American Culture
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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 ...
Americans Need to Party More January 07, 2025
This much you already know: Many Americans are alone, friendless, isolated, undersexed, sick of online dating, glued to their couches, and transfixed by their phones, their mouths starting to close over from lack of use. Our national loneliness is an...
American Culture Needs More 'Whiplash' January 06, 2025
Vivek Ramaswamy’s critique of American culture ignited a firestorm on X — and people are taking away the wrong lessons from the exchanges.In Ramaswamy’s post, he nodded to the 2014 film Whiplash, a psychological thriller about expectations and ambiti...
America Should Not Become a Nation of Tiger Moms January 01, 2025
A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an econo...
In Defense of the Great American Sleepover December 30, 2024
Here’s a confession: I do not feel particularly disturbed when great American institutions come under scrutiny, whether they be Harvard, the NSA, Wall Street, or the CDC. I figure if they are under attack it is probably for good reason, and either wa...
Bing Crosby’s Irish and American Christmas December 25, 2024
We often measure the significance of a particular cultural work by establishing whether it’s withstood the test of time. It’s not a bad way of assessing the universal and perennial nature of things. Bing Crosby is not only part of the American cinema...
Donald Trump’s Cultural Renaissance December 23, 2024
It is certainly possible to hope that the inauguration of Donald J. Trump will be greeted by a resurgence of the American spirit, from new inventions to a revival of entrepreneurial drive and the renewal of American industry and crafts. Trump may wel...
Our Countercultural Revolution November 20, 2024
Some presidential elections are decided by tactical moves: a stronger ground game to get out the vote, for example, or by superior media messaging. Donald Trump’s sweeping victory over Kamala Harris was none of those things. It was strategic and epoc...
How Jews Made American Culture Great November 11, 2024
In 2024 it’s not enough to just defend Jewish people from the onslaught of violence and antisemitism they are experiencing. As Americans we need to love the Jewish people for what they have contributed to our country. ...
The Vineyard and the Meth Lab October 18, 2024
“We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them.”— Katherine DeeIf, in 1450, som...
Contradictions of the New Elite October 02, 2024
Starting in the interwar period (between World Wars I and II) and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the “symbolic industries” — science and technology, education, medi...
The Lost Art of Waiting September 16, 2024
As a child growing up in Florida in the ’80s, I went with my family to Walt Disney World many times. The main thing I remember is the seemingly endless waits for rides. My sisters and I would peevishly whine to our parents as we shuffled along, waiti...
America’s Cultural Evolution September 11, 2024
In widely reported remarks made outside the US Capitol in November 2022, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer argued that the falling fertility rates among American citizens meant that mass immigration was needed to meet the labor demands of the US econo...
Toward the Recovery of American Culture August 21, 2024
As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll g...
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 Great Divergence May 14, 2024
Conventional wisdom holds that older generations tend to support right-leaning parties and hold more socially conservative beliefs, while younger generations tend to move, as a bloc, toward the Left. This trend is particularly true with Millennial vo...
Phone-Based Childulthood March 29, 2024
A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Haidt published a piece, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” for The Atlantic. Even now, it’s up there as one of its most-read articles. Haidt, along with Jean Twenge, is among the foremost mainstream critics of phone...
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out February 15, 2024
In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types...
A Nation of Ingrates? February 14, 2024
I entered this calendar year with some fear and trembling. It’s likely to be bumpy. On New Year’s Eve, chopping shallots for our oysters, I found myself reflecting back on memories from 2016, a very bad year in which I found myself, for the first tim...
How Powerful Is American Culture? February 12, 2024
I normally avoid starting an article by referring to what someone has said on social media; commentary about commentary can feel like an elevated form of gossip. But today I’m making an exception, on account of this much-ridiculed tweet by the Portug...
The Three Factions of American Culture January 15, 2024
Three years ago, I offered an outline of the three factions of the American left. It’s plausible these sweeping categories—moderate, left-liberal, and socialist—don’t hold in the coming years, and that the general instability of contemporary politics...
What Can We Do About American Culture? January 08, 2024
People across the political spectrum would likely agree that American society, entering 2024, faces myriad challenges — even as they may differ as to what they are, how best to rank them, and possible solutions. A more interesting question is: How ma...
