America
Story Stream
The State of American Downtowns April 02, 2025
Big city downtowns have taken a beating in the last five years. The great 20–25-year bull run of urban center growth had already been abating prior to the pandemic. Then COVID essentially boarded up downtowns for a year or more, and inaugurated a new...
The End of Hooters April 01, 2025
For decades, you couldn’t drive down a highway in America without seeing her: a tan, blond woman, scantily clad in orange and white, laid across a billboard, her legs as long as the semitrucks zooming past her. Keep Your Eyes on the Road, it might sa...
Waiting for the Golden Age April 01, 2025
If it’s true that America is sailing toward a Golden Age, Americans are not seeing it yet. Instead, the horizon is foreboding, with clouds of uncertainty blowing in on bitter winds....
A Century of Flannery O’Connor March 24, 2025
Ahundred years after the birth of Flannery O’Connor, her South, as well as the rest of America, is less “Christ-haunted,” as she once phrased it. Now, we’re Christ-neglecting, with the scandal of the cross replaced by the shock of click-bait headline...
It is Practical to Be Good March 24, 2025
This January, while Joe Biden was still president, the Washington Post published a story that revealed that a USAID official, Sonali Korde, had pressured a famine-tracking organization to downplay its findings that Gaza was in a state of famine, clea...
Civics Worthy of America’s 250th Birthday March 24, 2025
Anyone who has lived in this decade can tell you that the United States of America has had some hard days. During another bitter election season, there were many dispiriting moments. Civil dialogue about the many issues we face was all but absent....
Play Ball! March 24, 2025
After losing ground to football and basketball, baseball might not be the national pastime anymore, but it is certainly the national bellwether, the sport that has defined America and charted its ups and downs....
Whose Idea of America? March 21, 2025
When Jackie Kennedy died, Peggy Noonan distilled America’s love for its First Lady into a little over a dozen paragraphs, nearly all of them perfect. “A nation watched, and would never forget” how Jackie carried herself the weekend of her husband’s m...
America’s Elites Have Forgotten What a Working Week Is March 20, 2025
I recently paid a visit to a nearby grocery store. A year ago, I helped build it. I was returning after a break of a few months. It’s time to pick up some shifts for the spring and summer seasons....
The Most Overrated Writer in America March 19, 2025
There is a large contingent of people in America who occasionally read classic literature for fun. I debated a bit with my followers on Notes about the exact size of this contingent, and we decided it was probably somewhere between two and ten millio...
Major League Baseball vs. America March 18, 2025
Perhaps no decision in decades has so fundamentally altered America’s game like Major League Baseball’s elimination of 42 minor league affiliates before the 2021 season. Pulling out of 25% of its minor league towns would reportedly cut costs on what ...
On Danzy Senza's 'Colored Television' March 17, 2025
Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” an...
A Night Out With the MAGA Kids March 17, 2025
Last night, over 100 young conservatives gathered at Trump Tower for a party on the building’s mezzanine level. The dress code? Dress like you’re going to meet your future husband/wife. The host of the evening, Raquel Debono—the influencer who popula...
"Homestand" by Will Bardenwerper March 17, 2025
A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values i...
Liberals Are Ashamed Of Hamilton March 14, 2025
Last week, the producers of Hamilton announced they were pulling their upcoming run at the Kennedy Center in protest of the Trump administration’s recent changes to the Kennedy Center’s structure and funding. It’s just the latest in a long line of vi...
How Tesla Became the New MAGA Hat March 14, 2025
“It’s Tesla, baby!” tweeted Lily Tang Williams, posting a video of herself in a tie-dyed sweatshirt inside her brand-new Tesla Model Y. A twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate in New Hampshire, Williams told her X followers that she had b...
Whaling Upwards March 14, 2025
That the United States was ever reliant on large-scale commercial whaling now seems absurd. Whaling hasn’t disappeared—the International Whaling Commission put a moratorium on the practice in 1982, but Norway, Iceland, and Japan all maintain small y...
Inside the Fight to Save American Selvedge Denim March 13, 2025
On April 9, the last great hope in American-made selvedge denim will be auctioned off in Vidalia, Louisiana. Presided over by the Concordia County Sheriff’s Department, Vidalia Mills will sell off its assets, including land, buildings, and equipment ...
How Silicon Valley Can Reindustrialize America March 13, 2025
Peace through strength has been an enduring doctrine in American foreign policy. From Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, successful presidents have understood this instinctively. But the nature of war, as in all things,...
Glenn Gould’s God Complex March 12, 2025
It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has taught music history on an Anglophone campus: streaming platforms have intensified the characteristic presentism of the undergraduate worldview to an extent that was impossible during the days ...
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is the Great American Novel March 12, 2025
What if Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better novel than Huckleberry Finn?This might seem absurd, but surely it merits at least a little thought. Uncle Tom's Cabin was certainly the most widely-read novel of the nineteenth century. It was a huge bestseller i...
Brutalist America March 11, 2025
After World War II, the Franco-Swiss architect who went by the name of Le Corbusier erected brazenly expressionistic buildings, including an 18-floor Marseilles housing project and a hilltop pilgrimage chapel outside the little French town of Roncham...
The Last Sportswriters of New York March 11, 2025
On a warm, misty January morning, Phil Mushnick is sitting in his Boca Raton townhouse where he now winters. He points out the herons in the lagoon near his back porch as well as an adjacent golf course, a thousand miles from his central Jersey home ...
Abolish Grad School March 10, 2025
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think some of the Trump/Musk hatchet blows to government spending seem bad. Take the slashing of the IRS workforce. In a sane country, “fiscal conservatives” would want to maximize tax compliance. But in t...
Chimamanda Adichie Is a Hopeless Romantic March 10, 2025
One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly...
