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Willie Mays Was the Greatest Baseball Player Ever June 20, 2024
From the moment he retired—if we’re being honest, from a few years before that—and for the rest of his life, Willie Mays had a compelling case as the world’s Greatest Living Ballplayer.Mays died Tuesday, after a life lived in full, 93 circuits around...
Journalism Needs Cultural Adjacency June 20, 2024
When I was thirteen or fourteen, my best friend, a first-generation Cuban-American kid like me, told me about the weekend he’d spent shooting hoops at his Little League coach’s house. My friend was shocked that his coach had a basketball hoop, and au...
The Oral History of ‘Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story’ June 19, 2024
Rawson Marshall Thurber has held on to a pet theory for a while.“When you say ‘dodgeball’ to someone, they either break into a smile or break into a sweat,” the filmmaker says.As a kid, Thurber mostly smiled. The first time he played was in physical ...
The Odd Couple June 18, 2024
Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene had one of the great modern literary friendships — comparable to Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Owen and Sassoon. Strikingly similar in many ways, they were close contemporaries and came from professional middle-clas...
Decolonizing the Drugstore June 18, 2024
Mandatory ideological training has now come to the drugstore. In California, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, in order to keep their license, must study the latest in gender identity, colonialism, and white privilege. Such “cultural competency” ...
People Can’t Stop Being Weird About Caitlin Clark June 14, 2024
Caitlin Clark, like 99.99 percent of Americans this summer, will not be part of the 2024 US women’s Olympic basketball team. Officially, the team will be announced on Sunday, but according to reports and Clark herself, she didn’t make the 12-woman ro...
The Mystique of Ozempic Is Growing June 14, 2024
There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for weight loss, but the latest obesity drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a ...
What I Learned From Living With Joan Didion June 13, 2024
In the fall of 2013, my days and nights were wonderful and simple. I would wake in the morning to find Joan standing at the table, reading the paper, and as I edged into the kitchen, she would head to the stove to make me a one-egg omelet while I mad...
Beware the AI Leisure Class June 13, 2024
When my girlfriends proposed moving into a rental house without a dishwasher, I was appalled. After all white goods had done for feminism, here we were willingly returning to the dark ages. Would I have to quit my job to scour a pullulating pile of d...
Getting the New South Wrong June 11, 2024
Tom Wolfe was the only major American literary figure of his time with a reputation for conservatism. As academia, the college class in general, and the elite media particularly became precious, Wolfe became almost a figure of populism among our majo...
Caitlin Clark’s New Reality June 11, 2024
In early April, during the N.C.A.A. Final Four, ESPN’s “SportsCenter” host Scott Van Pelt asked Diana Taurasi, the legendary guard for the Phoenix Mercury, what was in store for this year’s highly anticipated rookie class when it reached the W.N.B.A....
A Thriller About the Real Miami June 10, 2024
Miami is a crime writer’s paradise. This city has seen it all, and her denizens have definitely done it all, so there’s no shortage of inspiration to fuel the imagination. The Magic City often feels more like a fictional metropolis than an actual, re...
'Do the Right Thing' Revisited June 06, 2024
Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is known for having sparked debates over conflicting methods of addressing racial oppression, namely, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent, integrationist approach and Malcom X’s separatist and–when necessa...
The State of the Gay Bar June 04, 2024
Queer nightlife is full of dreams, which at their best improve waking life. Coiled within conventional hopes for an evening is a utopian vision of society. “No one man owns house / because house music is a universal language,” Chuck Roberts announced...
National Disservice June 04, 2024
During my late teens, we pleasure-seekers drained three-day weekends by flooding our not-yet-fully formed brains with serotonin. Thousands of like-minds, posh and poor, black and white, swarmed a secretly disclosed valley in rural Wales. On the agend...
A Conversation with Cally Fiedorek June 03, 2024
Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of litera...
What Our Elites Get Wrong about Class April 24, 2024
Frederick Douglass described in his famous memoir how, when his master discovered his wife teaching their young slave Frederick to read, he chided her: “If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be ru...
Everyone Failed Ronda Rousey April 23, 2024
Women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Ronda Rousey’s new book, Our Fight, is a remarkable document. If her first book, 2015’s best-selling My Fight / Your Fight, was intended to establish the Bronze Medal-winning judoka and then-UFC women’s bantamweight...
The Mental is Political April 19, 2024
Political satires, like politicians themselves, often have a hard time striking a balance. Tilt too much in one direction and you alienate your base, tilt too much in the other direction and you end up preaching to the choir. Many authors lose their ...
The Day O.J. Simpson (Almost) Confessed April 19, 2024
No one ever really gets away with murder.If O.J. Simpson had played football in the ’60s for Bay Shore High School and taken Harold Anderson’s humanities class, he would have known this. Mr. Anderson would have lovingly encouraged O.J. to play less f...
On Tomas Tranströmer April 16, 2024
I first read Tomas Tranströmer when I was fourteen or fifteen. I had started to write poems influenced by the Swedish postpunk band Imperiet, whose songs led me to one of their big influences, the Beat-and-Dylan-influenced poet Bruno K. Öijer. To kee...
On the Myth of the Middle Class Writer April 16, 2024
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington was for two years the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe. He also sold his plasma to get by.I first met Wellington through the organization I co-founded, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, when I edited an essay about how he ...
The Delta Variant April 10, 2024
Measuring social change by particular expressions of popular culture is an imperfect science. A hit novel, song, or TV show may tell us something about the values of the underlying society that generated it. Alternatively, it may simply be a single i...
Shōgun Is Reinventing the TV Epic April 09, 2024
Last fall, I made a classroom full of 20-year-olds read The Da Vinci Code. It was a seminar for junior American culture studies majors, and one of the themes was to focus on cultural texts from the year 2003, the year when most of them were born. We ...
The New Defenders of the Faith April 09, 2024
This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale...
