Future
Story Stream
Why Are We Tormented by the Future? January 10, 2025
Not long ago, my six-year-old son was in the bath, building cities out of colorful foam blocks. (“City blocks!” he said. “Get it?”) One metropolis, on the tub’s outside edge, was supposed to be based in the present day; another, closer to the wall, w...
Art is Disagreement January 10, 2025
I'll admit it straight off: I don’t know how to write about Bob Dylan. It’s like being asked to write about the smell of your childhood home. Every awful, beautiful memory; every fear, desire, and promise; every premonition and uncertainty—it’s all t...
I Avoided Going Inside Target for Years January 09, 2025
I’m not sure how much I believe in New Year’s resolutions. I believe you change your life in every moment, with every unconscious decision, and waiting for a future date like the first of the year to instate a desired new habit can be the kind of hes...
'Nosferatu' and the Erotics of Evil January 08, 2025
Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.I hope you all had a lovely holiday season. I enjoyed a nice little break from working and writing, but make no mistake — I thought of you all and this newsletter every day. I have a few essays on the horizon, inc...
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...
Why History Is Always Political January 01, 2025
At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support ...
The World of Tomorrow December 10, 2024
Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise.Glamour is more than a synonym for fashion or celebrity, although these things can certainly be g...
Inside the Mind of Luigi Mangione December 10, 2024
The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is ...
Culture Slop December 10, 2024
In a recent interview, Tim Robbins said that if you want a picture of moviemaking’s destiny, imagine a mudslide of algorithmic garbage coming out of the streaming-industrial complex and crushing a human brain—forever. “You go on Netflix right now, yo...
Dawn’s Early Light December 09, 2024
To receive the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals is truly an honor. The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic i...
9 Books We’re Excited to Read in December 2024 December 09, 2024
It’s the last installment of our anticipated reads list for 2024, and we’re ending things with overseas literature from Buenos Aires to Palestine to Namibia to Venezuela, exciting returns from alt-lit icons, and non-fiction that pulls from past poems...
Dawn’s Early Light December 06, 2024
To receive the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals is truly an honor. The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic i...
The Re-Skilling of America December 05, 2024
Should fewer Americans go to college? In 2022, 37.6% of adults without a disability had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1990 only 20% of the older-than-25 population had a bachelor’s degree, and in 1970 the share was 11%. And yet according to the St...
Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future? December 04, 2024
To wake up one morning and learn that one’s job might soon be “disrupted,” or outright eliminated, by the emergence of an overhyped new technology that excites rich people is – let’s start here – a pretty common experience by now. It puts you in good...
Moon Should Be a State December 04, 2024
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of celestial bodies. “America’s done expanding” is the implicit rule. Our nation’s finished cooking, and the future looks like this forever (or maybe just a little smaller). It’s impossible for us to grow, and if it’s n...
The Best Albums of 2024 December 03, 2024
There is perhaps no moment in history when being a music critic felt like a respectable, lucrative, or essential position, though there are certainly years when it maybe seemed more fun—long before the mobilization of seething fan armies, before the ...
Oppenheimer and a Future Worth Waiting For February 21, 2024
I remember looking at all the social media reactions of critics and friends who had seen Oppenheimer, now up for a Best Picture Oscar. So many of them described walking out of the movie “devastated” and “depressed.” They said it was “all too true,” t...
Bluesky’s Future Is Social Media’s Past February 21, 2024
Like any good citizen of the internet, I went hunting for memes when I first heard the news. Rachel Dolezal, the notorious race grifter who courted controversy in 2015, had been fired from her teaching gig for operating an OnlyFans account. I was in ...
When Goodreads Reviews Go Bad February 19, 2024
Something dramatic happens on a social media platform every day. On Goodreads, the anachronistically designed website for logging, rating (out of five) and reviewing books, the dramas are more amusing, and they occasionally even draw attention from ...
The Future of Silk February 19, 2024
The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving...
The Best Book Written on American Immigration February 16, 2024
In decades of studying the subject, the best book I have ever read about immigration, fiction or nonfiction, was written by a semi-obscure poet who shunned attention and died, scarcely noticed by the political world, in 2022.No, it’s not Camp of the ...
The Future of Land-Grant Universities February 14, 2024
American universities are in trouble. And no, I don’t mean the troubles in the Ivy League, though these schools are indeed a mess. America’s other—potentially more important—universities also face a crisis. What made the American higher education sys...
Manky Stuff February 13, 2024
When I was a student, we used to play a boasting game. The rules were simple: all you had to do was list every drug you’d ever taken. The person who’d snuffled up the second-highest number of mind-altering substances would then, unofficially, win. Ta...
A Fumble for American Democracy February 12, 2024
Is the future of the National Football League’s Super Bowl linked with the future of American democracy? The Super Bowl may seem to some like an overly commercialized sports championship game, but it holds considerable cultural significance. It has e...
Toby Keith: 12 Essential Songs February 07, 2024
Toby Keith was one of the Nineties and 2000s most charismatic country artists, known for songs that were heavy in humor, romance, and patriotism — even when they were mixed with a heavy dose of post-9/11 jingoism — all of them delivered in a rich ba...
