Families
Story Stream
Technology for the American Family January 06, 2025
At the heart of the turn toward family policy in the developed world lies the breakdown of the family as a social institution. Policymakers across the globe are belatedly recognizing what social conservatives have been insisting for decades: that the...
How John Updike Invented Brat January 02, 2025
Harry Angstrom — better known by his nickname, Rabbit — has the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man. He feels trapped. Trapped by the small apartment he rents, and trapped by his job demonstrating kitchen gadgets in a department store. Trapp...
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter October 18, 2024
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-i...
Life on Earth October 18, 2024
October is the end for the Russo family’s annual adventure in horticulture. The mild (a partisan might say ideal) climate of the Maryland Piedmont means the garden yields tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers sometimes until almost Halloween. But last nig...
Baking Gingerbread Cake with Laurie Colwin October 18, 2024
In the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness, a mother and daughter get on the telephone to discuss the menu for an upcoming family dinner—either a roast leg of lamb or roast beef, with potatoes and, the mother says, “those lovely cold string beans of...
Republicans’ Recurring Family Policy Fight October 18, 2024
American families are suffering. Young Americans are faced with ever-increasing prices, stagnated wages, family-unfriendly childcare options, and fewer permanent housing options. As a result, many of them are putting off marriage and family formation...
Look Out! October 15, 2024
They are a baseball family, and they have a baseball rule: if you go to the game, you stay to the end. Always....
It's Time To End Normal Trade Relations With China October 15, 2024
After more than 20 years of so-called "normal" trade relations between the United States and China, the consensus on the desirability of that trade relationship has shifted dramatically—and for good reason. After China received Permanent Normal Trade...
On Alejandro Zambra’s 'Childish Literature' October 11, 2024
From the carefully pruned novella Bonsai to the more conventional narrative of Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra’s prose cannot avoid earnest family scenes and compelling reflections on the nature of storytelling. He makes his readers feel safe, often w...
Ryan Murphy’s Latest Era of Cynical Hits October 10, 2024
Ryan Murphy’s true-crime series seldom drop without a splash. Shows like “American Crime Story” and “Monster” have their own gravitational pull, and so their revisionism matters. “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is no exception: it recent...
The Poet October 09, 2024
I've had my galley of Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation for at least four months now; I've been able to stare at the tentative publication date of 10-8-24, thinking about when I'm going to get around to writing this review.There's something in Houell...
Blue Walls Falling Down October 09, 2024
An Excerpt from Blue Walls Falling Down: A NovelStella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks...
The Silencing of Sylvia Plath October 09, 2024
In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to ...
Tom Wolfe at the Strand October 04, 2024
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., was born in 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, raised in an upper-middle-class family that encouraged his intellectual inclinations. After college at Washington and Lee, he completed a PhD in American Studies at Yale, where like ...
Does Anyone Really Know You? October 03, 2024
At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya, bring him great joy, and he fee...
Coppola’s Solo October 03, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola didn’t have the career he wanted. As a young man, he saw himself as a personal filmmaker in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, someone who’s make many small films with the same group of people, an ever-expandin...
Last Out in Oakland October 02, 2024
The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look ...
America’s Families Are Not Okay January 29, 2024
Some families are irretrievably broken, and nothing can repair the damage done.April is 30 years old. She lives in New Hampshire, where she owns a small business with her brother. They have no family, other than a mother 3,000 miles away whom they ne...
Making Music with His Friends January 24, 2024
The following is a condensed version of "Making Music with His Friends" by John G. Grove, published at Law & Liberty. From childhood, he has admired the straightlaced singing cowboy Gene Autry; he’s also the world’s most famous pot-smoking hippie. In...
Threading the Feminist Needle January 24, 2024
I recently published the book The End of Woman. In it, I drilled down into first-wave feminism to demonstrate that many of the defining characteristics of feminism we live with today emerged earlier than most realize. My fundamental critique of femin...
Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence January 23, 2024
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a ca...
On Manjula Martin’s “The Last Fire Season” January 22, 2024
IN A MEMORY, Manjula Martin is a child and follows her father, brother, and stepmother through the Sierra Nevada on her first multiday backpacking trip. Whenever the family passes a glacial lake, her father promises a dollar to whoever jumps and stay...
A Liberal Takedown of Identity Politics January 22, 2024
In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins, joins a number of eminent critics of the identitarian movement that has come to dominate both American academia and, increasingly, our political and social life. ...
Cheryl Hines on Life After Larry January 19, 2024
It’s Christmas at the Kennedys’, and a happy sort of chaos has upended the family home, nestled in the affluent L.A. enclave of Mandeville Canyon.Conor, 29, the heartthrob son once romantically linked to Taylor Swift, has emerged from the backyard sa...
You Need To Be Cringemaxxing January 15, 2024
How do you reverse social atomisation? I spend a lot of time critiquing the breakdown of social bonds, and especially pointing out how difficult it is to create and sustain families with dependent children in the vacuum left by the breakdown of bonds...
