Books
Story Stream
Capitalism, Baseball, Community, and Loss March 25, 2025
Homestand is a book about baseball, and the author is a Mets fan. Thus, Homestand is a book about loss....
Preparing for the Plunge March 25, 2025
JOHN CHEEVER WAS FAR from my mind, or so I thought, on the late-summer weekend a few years ago when a heat wave settled over Los Angeles. The apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend had become a kiln, our ancient window unit no match for the tripl...
What the “Abundance Agenda” Leaves Out March 25, 2025
I spent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly t...
The Novel Cover Changes and Changes March 25, 2025
Italian designer Bruno Munari wrote in Design as Art that, "Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beaut...
Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes March 25, 2025
The award-winning Black feminist author Toni Morrison converted to Roman Catholicism in her teens, taking Anthony as her baptismal name and using Toni as a pen name. She wrote fiction featuring slavery, racism, sexuality, rape, profanity, police brut...
What Was the Millennial? March 24, 2025
Millennials are a joke now, just not a very funny one. Their quirks and quiddities can be finely itemised, from their tastes in furniture to their favourite drugs. They can be chronologised, their rise and fall from new and interesting to stale and p...
My Vanity Fair Hazing March 24, 2025
In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer, a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I star...
It is Not Good to Read (Only) Alone March 24, 2025
Over the past few years, I have seen a number of debates and research studies critically evaluating the different mediums in which people consume books in the twenty-first century: Reading on paper versus reading on screens (e.g., iPad or Kindle) ver...
"Cigar Gastronomique" by Patrick Potter March 24, 2025
As you delve into the pages of this book, you'll be embarking on a journey that stretches across continents, dips into the very soils that nurture the tobacco leaves and rises with the fragrant smoke of a freshly lit cigar. But more than that, this j...
It's Time for a Serious Adaptation of ‘Starship Troopers’ March 24, 2025
Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoev...
Faith in the Age of AI March 24, 2025
Religious belief can feel like the last refuge from pervasive technology. When New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called our society “decadent” in 2020, the threat of such technologies seemed comparatively distant. Innovation appeared stagnant, an...
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
The Unbearable Weight of the Literary Canon March 21, 2025
Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the ...
The Ecstatic Intimacies of Joe Brainard March 21, 2025
“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this thought in 1969, in a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Bill Berkson. ...
Barry Ritholtz's Excellent 'How Not to Invest' March 21, 2025
Recently a prominent member of the libertarian community died. Notable about the individual’s death is what he left behind.Though he earned good money over the decades, the pay was in no way astronomical. Yet as you’re reading this review of the very...
'Progressive Democracy' & the Totalitarian Temptation March 21, 2025
I’ve counted them all up: the teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle, is already ours. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer by saying that he’s more developed than his victims and couldn’t help killing to get money, ...
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...
The Beatles’ Brilliant Friendship March 20, 2025
John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the lipstick camp. But if Ziggy was from Mars (magical realism with a dash of science fiction) and the Beatles were from Liverpool (trippy s...
Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe March 20, 2025
All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few righ...
Breaking Up with Facebook March 20, 2025
“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich to San Francisco, traveling back from Davos with Sheryl Sandberg, her heroine and the chief operating officer of Facebook. Wynn-...
The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025 March 19, 2025
The weather is finally turning, and the dark days of winter are over. Earlier this week I was able to sit outside, get some sun, and indulge in some great books — though it’s back to cloudy days in DC for now, it’s a spell of good things to come. Enj...
What’s the Matter with Abundance? March 19, 2025
January of 1992 was a strange time to be thinking optimistically about the future prospects of global communism, but the end of the Soviet experiment prompted Howard University professor (and inveterate red) David Schwartzman to wonder what it would ...
An Extended Argument in Verse March 19, 2025
I am not qualified to review Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry. It’s not clear to me that anyone is, given Ruby’s stated goals: his book-length poem attempts to explain the history of poetry and poetics, “retracing...
The Life of the Mind Can Only Get You So Far March 19, 2025
Every young feminist, at some point, bumps up against the limits of her ideals. For me, it happened in my early 20s. My consciousness freshly raised and my mind spongier than ever, I spent my evenings imbibing the no-nonsense feminism of Vivian Gorni...
Tolkien, Philosopher of War March 19, 2025
“There's nothing in "The Lord of the Rings" except that it's a foundation of one's feeling for trees, flowers and England generally.” J.R.R. TolkienTolkien planned to dedicate his lore “to England; to my country” (Letters, 144 #131; cf. 250 #190)), y...
