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A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
Just Another Liberalism? March 05, 2025
If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideologica...
The Great Tech-Family Alliance March 05, 2025
Listening to President Trump’s inaugural address, I couldn’t help but be struck by the references to colonizing Mars, splitting the atom, and holding all the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands. After years of denigration by Washington, it’s r...
The Biggest Opportunity of My Life December 03, 2024
This spring, I applied to compete on a British TV show. Having read accounts of reality TV casting, I was prepared for multiple grueling rounds of taped interviews. The first interview was a phone call, which lasted five minutes, and centered on my v...
How Boomers Blocked the Open Road December 03, 2024
For Americans born in the Eighties and early Nineties, moving was a normal, expected, and alternatively exciting and devastating part of childhood. If your family didn’t move, your friends did, or you made friends with the new kids who enrolled in yo...
Terrence Malick’s Thanksgiving Masterpiece November 28, 2024
Thanksgiving is unique among American holidays because it’s not simply political, like Independence Day, which belongs only to Americans, nor simply a religious celebration shared among all Christians, like Christmas or Easter. It’s a mix of the two,...
The Election Story Nobody Is Talking About November 28, 2024
Last year, I published a book that diagnosed a major problem in society, and offered a solution. The problem is growing numbers of young women choosing to forgo or delay marriage and motherhood, in favor of “living their best lives” as atomized caree...
“Glicked”: Are You Not Entertained? November 26, 2024
When I saw Wicked, at the end of the well-attended matinee screening, an enthusiastic little boy who was there with a big family group yelled out, “Everybody clap!” and the whole audience burst into applause.I didn’t like the movie, but I liked the b...
The People’s Champ Has Lost His People November 26, 2024
Picture this, because it really happened: Dwayne Johnson stands in an IMAX theater, taking Christopher Nolan's seat. "I even asked to let me sit where Chris sits," he said in a recent interview with Imax. "They said, 'Chris sits here.'" He watches Op...
Why We Need Alexander Pope’s Wild, Weird Poetry Today November 25, 2024
Alexander Pope is hardly an unknown quantity. Born in London to a family of merchants in 1688 and buried in a Catholic Church in the suburb of Twickenham in 1744, he has a metaphorical statue in the pantheon of great English poets extending from Chau...
The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal November 20, 2024
These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-fiv...
Even in the Ironbound November 20, 2024
My first visit to my family’s village in Greece made me feel like I was in another world. Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, going to the island of Chios was a bewildering experience. I was surrounded by people who took life at a leisurely pace ...
The Case of Justine Bateman November 19, 2024
Three days after the election, Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties star, catapulted herself into the political muck with a tweetstorm to her 140,000 followers that began: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.” ...
Among the Bros for the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson Fight November 19, 2024
Rooting for Mike Tyson has never been a simple proposition. This is someone raised in destitute conditions in Brownsville who then rose to the peak of boxing, sure, but also someone convicted of a violent sexual crime (that he has maintained his inno...
The Response To Art Is Everything November 15, 2024
After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of ...
Is Technology Destroying Marriage? November 13, 2024
I am a happily married man who’s been with the same woman since college. I am a devout Christian who tries every day to abide by the scriptural injunction to sanctify our family with self-sacrificial devotion. My wife and I have two beautiful childre...
Kevin Costner Hates ‘Yellowstone’ November 12, 2024
On Sunday, Yellowstone finally returns, delivering the back half of its fifth and final season nearly two years after the season’s first half began to air. But all is not well in the land of the Duttons.Since its 2018 debut, Yellowstone—a sweeping fa...
From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series November 12, 2024
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Ba...
How to Understand the Election Results November 11, 2024
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about college students reacting to the election, which has made me think about my own college days, which coincided with the 2008 presidential election. This was a pretty happy time for me. No one I knew was terribly i...
Liberation from Libertinism November 11, 2024
Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty (1999), was raised in a secular Jewish family and became an observant Jew as an adult. In this book, she contends that a culture failing to inculcate broad respect for the sexual modesty that today’s observ...
The Exploitation of Compassion November 08, 2024
For a book about the perils of empathy’s excesses, Allie Beth Stuckey’s newly released Toxic Empathy (2024) is rife with respect for empathy itself.Christian compassion, Stuckey acknowledges, is a positive force in our daily lives. When we see a frie...
“Laguna Beach” @ 20 November 06, 2024
In the premiere episode of MTV’s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Lauren Conrad takes the object of her affection, Stephen Colletti, to visit her family’s under-construction beachfront mansion. The scene oozes excess: everything is washed in a l...
Quincy Jones Remembered As a ‘Titan’ Across Hollywood November 05, 2024
The entertainment industry is mourning the loss of Quincy Jones, the music producer known for his work with icons including Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra. Jones’s publicist informed the world of his death, at the age of 91, on November 3. “Tonigh...
Is America as Soul-Sick as it Looks? November 05, 2024
I study Swedish five hours a day. A social program for foreigners with higher education. Funded by the city. My classmates are Iranians, Afghans, Indians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans—lawyers, economists, epidemiologists. Everyone is nice, everyon...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
