recent presidential election victo...
The Cult of Haruki Murakami November 26, 2024
On March 20, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type m...
Book Review: Tevi Troy's 'The Power and the Money' November 25, 2024
Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 may not have been his best business acquisition, but it still arguably rates among his best acquisitions. Precisely due to Amazon’s stupendous growth borne of a remarkable business that much of the...
Have We Never Been Woke? November 25, 2024
We Have Never Been Woke is a work of, by, and for the American professional class. According to its author, Musa al-Gharbi, this is a social class defined by its manipulations of symbols and its distinctive symbolic culture. During the Great Awokenin...
Who Gives a Cluck? November 25, 2024
I'll get right to the best part: In 1945, Colorado farmer Lloyd Olsen was preparing to sell a chicken when he hit a snag. As Sy Montgomery explains in What the Chicken Knows, Olsen "failed to kill the rooster when his ax missed the bird's carotid art...
Down and Dirty 'On the Waterfront' November 25, 2024
Take it from a veteran of three nonfiction books in which I dramatized the betrayals, transactional romances, backstabbing, feuds, creative compromises, and artistic glories behind the creation of classic films: there are truisms one had better accep...
Miley Cyrus Wants to Make You Vibrate November 22, 2024
Miley Cyrus is sitting in front of the stone-walled fireplace in her house in Los Angeles, holding up two coffee-table books. One is 2017’s Doll Parts by Amanda Lepore, the transgender, transgressive, glamour-all-the-time nightlife icon. The other is...
The Perils of a Post-Racial Utopia November 22, 2024
Years ago, a friend of a friend who had just bought a home told me that the biggest difference between renting and owning was that cops now treated him with respect. He and I are both Black, so I immediately knew what he meant. In countless contexts,...
Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy November 22, 2024
Like many middle-aged women I know, I spent my summer parsing the rallying calls of personhood and artmaking ringing out from the new roster of divorce books—books like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Splinters by Leslie Jamiso...
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in America November 22, 2024
One day in the early 2000s, a goth teenager by the name of Sohrab Ahmari was perusing the shelves of a Salt Lake City bookstore when his gaze landed upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For a misfit atheist adolescent looking for meanin...
A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis November 22, 2024
In 2011, an anti-corruption activist began a hunger strike in Delhi, inspiring protests all over the country to pressure the central government into accountability. The following year, a twenty-three-year-old woman was raped and murdered by several m...
Blake Butler’s Knotty Novel Is Back, Retitled November 21, 2024
Void Corporation, Blake Butler’s new novel, isn’t new. He already published it under a different title, Alice Knott, in 2020. You’d be forgiven for being confused. Butler’s popular — and wrenching — 2023 memoir, Molly, was a breakthrough, for him and...
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...
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 ...
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Family Dramas October 31, 2024
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise, begins with a kidnapping. The year is 1980; Carl Fletcher, a wealthy Jewish factory owner living in the fictional Long Island town of Middle Rock, is getting into his car one morning when he ...
12 Books Coming in November October 31, 2024
Novels by Haruki Murakami and Rebecca Yarros, memoirs by Angela Merkel and Cher, and more....
Gary Indiana Understood the True Nature of Obsession October 31, 2024
The writer Gary Indiana, who died last week at the age of 74, wrote about his obsessions with the calculated grace of a man who found them slightly embarrassing. He was a stylist of remarkable erudition, and possessed a startling range; his essays, c...
The Pulp Sublime October 30, 2024
During lockdown, like so many others, I tried to get a DnD game going with a few friends. Before our plans inevitably collapsed, I was sent a character sheet for a communist Paladin sworn to the Oath of the Common Man. While there’s no quick way to i...
Trolling Alone October 30, 2024
I DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard the term “incel” but I do recall my reaction: I don’t want to know about these guys. You feel sympathy for lonely people, of course, but it would seem that their constitution as a class or identity category in the ...
