Culture
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The Paradox of Free Thinkers March 19, 2025
Everyone wants to be a free thinker, or at least to be seen by others as thinking freely. Sometimes we imagine even our most embarrassing acts of conformism as daring ventures of freedom....
How Business Metrics Broke the University March 19, 2025
In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo pivoted from his usual focus on the ideological biases of higher education—the prevalence of “critical race theory and gender ideology and li...
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...
The Bill Burr–naissance March 19, 2025
If you’re looking for a snapshot of Bill Burr’s worldview, I recommend listening to the comedian’s wide-ranging interview he sat for on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. Burr was promoting his latest stand-up special, Drop Dead Years, which premiered on Hul...
Mister Lonely, the New TV Hero March 19, 2025
In the very first shot of the pilot episode of “Paradise”—a recent dystopian political thriller from Hulu—a man played by Sterling K. Brown lies alone, unrestfully, in bed. His eyes are bolted open. A watercolor wash of blue light floods his face. He...
The Joy of Forgotten Books March 18, 2025
For five months in 2023 my wife and I traveled through 28 states across the United States, in a hopeful, slightly crazy, deeply personal, and sometimes grueling search for Little Free Libraries. I had a book to deliver, a copy of my latest novel, Wha...
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...
Gay Talese’s City March 17, 2025
Any proper biography of Gay Talese would also be a history of modern American journalism, if only incidentally. Talese, now 93, started in the field as a teenager, publishing hundreds of columns in his hometown paper, New Jersey’s Ocean City Sentinel...
Sarah Snook’s Wilde Adventure March 17, 2025
For almost fifteen minutes, we sit looking at a vertical screen on a seemingly empty stage. In the projection, the Australian actress Sarah Snook, in tight closeup, speaks the rapid, bantering prose of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 masterpiece, “The Picture of ...
Why 'The Living Mountain' Endures March 14, 2025
There is no way Nan Shepherd could have predicted its success, nor the uncommon staying power, of the book she had stowed away in a drawer for decades. After a quiet release in 1977, The Living Mountain became a surprise sensation in the United Kingd...
The Rise of Gracie Abrams March 14, 2025
Gracie Abrams was three months old when the O2 Arena’s dome was opened to celebrate the new millennium. Back then, most of the 20,000 people who came to the O2 to see her perform on 6 March were still a decade from being born. Abrams is known as a “b...
The Greatest Outburst in Sports History March 14, 2025
Pop culture has no shortage of memorable bowlers. Fred Flintstone. Homer Simpson. “Big” Ernie McCracken. The Dude. But no one on earth, imagined or real, has rolled quite like Pete Weber. ...
Lady Gaga’s Return to Form March 14, 2025
In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, “Born This Way,” did something unexpected—at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I’m not talking about the way she’d ...
The Billionaire, the Influencer and their Baby March 14, 2025
On Valentine’s Day, a conservative influencer named Ashley St. Clair announced, via a carefully choreographed (and publicist-approved) tweet, that she had a child with Elon Musk....
One Woman's Rage against the Machine March 13, 2025
The cultural critic Katherine Dee has long argued that the true division in our culture will prove not to be Right vs. Left but Tech vs. Anti-Tech. One can see this happening now: the relationship between tech and the Democratic party was always stra...
The Wunderkind Novel, Two Decades Later March 13, 2025
The heroine of Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote—her second—is a plucky teenage girl intent on excelling at a practice typically reserved for boys. This historical novel set in 1935 Nebraska also features a woman with the power to extract peopl...
Don’t Blame Smartphones for Everything March 12, 2025
The theory that smartphone use is making people more alienated and uncultured seems so obviously true that it is hard to believe that anybody can deny it. We have little boxes filled with half the people in the world and most of the pop culture that ...
Lady Gaga Sounds Like Herself Again March 12, 2025
The anxiety of influence, a phrase that the literary critic Harold Bloom coined in 1973 to describe the struggle to write innovative poetry, lives on today in the form of reheated nachos. In internet slang, to reheat someone else’s nachos is to take ...
Slight Rebellion off Madison March 12, 2025
In just a few weeks I’ll be thirty. O dark dark dark! All passion spent! Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun! And so on. The window for being a wunderkind has officially closed, no longer can I coast on my innate freshness and vigor. No more “havi...
The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies March 11, 2025
A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard...
A Visual Feast that Fails to Frighten March 11, 2025
Iconic though the name “Dracula” has become in our culture, it is, in fact, a diminutive. The Transylvanian potentate Vlad III, who was feared for impaling his captured military opponents, took it from his father, Vlad II, who was known as “Dracul,” ...
Return to Myth March 11, 2025
Our cultural malaise—despair, alienation, idleness—is rooted in the loss of myths, particularly in literature. Social media and consumer culture have replaced these guiding signposts with trivial, hollow imitations....
Socratic Wisdom for a Lonely Age March 11, 2025
The Elks, the Shriners, and the bowling leagues are too far gone to be mourned. Even our dining has become solitary if our cultural commentators are to be believed. Office communities breathe on life support, as do many churches. Face-to-face interac...
Earl Weaver, Baseball Lout and Legend March 11, 2025
John W. Miller’s The Last Manager might sound like the kind of overcooked title you slap on a clickbait article, but the bold assertion has merit. Once upon a time, managers mattered. Then free agency and analytics handed the keys to the players and ...
