Journal
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How to Start and Keep a Journal January 08, 2025
It’s a familiar story: You buy a beautiful notebook, intent on starting a journal, only for it to sit untouched for years. While the benefits of journal-keeping are well established — it “can raise levels of optimism and life satisfaction,” says the ...
‘Hollywood Squares’ Review January 08, 2025
Rising like a demented phoenix out of the ashes of its own reboots, “Hollywood Squares” is back on CBS with a fabled history and a question: What celebrities are as glib and available as were Rose Marie, Charo and—notably—Paul Lynde in the glory days...
Bob Dylan’s Famous Moment in 'A Complete Unknown' January 07, 2025
It’s easy to make the mistake that a key scene in A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, involved a mere disagreement about style and instrumentation. The scene depicts the famous moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival w...
The Twenty-Five Best Movies of 2024 January 03, 2025
A never-miss holiday classic in my house is the film scholar Elena Gorfinkel’s polemic “Against Lists,” which was published in the journal Another Gaze in November 2019. This piece—part prose poem, part dark prayer—reminds us in its first line that “...
On (Not Quite) Making It January 02, 2025
In 1967, Norman Podhoretz, then the 34-year-old editor of Commentary, published a memoir, Making It, in which he confessed to a powerful drive for status, money, and other conventional forms of success. What’s more, he asserted that other New York in...
The Evolution of the Diary July 24, 2024
John Dickerson: Is there a storyline about how you get from the first place that a person can write down their innermost thoughts to what we conceive of as journals and diaries now, which are more the location for our personal exploration? How do you...
The Next Arsenal of Democracy July 24, 2024
The first thing you notice in El Segundo is how serene it is. Yet, as I take in the quiet charm of its Main Street, my mind is still withdrawing from the rattle-banging anarchy I left behind moments ago. Back on the Imperial Highway, before the turn-...
Let Old Glory Fly in Paris July 22, 2024
Much has been said about Donald Trump becoming a “unity” candidate after last week’s attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. This appears to be wishful thinking, despite Trump’s polling lead over Joe Biden. In the latest AP-NORC poll, 57 percent...
A Good Flannery Film Is Hard to Find July 22, 2024
If I wish to spend time in the company of Flannery O’Connor, I might pick up her novel Wise Blood or turn to any random page in one of the volumes of her correspondence, especially The Habit of Being. I might listen to the recording of her strikingly...
Frontier Cities July 22, 2024
April 2009. Peter Thiel publishes his essay “The Education of a Libertarian” in the Cato Institute’s journal Cato Unbound. Arguing that “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology” his text describes his disillusionment with American dem...
I Represent Science July 18, 2024
At the 1996 meeting of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver, a group of researchers presented the results of a much-anticipated study. The scientists had tested AZT, the first drug approved to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in combi...
The MTV News Archive Is Gone—and That's OK July 11, 2024
My first ever job in journalism was at something called Hollywood Crush, a young Hollywood news and gossip site that was part of the larger MTV News ecosystem. Although the MTV brand still had a certain cool-kid cachet, left over from a time before i...
The Concept of the Political Belief July 08, 2024
Some books are most profitably read backward, or at least with their endings in mind. Once you’ve read an Agatha Christie novel, you derive a new enjoyment from finding and parsing the clues and hints she leaves throughout the book that point to the ...
We Are the Media Now July 01, 2024
All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. It was a quiet echo of the past, and perhaps a hint of things to come, when TechCrunch took a break from exploring the ethical questions inherent of helping American soldiers survive com...