The Best Books of 2024 (So Far) October 30, 2024
It’s time to check in: How’s the year in books coming along for you, dear reader? As we approach the conclusion of 2024, we’re enjoying an embarrassment of literary riches—and now we’re here to spread the gospel about our favorites....
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...
Canal Street Confidential October 30, 2024
Sometimes it’s easier to name a phenomenon than to describe it. As early as 1987, members of the so-called Literary Brat Pack admitted it was a hoax concocted for a magazine spread. “We were strangers, or — after a few photo shoots — superficial acqu...
Joan Didion Remains as Elusive as Ever October 29, 2024
It’s still bright afternoon when the writer Lili Anolik slips into the dim recesses of the Odeon restaurant. Here, at New York’s timeless destination for downtown cool, she prefers to sit in the same place every time, a small booth by the host’s stan...
If You Can’t Change the World October 29, 2024
YOU DON’T GET movies like Megalopolis every century. That was the gist of the coverage surrounding the production and release of 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s bizarre new epic. The film, which Coppola has been developing for over four decades, h...
Selected Amazon Reviews October 29, 2024
Shopping on Amazon is hard, and getting harder all the time. Despite Amazon’s patented (expired) and trademarked (still valid) “1-Click” ordering, I tend to get stuck browsing. I type “spatula” into the search bar and am instantly greeted with over 7...
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...
Who the Woke Are October 28, 2024
What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But ...
The Strange Case of Garth Greenwell October 28, 2024
Garth Greenwell’s first book, What Belongs to You, succeeded even if his weaknesses were in plain sight. His sense of language so effectively captured abjection and sexual obsession that you didn’t mind whatever else was wrong with it. Greenwell seld...
On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It October 28, 2024
The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it....
On Rachel Cusk’s 'Parade' October 25, 2024
My first goal for this essay was to pinpoint exactly where Rachel Cusk’s interest in visual art began. I am not sure why the chronology seemed so important—perhaps because of the persistent delusion that beginnings are in some way definitional, and t...
Big Man, Little Novel October 25, 2024
Trust, the second novel by Hernan Diaz, Argentinian-American writer and academic, pleased critics, readers, prize committees including the Pulitzer’s, and a former president (the one who tells us about his favorite new books). Diaz’s first novel, In ...
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...
Why History & Social Science Can't Substitute for Fiction October 25, 2024
After Augusto Pinochet stepped down from power, financial investigators discovered the Chilean dictator had used public funds to amass a 50,000-book private library. It included everything from texts on Napoleon’s campaigns to the philosophical musin...
‘To Overthrow the World’ Review: Communists in Control October 25, 2024
In 1797, as the revolution in France cooled down following the Reign of Terror, François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf stood trial for organizing a putsch against the governing directorate running Paris at the time. In an undaunted defense of his actions, B...
Adventures in Absinthe October 25, 2024
An old military adage holds that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy—or, as Mike Tyson once put it, “everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”That also holds true for writers....
Is This Really Venom’s Last Dance? October 25, 2024
The question at the core of Venom: The Last Dance is a simple one: Is this really the end of Venom?Is this really Tom Hardy’s last hurrah as journalist-turned-anti-hero Eddie Brock? Is the greatest comic book movie love story — a man standing in fron...
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 ...
The Classroom Panopticon October 24, 2024
Is it ironic to give a prize for encouraging “open discussion and debate in the classroom” and “creating an environment where all perspectives can be heard” in the name of William F. Buckley Jr.?Although best known today as the founder of National Re...
8 Questions for... Sherman Alexie October 24, 2024
1. Why Substack?I had various manuscripts in progress but I didn't have any book contracts for the first time in 30 years. I was a complete free agent who was searching for an alternate means of publication. For many years, I'd pondered creating my o...
Knowers of Ball October 24, 2024
Innovation has come for the NFL, America’s most popular sports league. As the writer Chuck Klosterman once pointed out, football presents itself as conservative but is incredibly liberal in terms of the competition’s evolution: the introduction of th...
Gillian Anderson Can Tell You What Women Want September 13, 2024
Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping throu...
