History
Story Stream
Why History Is Always Political January 01, 2025
At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support ...
History, According to Ridley Scott November 22, 2024
Just a year after the release of Napoleon, Ridley Scott is back with another historical epic, Gladiator II, the sequel to arguably his magnum opus. The original Gladiator had a lot of things going for it—compelling performances from Russell Crowe and...
Time Is Never Time at All: Why the 1990s Matter November 21, 2024
Calendars to the contrary, most people who talk about the 1990s close the decade with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This is telling: the bliss of the ’90s was American bliss, and the victory over history posited by Francis Fukuyama, Py...
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence November 21, 2024
I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of ...
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...
Hyperamerica November 20, 2024
Jean Baudrillard’s description of America as a “primitive society” with no “ancestral territory” of historically accumulated meaning immediately brings to mind photographer Edward Burtynsky’s widely-memed image of sprawling Exxon gas stations and McD...
Coming Undone November 19, 2024
Writing, it’s been said, remains unique because it is the only medium that can use its own form to investigate itself; that is, the art and the criticism that seeks to understand the art share the same ground. (Where is photography’s essay on the ima...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
Axis of Deception November 18, 2024
Making sense of the geopolitical landscape after 1989 would be hard enough without the self-inflicted fantasy that ideology, and thus history, had reached its final resting place. Once the infamous Iron Wall pulverized into the dustbin of history, We...
Everyone Still Wants to Believe in Mike Tyson November 18, 2024
Mike Tyson stands alone in an empty ring, throwing punches at ghosts. The crowd screams his name, but he doesn't hear them anymore. At fifty-eight, his muscles still ripple beneath flabby, weathered skin, but the speed and movement that actually made...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 November 14, 2024
Gripping novels and short stories, eye-opening histories, moving memoirs, and more. These are the books that entertained and enlightened us....
The Sun Also Sets November 13, 2024
The Library of America is something of a publishing curiosity. Its declared aim is to preserve America’s literary heritage “by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” Yet, unlike those...
A History of R.E.M. November 12, 2024
R.E.M. grew out of the vibrant music scene of Athens, Georgia, in 1980. Lead singer Michael Stipe, a recent transplant from the St. Louis suburbs, was taking art classes at the University of Georgia and singing in a kitschy cover band when he met rec...
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...
Tim Burton's Dark Nights November 01, 2024
Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns might be the perfect Halloween movies. They were big successes back in 1989 and 1992, grossing together more than a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). They are fun popcorn movies, but also weird artistic ...
The History of History October 22, 2024
Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of the truth factor in the portrayal of the past, it seeks out the ways it has been told and the most accurate w...
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter October 18, 2024
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-i...
How the WNBA Became the Most Exciting League in Sports October 17, 2024
Before this year, the last WNBA All-Star Game I covered in person was in 2009 at Mohegan Sun, the casino off I-95 that has been home to the Connecticut Sun since 2003. I’d paid my own way to be there, and I never got paid for the story I published ab...
Megalopolis’ Bad History October 15, 2024
Though the refrain “Drain the swamp!” might be a favourite of Donald Trump’s, Cicero made the rhetorical overture first, circa 43 BC. I am glad this has not been made known to Francis Ford Coppola, whose recent film Megalopolis finds the denouement o...
A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre October 10, 2024
Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo t...
A People’s History of Free Speech October 10, 2024
There is a well-established tendency in American politics to declare whatever problem we happen to be facing at the moment to be an “unprecedented” one. We do this, I think, to signal that the problem is serious and requires our urgent attention. But...
Blue Walls Falling Down October 09, 2024
An Excerpt from Blue Walls Falling Down: A NovelStella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks...
The Silencing of Sylvia Plath October 09, 2024
In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to ...
Clan of the Cave Bore October 09, 2024
Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of ...
