The Myth of Small-Town America October 02, 2025
It’s Saturday morning, and a crowd is gathering in a parking lot off Main Street. It’s been raining hard for the last hour, and blue-grey clouds still hang low in the sky; a little girl in a pink t-shirt turns her umbrella upside down to catch raindr...
A Muscle Man’s Message to America’s Lost Boys October 01, 2025
It was raining when I met Jordan Castro at his office on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., so I opened my umbrella over us. As we walked to a nearby Chipotle, he shrank out from under it.“Using an umbrella is not very masculine,” he told me.This is ...
The Front Porch October 01, 2025
With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence fast approaching, Americans are badly in need of a sense of hope and renewed opportunity. Our solution is one deeply rooted in our history but aimed at the future: a new Homestead Act for ...
The Author in the Age of Conglomeration September 26, 2025
“On the bad days, the days when another venerable house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent ha...
The Moral Hemisphere September 26, 2025
A strange fact about the United States of America is that its name is not very specific. When I was an editor at a magazine on Latin American politics, I was under strict instructions to use “U.S.” instead of “America” to refer to the republic whose ...
How In-Person Events Can Help Us Fight Loneliness September 25, 2025
In a world that is, technically speaking, more connected than ever before in human history, Americans find themselves isolated, atomized, and without a feeling of greater purpose.Like a fish without its school, humans have lost an integral protective...
The Bloody Love of Poe September 25, 2025
A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his le...
Five Days with Geese, America’s Most Thrilling Rock Band September 25, 2025
Cameron Winter doesn't smile when he sees me.It's 8:03 on a Sunday morning in Silver Lake, a mile below the hillside house that Winter and his band, Geese, have been living in for the past week. Winter told me last night to meet him here, in a cavern...
A New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America September 24, 2025
America, circa now. Things, most of which have been weird for a while, are getting distinctly weirder. The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Do...
Trump’s Monumentalist Aesthetic September 24, 2025
From the ancient Redwoods in northern California, to the thunderous roar of Niagara Falls in upstate New York. From the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan, to the sandstone buttes rising from the desert floor of Monument Valley, America is a ...
The Great American Migration from Big Cities September 23, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with investigators Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox about their latest two-part RealClearInvestigations analysis on America’s new migration. For the first time in more than ...
Rage of the Falling Elite September 22, 2025
In America, we love a rags-to-riches tale. Think of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who rose from bobbin boy to steel magnate; Oprah Winfrey, who grew up poor in rural Mississippi; even Elon Musk, the awkward South African transplant who tran...
Rock 'n' Roll's Greatest Oasis September 22, 2025
Like most fans of rock ‘n’ roll, I gravitate to works from the vicinity of Greater Manchester intuitively, involuntarily. Even as someone who’s never once set foot in Great Britain, I’ve always felt I could viscerally relate to exactly where bands fr...
The Decline of Sex and the Alpha Male September 22, 2025
Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude m...
‘One Battle After Another’ Review September 19, 2025
“One Battle After Another,” the turbulently powerful and enveloping new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is set in an America that’s become a fascist police state: a place where immigrants are rounded up en masse and placed in dete...
What Are Drugs For? September 17, 2025
A woman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It’s an apt metaphor. In mid-century America, housewives were expected to polish their ...
Honor the Memory of Charlie Kirk September 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk was a loving and dedicated husband and father; a pious, learned, and evangelizing Christian; and a hero, inspiration, and mentor to millions of young Americans trying to make sense of our turbulent political times. Many knew him much bet...
Camus Comes to America September 16, 2025
The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as...
The Long Walk Is a Long Slog September 16, 2025
In adapting Stephen King’s 1979 novel, The Long Walk, originally published under a pseudonym, the filmmakers made the bold decision to stick relentlessly to the walk itself. The walk is an annual televised public spectacle in an impoverished, bankrup...
DEI Is Real Cause of America’s Housing Crisis September 12, 2025
Why doesn’t Hermes just produce more bags and then everyone can have a Birkin? That’s basically the argument of people pressing President Donald Trump to declare a housing emergency. The fact is there’s plenty of housing, just not in the most desirab...
How America Fell in Love With the Quarterback September 10, 2025
Steve Young lifts his arm, holding an imaginary football, preparing to throw. This act—the most basic aspect of quarterbacking—has defined his life and, at times, his self-worth....
Why Civics Education Is America’s New Flashpoint September 09, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller and John Murawski discuss his latest investigation into the comeback of civics education. Once overshadowed by STEM and social justice initiatives, civics is now one of the mo...
Alice, or The Wild Girl by Michael Robert Liska September 08, 2025
In 1856, Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird makes a startling discovery: a speechless, shipwrecked young girl, living a feral existence on a remote Pacific island. When he exhibits her as a “wild girl” in the chaotic sprawl of early San Francisco, this gold...
America Offline September 05, 2025
AOL is ending its dial-up service later this month. After over 30 years, it will cease offering Internet connection through domestic telephone lines. What once seemed like a revelation is now a relic....
The Palm at the End of the Mind September 03, 2025
Florida—America’s problem child, God’s waiting room—hangs down at the bottom of the Eastern Seaboard, priapic and slightly obscene. Through its lands and waters roam alligators, manatees, flamingoes, iguanas, and all manner of colorful characters: hu...