All the Audiences You’ll Find September 13, 2024
On Sunday, I took a break from being a dad to spend a couple of hours at the apartment of a woman who read my debut novel and reached out to me on Instagram. She invited me to attend an in-person meeting of her book club in Miami. It’s a modest club ...
Editor’s Picks September 13, 2024
This week, don’t miss a new edition of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1966 masterpiece, the retelling of a 1980s hostage crisis, and Bernard-Henri Lévy on Israel....
Circumnavigating the Regal Void September 13, 2024
Queen Elizabeth II was only ever spotted running in public on two occasions, or so Craig Brown alleges in his biography of the late monarch A Voyage Around the Queen. The first was in 1954 when her horse Aureole won at Ascot; the second, nearly four ...
Sex, Drugs, Raves and Heartbreak September 13, 2024
The “breakdown” in the subtitle of Emily Witt’s haunting new book, “Health and Safety,” isn’t hers. It belongs to Andrew, her boyfriend of four years; he started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns in 2020 put an end to the underground party...
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...
Vivienne September 12, 2024
Vesta Furio is grinding her teeth as she often does in the deep sleep hour before waking. Franz, whom her father named after the artist Franz Kline, sleeps beside her, and the crepuscular sounds emanating from her mouth stir him awake. He leaves the ...
Yuval Noah Harari’s Apocalyptic Vision September 12, 2024
“About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being.” So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century’s most astonishing academic careers...
On Richard Flanagan's 'Question 7' September 12, 2024
A few years ago, I met up with my friend Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa Editions and publisher of such global luminaries as Elena Ferrante and Mieko Kawakami, at a bar in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I was working on a piece about Richard ...
On Jonathan Lethem’s Art Writing September 12, 2024
JONATHAN LETHEM is perhaps best known as a writer of pastiche-driven, omnidirectionally intelligent fiction. His novels include a Chandler-inspired detective story (Gun, with Occasional Music), an academic satire (As She Climbed Across the Table), an...
The 2024 National Book Awards Longlist September 12, 2024
The New Yorker presents the longlists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction....
17 Novels You Need to Read This Fall September 12, 2024
Have you noticed yellowing leaves, Labor Day sales, and the return of the school bus, now clanking spiritedly around your neighborhood? Congratulations, you’ve made it to another Big Book Season. There are a lot of books coming out this fall, and a l...
WH Auden’s Visions of England September 12, 2024
Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island “a Copernican revolution” in studies of the great poet. It’s a big claim, and for the first few dozen pages it looks as though it might be an exaggera...
The Machines Are Proving Ray Kurzweil Right September 12, 2024
In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke was the face of futurism. A deep-sea explorer, inventor, and science-fiction author, Clarke dazzled Anglophone audiences with visions of global computer and satellite networks, space travel, and artificial intelligence....
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...
On Samuel Franklin’s “The Cult of Creativity” September 11, 2024
In June 2023, University of Montana researchers evaluated the capacities of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot system released by OpenAI. To gauge the capability of the flashy new technology, psychologists tested it using an older tool for ...
Garth Greenwell’s Book Is Unreadable September 11, 2024
A friend has been texting me about the new Garth Greenwell novel. My friend’s like, it's so bad! What do people see in it?I'm honestly kind of bemused by the whole exchange. Of course it's bad. Aren't hype-machine books usually bad? Does it even matt...
The Enlightenment's Addicts and Fanatics September 11, 2024
David Hume is famous for his seminal contributions to philosophy and economics during the Enlightenment. He may also have been the principal diagnostician of his time. This at least is Richard Whatmore’s contention in The End of Enlightenment: Empire...
The Secret Agent September 11, 2024
Sadie Smith arrives in a French village with an impeccable referral for the anarcho-primitive commune based there. An American, she’s ostensibly on hand to translate into English the commune’s collectively authored handbook on how to secede from and ...
The Babbitt School of Conservatism September 10, 2024
In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds inspiration less in Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke than in Carl Schmitt, and the history of the conservative movement up to 2016 seems largely irrelevant...
