Children
Story Stream
Decisions, Decisions February 13, 2025
Recently, at a wedding, my boyfriend and I were asked rather abrasively about the prospect of children. The bride, a mother of two, first posed the question to me. I told her I did not want children. She asked me why. I said, because I do not want ch...
The Haunting Fiction of Han Kang February 11, 2025
A woman is walking along a cold seaside plain lined with thousands of black tree trunks. Together, the trunks create “the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.” Surely, she tells herself, this is a graveyard....
Why People Seem So Annoyed by Kids September 23, 2024
In some corners of society, there appears to be a shift in the way people talk about kids.Every so often, a provocative social media post sets off predictably polarizing discourse about the presence of children in daily life. There was the woman who ...
Can Poetry Save a Nation? September 18, 2024
In a globalized world, why should anyone want to be German, French, Spanish, or Hungarian? “None of the above” isn’t a full-credit answer to the question of national identity. This is the great existential question for the West. Nations are the carri...
Freezing Dreams and Selling Lies September 17, 2024
We are living in an age of apparent contradictions. On the one hand, U.S. birthrates are at an all time low, well below replacement rate. And yet, “between 2009 and 2022, nearly 115,000 healthy women in the United States underwent egg freezing.” Annu...
All the Audiences You’ll Find September 13, 2024
On Sunday, I took a break from being a dad to spend a couple of hours at the apartment of a woman who read my debut novel and reached out to me on Instagram. She invited me to attend an in-person meeting of her book club in Miami. It’s a modest club ...
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
America’s Cultural Evolution September 11, 2024
In widely reported remarks made outside the US Capitol in November 2022, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer argued that the falling fertility rates among American citizens meant that mass immigration was needed to meet the labor demands of the US econo...
The Metaphysical Promise of the Consumer Society September 04, 2024
In a book documenting his travels through the United States, a Frenchman commented that “there is nothing funny about Halloween,” a holiday characterized by an “evil force” and “infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. . . . There ...
America’s Anti-Family Turn August 29, 2024
On his post-presidential tour of Europe in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt raised eyebrows when he delivered his “Man in the Arena” speech in Paris, equating “the chief of blessings for any nation” with the willingness of the “average man” and the “average ...
Free Speech Is Not Enough August 27, 2024
The corrupted state of American higher education has become a primary item on the national agenda. The ever-ballooning expense of college, coupled with growing doubts about the value of what our colleges are fostering—and not fostering—in our young p...
America’s Endless Horizons August 26, 2024
The first installment of Kevin Costner’s Western film series Horizon: An American Saga is an homage to America’s ceaseless drive and energy. Before the Civil War, in the opening scene, settlers of men, women and children encamped on an Arizona river...
Good News from an Independent Bookshop August 23, 2024
A year and a half ago, our city’s one bookshop went up for sale. My wife and I bought it. The place had 20,000 books, a good music system that probably played 3,000 hours of Bach per year, and a black cat named Raven. It even had an entire room just ...
To Have or Have Not August 20, 2024
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman are the authors of What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), in which they lay out a modern argument grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism about childbearing ambivalence an...
The Progressive Case for Parenthood August 19, 2024
What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice is an ambitious book that addresses arguably the most pressing questions of both our time and all time: Are people good? Is life worth living? What does it mean to be a parent? What is motherhood, what...
Talk to Me Nicely August 16, 2024
How many times in the last few weeks have I heard the broad strokes of the same story: “No one is having babies”? Millennials are paralyzed by narcissism and indecision. J.D. Vance thinks there’s too many childless cat ladies who don’t have a stake i...
How to Respond to Tradwife Envy August 15, 2024
Recently a number of hit pieces and critiques of the cultural phenomenon known as “tradwives” seem to suggest that progressive feminists are beginning to have a change of heart. Although their stated intention is to detract from the phenomenon, the ...
The Surprising Truth About Loneliness in America August 15, 2024
Who are the loneliest people in America?American men were said to be in a “friendship recession,” with a survey finding the number of men without any close friends increased fivefold since 1990. Meanwhile, resurfaced comments from Republican vice pre...
The Well-Trained Boy August 13, 2024
In BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, British author Ruth Whippman offers readers a window into her mothering journey. This is a beautifully written, often thought-provoking, and disarmingly vulnerable book that begins ...
Escaping the Fame Trap August 12, 2024
Every morning, as soon as the actor Josh Hartnett wakes up in his home in the Hampshire countryside, there are mouths to be fed. Most obviously, those of his four young children. But also: the dog, several guinea pigs, several more chickens and a sma...
When Life Gives You Lemony Snicket August 08, 2024
“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” So Daniel Handler, writing as the enigmatic Lemony Snicket, begins A Series of Unfortunate Events, his inordinately successful sequence of childre...
Inside Out 2: Fluff, Hijinks—and the Right Message August 05, 2024
My generation’s worst habits are finally being put under the magnifying glass. Social media addiction is getting national attention, from the surgeon general of the United States advising a warning label, to some of the biggest school districts in th...
How Liberals Talk About Children June 10, 2024
When Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2002, I was twenty-two and deep in one of those unfortunate periods during which a young writer wants to be serious but doesn’t quite know what that means. The young writer may, in such a phase,...
'Do the Right Thing' Revisited June 06, 2024
Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is known for having sparked debates over conflicting methods of addressing racial oppression, namely, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent, integrationist approach and Malcom X’s separatist and–when necessa...
Parents Take Control June 04, 2024
During Covid, America’s public school teachers received full pay to stop doing their jobs, often for over a year. Officially, to be clear, Zoom school was in session. But “teaching” via Zoom was barely better than nothing. Zoom schools offered little...
