Aging
Story Stream
Written on the Body October 09, 2024
J was the coolest grown-up at my first job. The place was a magazine publisher that felt like finishing school, lousy with women you could just tell had once owned a horse. If I was an outlier—not white, not born rich, gay sissy not gay gym bunny—so,...
On the Remarkable Legacy of Lewis Lapham October 08, 2024
You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely. I was lucky enough to enter the orbit of the legendary editor and essayist Lewis Lapham. A week ago, I attended his memorial se...
“Megalopolis” Now October 04, 2024
I’ve decided I do think Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a good movie. I think that puts me in the distinct minority of reviewers. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a mess! Everything they say about it is right. I just don’t think it really matters. This...
Henry Regnery, the Dissident Publisher October 03, 2024
Rare indeed is the publisher so possessed of acumen, audacity, and a sense of mission that he is willing, even eager, to flout the temper of the times. Such an intrepid popularizer was Henry Regnery, publisher of two of the most influential conservat...
Finding the True Capote October 01, 2024
The literary output of the author, screenwriter, essayist, occasional actor, and purveyor of often waspishly malicious gossip Truman Capote (1924–84) was prodigious. He produced a collection of five full-length novels, eight novellas—among them 1958’...
The Madness of 'Megalopolis' October 01, 2024
I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a great privilege, a...
All-Time Hits Leader Pete Rose Dies at 83 October 01, 2024
CINCINNATI – A gritty baseball great who compiled a nearly unrivaled list of achievements, only to tarnish his own legacy with sins against the game that drew a nearly unrivaled list of detractors, Pete Rose died on Monday at the age of 83.Rose passe...
A Dangerous Drama in Paradise July 26, 2024
NBC has an age-old formula for its Olympics broadcasts: Crank up the tension, hype the world’s best athletes until they either win or crumble under pressure, and, in between, run dozens of tear-jerky athlete-backstory segments. Tie it all together wi...
Riding Into the Sunset July 26, 2024
My grandma picked up the phone like she had many times before. “Who is this?” she asked skeptically.“Grandma, it’s me, Ethan, your grandson.”Before she could trust the voice on the other end of the phone, I had to give a detail that proved it was me....
What Was Childish Gambino? July 25, 2024
The phrase “music culture in the streaming age” often gets listeners rumbling about the death—or, at least, the increasingly strained relevance—of genre. We still recognize the conventional differences among, say, “Not Like Us” (hip-hop), “Need a Fav...
A Comedian of Order July 24, 2024
Bob Newhart has died at the age of 94—the comic who was our last connection with mid-century America. He became famous with the live comedy album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1960), which was a big hit, selling more than 1,000,000 copies and ...
Proust in the Age of Retranslation July 24, 2024
How should translators — or any writers, for that matter — respond to their critics? The usual advice is quiet dignity: for certain distances to be kept so that a sense, however slight, of superiority might be implied. Some even urge writers not to b...
Power and Corruption July 24, 2024
Lord Acton said that great men are almost always bad men. Their greatness, he thought, contributed to their wickedness: power corrupts, and more power is all the more corrupting. This is taken for a truism in the Western world today, and many of our ...
How Elvis Became the King of Las Vegas Weddings July 22, 2024
Even if he weren’t dressed in a black jumpsuit studded with gold sunbursts, even if his thick black hair wasn’t combed back, a single strand hanging roguishly across his forehead, Collins’ voice would still be instantly recognizable. The Nashville-bo...
On the Appalachian Trail, I Fell in Love With America July 22, 2024
When I was 18 years old, I decided to hike all 2,193 miles of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. It was a strange year to come of age, 2020. Covid had canceled my high school graduation and delayed my freshman year of college; it was hard ...
Formalism and Younger Poets July 22, 2024
Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel i...
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...
Bob Newhart, Comic Icon and Sitcom Star, Dies at 94 July 19, 2024
Bob Newhart, everyman comedian and star of two beloved sitcoms that bore his name, died Thursday at the age of 94. The news was announced by Jerry Digney, Newhart’s longtime publicist.Beneath his mild-mannered appearance and stylized stammering deliv...
Haliey Welch, Our “Hawk Tuah” Girl of the Year July 18, 2024
In the sweltering heat of a Nashville summer, a 21-year-old woman named Haliey Welch uttered two words that would change her life: "hawk tuah."The phrase, delivered with a twangy Southern drawl as part of a crude joke about oral sex, ricocheted acros...
American Berserk July 17, 2024
Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, died at twenty, which means he was born in September of 2003. For the youth, there is nothing remarkable about this fact, but if you’re even a decade older, you remember these as science fictio...
Barbie’s Girls and Hannah’s Children July 12, 2024
When I was a young girl in the early 2000s, “career Barbie” ruled the world. The doll, released in the late 1950s, had developed beyond domestic concerns and now followed the prevailing cultural message that girls could be anything. Barbie defined th...
A Return to Mount Olympus July 12, 2024
The American educational system acquaints most of us with Zeus, Apollo, and Aphrodite at some point in our schooling. The names on the page are abstractions, and the readings seem as ancient as the Bronze Age conflict that Homer recounts in The Iliad...
The Writer and the Brute July 11, 2024
If you love Alice Munro’s fiction, you’ve likely spent much of the past few days wondering: How could an artist so sensitive and astute behave with such callous selfishness toward her own child? There’s so much to be appalled by in the Toronto Star’s...
Kevin Barry on Reimagining the Novel July 10, 2024
Kevin Barry has, for almost two decades now, been heralded as one of Ireland’s most dazzlingly gifted fiction writers. Whether he’s conjuring a dystopian city on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, imagining John Lennon’s post-Beatles island pilgrimage, or fol...
The Particular Ways That Being Rich Screws You Up July 10, 2024
When a certain type of person reaches middle age without having achieved the level of professional recognition or personal happiness they feel they deserve, they’re apt to take a page from sociologists who study poverty and start searching for root c...