The Case for Life on Mars September 09, 2024
Robert Zubrin’s The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024) is a remarkable book. It’s notionally about colonising Mars and contains plenty of maths, and many diagrams and technical disquisitions outlining how that will be acco...
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...
Why You Should "Rawdog" Parenting September 09, 2024
What do I mean by this, you ask?Allow me to explain!First, for those who don’t know, “raw dogging” is a crude term used to describe the act of intercourse without using protection. But it has been hilariously repurposed by the internet to describe su...
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...
‘Booktok’ Has Lost the Plot September 09, 2024
Young people – predominantly women – have started using video-sharing platform TikTok to make reading ‘cool’ again. Given that TikTok is widely held responsible for nuking Generation Z’s attention span, injecting 10-second snippets of content slop di...
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...
The Crisis of Performative Kitsch September 06, 2024
In October 2008, Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association—he would be appointed minister of tourism by Saad Hariri the next year—made the following statement: “It is not enough they [Israelis] are stealing our land. They are ...
The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom September 06, 2024
Goodbye forever, brat summer. Thanks to you, slime green has joined the viral-color pantheon alongside minion yellow and millennial pink. When our fairy bratmother, the pop star Charli XCX, named her sixth album “brat,” she inaugurated a season of pe...
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...
The Best Literary Fiction Books of 2024, So Far August 26, 2024
There are few pleasures—or responsibilities—I appreciate as much as the chance to survey a whole year’s worth of books. Hundreds of thousands (or millions, depending on what and how you’re counting) of titles are published each year: Giving each the ...
The World of C.S. Lewis August 26, 2024
It is not wrong to say that America made C.S. Lewis. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters was popular in Britain but was initially rejected by American publishers until Macmillan took a chance on it in 1943. It was a huge success. Macmillan quickl...
A Jolt from the Slumber of the Self August 26, 2024
Throughout his long career in film, director Werner Herzog has escaped aesthetic categorization. In his more than 70 films, Herzog consistently looks outward, examining people, animals, and distant places. In his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and...
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...
The Keys to the Rooneyverse August 26, 2024
We’re a month from the novel after the most-reviewed novel of all time by the one secure Major Novelist of a generation. Sally Rooney’s fourth book comes out on the 24th of September. How might we structure our anticipation? The three previous novels...
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In August 23, 2024
On March 5, 1853, while her family ate breakfast, Emily Dickinson addressed four envelopes to Susan Gilbert, a woman with whom she seemed to be in love. The envelopes were empty. Though Emily had already written Sue several letters—and would, over th...
A Match Made in Memes August 23, 2024
Brittany Menjivar interviews actor, filmmaker, and meme admin Peter Vack about his debut novel, “Sillyboy....
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...
Good News from an Independent Bookshop August 23, 2024
A year and a half ago, our city’s one bookshop went up for sale. My wife and I bought it. The place had 20,000 books, a good music system that probably played 3,000 hours of Bach per year, and a black cat named Raven. It even had an entire room just ...
Gates-Crasher August 23, 2024
Whatever your opinion of the Microsoft co-founder, it has probably evolved over time. Anupreeta Das tracks the ups and downs of Bill Gates’s career in her eye-opening book, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King. Not quite a biography, the author instead us...
Spilled Oil: On Lydia Kiesling’s “Mobility” August 23, 2024
When Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn meets the man she will marry for the first time, lingering over mini quiches at a Houston rooftop party in 2010, he asks her if she wants to have kids. She hopes that he is asking flirtatiously. As a self-identified liber...
Fifty Years of Paying Attention August 22, 2024
I met Ian Frazier at a six-way intersection in the South Bronx, where Prospect Avenue, Westchester Avenue, Longwood Avenue, and 160th Street chaotically meet. It was forecast to reach 96 degrees on this August day, and the street already felt like th...
We Are the Borg August 22, 2024
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectua...
