Cities
Story Stream
The Group Chats That Changed America April 29, 2025
Last Thursday morning, a bit before 10 am in Austin and nearly 11 pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale had enough of Balaji Srinivasan’s views on China.“This is insane CCP thinking,” Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, wrote to a 300-member Signal group. “N...
The Rise of Megan Moroney, Emo Cowgirl April 29, 2025
“I don’t write a whole lot of love songs,” Megan Moroney said last month, onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Fortunately, that’s not exactly true. Almost all her songs are about love, although she sings mostly about coping with its absence, or its fai...
The End of Bohemia April 29, 2025
In David Polonoff’s rollicking novel WannaBeat, a twentysomething named Philip Polarov tries to become a writer in 1970s San Francisco. Philip is middle-class and downwardly mobile; he went to an elite, unnamed college and the novel strongly implies ...
A Russian Novel Saved My Mind April 29, 2025
When I was 19 years old, I was living with a roommate in a tiny apartment in St Petersburg, Russia, just steps from Senate Square, where the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment rambles about while in the throes of madness. I was perhaps ...
Story of His Life April 28, 2025
The epitaph on John O’Hara’s Princeton gravestone reads: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional.” Another Irishman, Jay McInerney, picked up the second half—or at lea...
Definitive History on the COVID School Closings Disaster April 28, 2025
David Zweig is a novelist and journalist who lives near New York City and was a early skeptic of Covid lockdowns and school closings. (In other words, he’s me, but nicer.)Somehow, Zweig didn’t get canceled. In 2020 he became one of only a few legacy ...
“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa April 25, 2025
On Iowa City’s Market Street stands a low-slung, trailer-like red building. This is Dave’s Fox Head Tavern, one of the sites where the official culture and the counterculture of this most literary town overlap. Often used for student gatherings of th...
Another Thing Folks Like About the South: Education's Revival April 25, 2025
GEO Prep Mid-City Academy, located in one of the poorest sections of Louisiana, did something almost unheard of in public education – it went from dying to thriving in just a few years. ...
Lady Gaga’s 'Mayhem' and the Art of Pop Nonconformity April 24, 2025
Five years after pandemic lockdowns disrupted the rollout of Chromatica, Lady Gaga has blessed our ears with her gigantic, return-to-form seventh studio album: Mayhem. The past years for the star have been action-packed with everything but giving us ...
Revolt of the Dandies April 24, 2025
The decline of Western culture is most easily perceived not in our galleries and museums, or even on our stages and screens, but in the wardrobes of American men and women. Stroll the main streets of our cities. Is this really how the citizens of the...
Can Democrats Pivot to the Center? April 23, 2025
On November 5, the Democratic Party received what counts in our hyper-polarized age as a comprehensive drubbing. Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved over his 2016 and 2020 performances with nearly every demographic subcategory,...
Pierre Manent’s Fruitful “Triangle” April 22, 2025
The contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent is widely acknowledged as a thinker of the first rank, one whose approach to the study of human affairs renews political philosophy’s original ambition to provide a truly “architectonic” or ...
How Trump Can Make Baseball Great Again April 22, 2025
At this writing, President Trump has signed 123 executive orders, covering matters as varied as reciprocal tariffs and electoral integrity to undoing the Left’s war on shower heads. In sum, these constitute an essential attempt by his administration ...
Peter Wolf and the Lost Art of Chance Encounters April 21, 2025
In his elegant memoir of postwar Greenwich Village life, When Kafka Was the Rage, the literary critic Anatole Broyard wrote that “you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored.” Broyard then cited one se...
Sawn-Off Bareness April 21, 2025
I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary....
Richard Bernstein Warned Us About DEI April 18, 2025
Decades before terms like “virtue signaling,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became ubiquitous, one author foresaw how they would come to dominate American universities and other elite institutions. Richard Bernstein, an esteem...
Hollywood At Risk April 17, 2025
The specter of Los Angeles becoming another Detroit, a city built on a specific industry that became a shell of its former self when that business moved out, loomed over a compelling film and TV industry town hall that tackled not only the calamitous...
So Unnaturally Slow April 17, 2025
AS THE SUMMER INCHED toward its merciful end and the Las Vegas heat began to relent, I noticed that all of the batting cages in the city had disappeared. Not the privatized, state-of-the-art indoor facilities that could be rented by the hour so youth...
How the WWE Stopped Being Great Again April 17, 2025
WWE has mastered a nifty magic trick. The company simultaneously announces record revenues while its flagship event, WrestleMania 41, struggles to sell tickets for the upcoming Easter weekend. This isn't merely growing pains from a corporate transiti...
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview April 15, 2025
It’s been a painfully long winter here in New York City, but the glinting promise of spring—and spring books—has bolstered me through these cold, hard months. Here you’ll find just over 100 titles that we’re looking forward to here at The Millions. S...
Is the Dire Wolf Truly Back from the Dead? April 14, 2025
It’s a quarter past one in the afternoon in Dallas when I meet bearded billionaire Ben Lamm, the 43-year-old denim-jacketed CEO of Colossal Biosciences, who claims to have reintroduced dire wolves into the world after more than 10,000 years of extinc...
Private Predicaments and Natural Disasters April 14, 2025
Over five first-rate essay collections and one very good, if underrated, novel, Meghan Daum has written a cohesive, almost novelistic narrative about a character named Meghan Daum. Her first book, My Misspent Youth, from 2001 (which, full disclosure,...
The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice April 14, 2025
The restaurant as we know it was invented in Paris around the late 1700s. Foreign visitors called the city’s restaurants the “most peculiar” and “most remarkable” things. At a traditional inn or tavern, you ate what was served, at a communal table, a...
The Met’s “Big Bet” on Contemporary Opera Is a Loser April 11, 2025
“Hopefully we see the Met thriving artistically, and that we will have created a new artistic foundation that will help it continue to grow,” Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb told the New York Times in 2023, referring to his “big bet”: p...
