The Boys
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What Happened to 'The Boys'? July 25, 2024
Back when it premiered, The Boys was the perfect show for its moment. In 2019, the box office was eclipsed by Avengers: Endgame, the apex of global Marvel mania, which came equipped with a flimsy set of politics positioned, implicitly, against the ri...
UwU It-Girls July 23, 2024
When I was about eleven a group of boys told me to google “dildo.” They told me it was a new Pokemon. That’s what reading My First Book, the new debut by Honor Levy, feels like. It’s like reaching into a jumbled bag of Red Scare goodies: emoticons, C...
Do We Really Want More Male Vulnerability in Fiction? July 18, 2024
Last week, journalist Katie Tobin published a piece in Esquire called “Where is all the sad boy literature,” which I read with great interest. Although I don’t really know what the hell “sad boy” literature is, and didn’t really get a better sense of...
The Second Coming of the Sports Novel July 12, 2024
In the beginning, it was just for boys.Originating in the late nineteenth century as a popular, morally instructive piece of entertainment for preteen males, the sports novel has had a long, slow climb to respectability. Ever since it began to encroa...
Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature? July 11, 2024
Lately, it seems like literary fiction has been unable to escape the scourge of “sad girl literature.” Though the genre has deep roots, it garnered widespread popularity during the pandemic, when it came to encapsulate the malaise of millennial and G...
The Limits of Liberation July 09, 2024
“Fantasy love,” claimed Andy Warhol, “is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting…Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway.” He lamented that social and scientific progress led to b...
Ivan Cornejo’s Mexican American Heartache July 08, 2024
Four years ago, when Ivan Cornejo was a junior in high school, he had a meeting with his family to announce that he was dropping out. His parents were alarmed, of course, but his older sister, Pamela, had a more sympathetic reaction, because she also...
‘The Bear’ Remains Irresistible July 02, 2024
The summer of 2022 gave us the debut season of House of the Dragon, the final season of Better Call Saul, and the third season of The Boys, but while those shows arrived with plenty of fanfare, a dramedy about the ins and outs of a professional kitch...
Nobody Wants This From Will Smith July 02, 2024
The Will Smith image-rehabilitation tour ramped up over the weekend with the release of “You Can Make It,” a stormy gospel rap tune featuring Philadelphia singer-songwriter Fridayy (DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” Lil Baby’s “Forever”) and Ye’s Sunday Service...