Jane Austen’s American Spirit August 22, 2024
Jane Austen is England’s brightest literary jewel. The slightly upper-crust characters in her novels spend most of their time in the most English of pursuits: drinking tea, visiting country houses, and gossiping about their neighbors. Austen herself ...
New York Publishing in the Late-Aughts August 22, 2024
I remember sitting next to a fancy older lady with plumped lips and sunglasses and a pug under her seat on the plane to Laguardia (Was it Ms. Wintour herself, in disguise, flying coach?). This was 2008.With customary New York stubbornness, we didn’t ...
What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last August 22, 2024
Recently after a literary event, I was hanging out with some other writers and a conversation about older books led to a parlor game. One of us would read the titles of bestselling novels from a few decades ago and everyone else would try to guess th...
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...
Being Human in a Digitally Disembodied World August 21, 2024
Clubbing on a Monday night — that’s the image that came into my mind as I was reading the great new book by Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institu...
Rachel Cusk’s Inverted World August 21, 2024
Rachel Cusk’s Parade appears in its early pages to uphold a grand tradition: the novel about an artist. G is a painter, much admired but “angry and hurt by the world.” G, notable for rendering images upside down, works in a somewhat gimmicky mode, bu...
A Singular Man August 21, 2024
All of life was a play for Christopher Isherwood; sometimes he was the lead actor, sometimes a clear-eyed observer in the stalls. In person he was a born performer—charming and gregarious and adaptable; as a writer he delighted in playing one of his ...
When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book? August 21, 2024
Book lovers have all inevitably found themselves slogging through arid prose that stretches on endlessly. Sometimes the culprit is a popular novel whose obnoxious characters you’re desperate to run away from; at other moments, it’s a plot so ludicrou...
Millennium Man August 21, 2024
The books you read in childhood can determine the course of your life. The same is true of films. My father insisted that Alain Delon be part of my upbringing, and his films remain among the greatest things that he ever imparted to me. One can get a ...
Matthew Davis' Reading List August 21, 2024
Matthew Davis’ compelling debut has a voice you fall into as easily as the holes of your own self-delusion. A humiliatingly accurate portrait of our so-called modern life, Davis’ prose is blisteringly funny and alive. Ahead, Davis shares the books th...
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 ...
The Literati Aren’t Reading New Releases Anymore August 21, 2024
On a recent visit to New York, I did a reading, and a lot of the chatter was about how something seems to be wrong in the literary star-making machine. Publicists keep pulling the usual levers and nothing seems to be happening. Journals ignore their ...
How Ireland Became the World’s Literary Powerhouse August 21, 2024
‘The Irish just chat about everything. We love telling tales and yarning. There’s no other country where you could talk for an hour about the weather,” says Aisling Cunningham, 57, the owner of Ulysses Rare Books on Duke Street in Dublin.Sure enough,...
On Some Recent Translator’s Notes August 21, 2024
In translation, the stakes are high and the compensation indubitably low. That the task, rewarding as it is under various scalpels, goes so unnoticed by lay-readers, explains my experience that translators are a pretty tight-knit group, braided with ...
The Salter Method July 25, 2024
A retrospective on Martin Amis in the Times of London has voiced a complaint made several times in recent years—that young male writers are at a disadvantage, today, not just because of declining numbers of men reading fiction (a complaint taken up i...
The Nabokovian Genius of Taylor Swift July 25, 2024
Taylor Swift has quietly created a cultural monopoly. Reissues of her albums dominate the charts. Her concerts are major events. Now the Hachette-owned Headline Publishing Group has announced Invisible Strings, a Swift-themed poetry anthology. Contri...
A “Sputnik Moment” for Civics July 25, 2024
Last year’s dismal eighth grade scores on the history and civics exams of the National Assessment of Student Progress are not the only warning sign of a civic education emergency. According to a recent survey from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundat...
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Norman Mailer? July 25, 2024
The contemporary brief against Norman Mailer is long and sordid. He was a misogynist, a violent man who extolled violence. In his brawling and chest-thumping, he tried to out-Hemingway Hemingway and became a parody of Papa—a blowhard narcissist who p...
