Father
Story Stream
James Baldwin’s Fraught Relationship With His Stepfather November 21, 2024
Baldwin describes how his father’s illness led to him “hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him.” As my father’s illness took over his brain, he would ...
What I Want to Say About Owning a Truck November 18, 2024
When I was seventeen, my father put me in charge of his black Nissan Hardbody pickup. Its driver’s-side brake light got smashed when I backed into a dumpster. I sealed it with red translucent lens-repair tape. (Can you say the word translucent if you...
On Classical Education November 14, 2024
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And what has the Department of Education to do with the classical education movement? For Tertullian, the second-century church father, the question was whether Hellenic culture and philosophy might divert Christ...
Mike Tyson, in Conversation With Rosie Perez November 13, 2024
It’s fair to wonder why Mike Tyson—A.K.A “Iron Mike,” the 58-year-old four-time undisputed heavyweight champion, movie star, and father of seven, not including a semi-famous bengal tiger—is coming out of retirement to get back in the ring against You...
The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression November 13, 2024
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who spent his days playing semi-pro ba...
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...
Heeere’s … Johnny the Iceberg! November 05, 2024
Bill Zehme, the premier magazine-profile writer of the 1990s, once told me that it was like he had two fathers. “Johnny,” he explained, “was the cool dad with the television show.”At a time when U.S. presidential candidates are fielding questions fro...
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...
Book Publishing in Crisis June 17, 2024
You have to go all the way down to number 81 on Amazon’s bestseller list to find a book by a “literary” writer.That would be “All Fours,” by Miranda July, the writer-filmmaker-artist.Otherwise most of the top 100 is taken up Father’s Day books, Mothe...
For Love and Money, Married Dads Matter June 17, 2024
Father’s Day is an awkward moment for the apostles of what I call “family-diversity theory”—the academics, journalists, and activists who want us to believe that all family forms are equal. They are bent on convincing the American public that what ma...
Red Meat June 13, 2024
Readers escape and go someplace else, and some of them, when they return, bring things back and use them to become writers. Apparently, judging from their fictions, young British readers have been going to America. In different ways, their novels are...
The World’s Richest Family Is About to Remake the Olympics June 13, 2024
Paris, that most presentable of capitals, is being polished before it hosts the Summer Games. Around the Champs-Élysées, where some of the benches date to the 1850s, the seats are getting a new layer of paint before an estimated 15 million visitors a...
The Delicate Art of Turning Your Parents Into Content June 06, 2024
In 1974, Martin Scorsese was a year removed from his breakthrough film—the semi-autobiographical “Mean Streets,” about a young man in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood who is sinking into the quicksand of Mafia life—when he presented a companion p...
'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...