The Year America Went Mad July 25, 2024
Much has been written about the social convulsion that has taken place in the West since the Great Awokening of around 2015. Most of it has come from conservatives. Some accounts have also emerged from classical liberals and feminists. But few testim...
Adults Have Stopped Reading – No One Cares and I Hate It July 25, 2024
Two wise people had similar messages when it comes to the subject of kids. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” said one. “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them...
The Evolution of the Diary July 24, 2024
John Dickerson: Is there a storyline about how you get from the first place that a person can write down their innermost thoughts to what we conceive of as journals and diaries now, which are more the location for our personal exploration? How do you...
Proust in the Age of Retranslation July 24, 2024
How should translators — or any writers, for that matter — respond to their critics? The usual advice is quiet dignity: for certain distances to be kept so that a sense, however slight, of superiority might be implied. Some even urge writers not to b...
The Misfit Wisdom of Harry, Barry and Larry July 24, 2024
In and around Oxford, Miss., about three decades ago, it wasn’t uncommon to drive along a rural route and pass a car with a bumper sticker that said, “I’d rather be reading Airships.” The people in those cars tended to have their windows rolled down,...
On Gabriel Smith’s “Brat” July 24, 2024
“Hi Gabriel,” the email begins. “My name is Charli - perhaps you know my music, which I put out under the name ‘Charli XCX.’”Charli is writing to ask Gabriel a question. The question is about her new album, which she plans to title Brat after Gabriel...
The Philosophical Genius of P.G. Wodehouse July 23, 2024
Praising P.G. Wodehouse for his humour is rather like praising the Royal Gurkha Rifles for their ability to march and fold socks. Wodehouse is indeed a hilarious writer, but he’s worth reading for more than just the gags. His books transport readers ...
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...
On 'Girl Storm' by Peg Kerswell July 23, 2024
Girl Storm is a memoir by Peg Kerswell about raising a profoundly autistic daughter and eventually placing her in a home. While reading it, I had to set it down multiple times out of devastation and sadness. The last 15 percent or so of the book is o...
The Last Days of Joan Didion July 23, 2024
On a cold Friday morning in February 2022, Cory Leadbeater took his final walk with Joan Didion. It was down Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she and he had walked “thousands of times”, an odd-couple pairing well known to the near...
UwU It-Girls July 23, 2024
When I was about eleven a group of boys told me to google “dildo.” They told me it was a new Pokemon. That’s what reading My First Book, the new debut by Honor Levy, feels like. It’s like reaching into a jumbled bag of Red Scare goodies: emoticons, C...
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,...
Formalism and Younger Poets July 22, 2024
Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel i...
Why Love Songs Are Badass July 22, 2024
I spent ten years researching and writing a book about love songs.I learned many things, but two facts stand out:Everybody knows hundreds of romantic love songs, and can even sing along—because the words are deeply embedded in our memory.Most people ...
The Best Books of the Year (So Far) July 22, 2024
Halfway through the year is a good time to take stock of our reading. The spare elegies of winter have left their mark; the elegant literary novels of spring have come and gone; the big juicy beach reads of summer are just beginning. Let’s pause here...
Do the Math July 22, 2024
Mathematicians can have a childlike sense of wonder. They chart the optimal color of bananas to ripen on schedule, rather than just purchasing the best-looking ones. Where most people see a mess to clean up, they see the partial differential equation...
What Shapes Our Desires? July 19, 2024
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Luke Burgisis the only person to have graduated from both NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.I first encountered him through his book Wanting: The Power of Mime...
Literature Without Literature July 19, 2024
Readers of books from the New York publisher Knopf will be familiar with the leaping dog that appears on their spines. In 1915, when Alfred Knopf started the firm, his wife Blanche was ‘crazy about borzois’, and she suggested the animal as the publis...
Mugged By Reality July 19, 2024
“Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for ...
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...
I Represent Science July 18, 2024
At the 1996 meeting of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver, a group of researchers presented the results of a much-anticipated study. The scientists had tested AZT, the first drug approved to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in combi...
1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing July 18, 2024
A trail of Reese’s Pieces. The decapitation of a giant snake. The noble face of Mr. Spock, his skin peeling off like bark from a tree. Police cars that hover above the streets. Skeletons in a swimming pool. Blood in a petri dish, which squeaks and le...
Haliey Welch, Our “Hawk Tuah” Girl of the Year July 18, 2024
In the sweltering heat of a Nashville summer, a 21-year-old woman named Haliey Welch uttered two words that would change her life: "hawk tuah."The phrase, delivered with a twangy Southern drawl as part of a crude joke about oral sex, ricocheted acros...
Do We Really Want More Male Vulnerability in Fiction? July 18, 2024
Last week, journalist Katie Tobin published a piece in Esquire called “Where is all the sad boy literature,” which I read with great interest. Although I don’t really know what the hell “sad boy” literature is, and didn’t really get a better sense of...
Africa and the History of Civilization July 18, 2024
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Hegel declared that Africa is “no historical part of the World” and that “what we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of m...
America’s Artist June 28, 2024
We have seen, be it in person or in a photograph, the famous painting depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Populated by important men of the American Revolution, most prominently we see George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thoma...
On Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo” June 28, 2024
An old adage among translators goes that every generation should have its own version of a classic text to speak to that era’s cultural style. It’s a curious suggestion, since we don’t try to “update” canonical American or English novels. But revisit...
Eight Transforming Summer Reads June 28, 2024
New Yorker writers on books that changed their lives. ...
Zombie Land June 27, 2024
Gabriel Smith's Brat is a short novel about a young man named Gabriel who must sell his recently deceased father's house, and discovers, thanks to some fiction manuscripts and VHS tapes left behind by his parents (because the manuscripts and the tape...
The 'Bikeriders' Diaries June 27, 2024
Next to Robert Frank’s The Americans, there may be no book of midcentury American photography more influential than The Bikeriders, Danny Lyon’s landmark work from 1968. It’s not just the unforgettable photographs, which focus on the Chicago Outlaws ...
Sin and Social Science June 26, 2024
When Sigmund Freud was asked by his friend, German novelist Arnold Zweig, for permission to write Freud’s biography, Freud replied:No, I am far too fond of you to allow such a thing to happen. Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to con...
Fran Lebowitz Wasn’t Kidding June 26, 2024
“Far be it from me to make noise while you’re asleep but I should like to notify you that you are under arrest for being boring.” Midway through one of the best—funniest, most troubling—essays in her first book, Metropolitan Life (1978), Fran Lebowit...
Renewing the Republic June 26, 2024
The United States Constitution is under attack—again. The chorus of critics—including prominent law professors, journalists, political scientists, and politicians—seems to grow louder daily. They call it a broken relic, standing in the way of further...
Michael Oakeshott’s Life of Reflection June 26, 2024
In 1863, John Henry Newman wrote: “From first to last, education … has been my line.” The same can be said about Michael Oakeshott, and about his foremost American protégé, Timothy Fuller. Fuller arrived at Colorado College as a young man in 1965, an...
The Politics of Life June 26, 2024
The following excerpt is adapted from The Politics of Life: My Road to the Middle of a Hostile and Adversarial World (Regan Arts.) by Douglas E. SchoenPenn, Schoen & Berland had been a successful consulting firm for almost 20 years, but we were still...
Risk and Reward June 25, 2024
Thom Gunn was the great rhapsode of risk. In a 1961 love letter to queer San Francisco, the poem’s speaker looks from afar at the drunken revelers and hungry cruisers in the darkened streets below: “By the recurrent lights I see / Endless potentialit...
A Reading Life June 25, 2024
Today would mark my father’s seventieth birthday. We’re all here on a limited warranty, he’d often say, and his expired two years ago this summer. But throughout his life, he never stopped reading, collecting books on wide-ranging subjects from “Pist...
