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How RealClear Will Cover the New Administration December 18, 2024
Dear Reader,When Donald Trump returns to the White House, you can be sure that RealClearPolitics will feature supporters of his agenda. And also critics.RCP has covered the Biden presidency in the same way, showing perspectives from all sides. The Re...
The Last Town In America December 18, 2024
The last official release for the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, was Wario’s Woods, which hit the North American market on December 10, 1994. This was not only years after the release of the NES’s successor, the Super Nintendo Entertai...
Lore Segal’s Legacy December 17, 2024
LORE SEGAL’S FIRST NOVEL, Other People’s Houses (1964), is narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, named Lore Segal, who escapes Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport at the age of 10. Once in England, Lore (the character who may also be the...
Smells Like American Spirit December 17, 2024
In my life, I’ve personally witnessed three elite salespeople at work. The first was in the Johnson County, Iowa, jail, where I spent July 4 and 5 some years ago for reasons I’d rather not go into here. It was so overcrowded that we had to sleep head...
England’s Real-Life Quietus December 11, 2024
Two weeks ago, the British House of Commons voted in favor of a bill that, according to the BBC, “would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to seek help to end their own life.” The final vote was 330 to 275.This news immedia...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Why the Rainforest Cafe Refuses to Go Extinct December 05, 2024
Upon entering the Rainforest Cafe, I was greeted by a talking tree that rattled off a slew of plant-related factoids. Pumped-in fog and canned thunder rang out, as a hostess led me through an aquarium archway to our table. I was seated across from a ...
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...
When Suburbia Was Weird December 02, 2024
Geography, not design, is the main determinant of housing prices in the Washington, DC, suburbs. A garish McMansion in the leafy inner ring will fetch far more than a charming bungalow out by Harper’s Ferry. If suburban Northern Virginia has an archi...
Rachel Kushner’s Spy Games August 29, 2024
A young woman arrives at a run-down house in the French countryside. The house, at the end of a drive lined with poplar trees, belongs to her wealthy boyfriend. She has spent the last week loitering around a swimming pool and making trips to the beac...
Herd Immunity August 29, 2024
The ordeal is over. Reader, whatever you do with your four-thousand weeks on this plane of absurdity, do not drain four precious weeks in putting a roof over your head in London.This death march, or 'my struggle' as the publishers have cannily titled...
When Hitchens Was Good August 28, 2024
How distant the world Christopher Hitchens departed in December 2011 seems today. The vice president, Joe Biden, was a spry and limber seventy-year-old, jogging around the White House with the tender-footed Obama, twenty years his junior. Donald Trum...
Ballard Predicted the Collapse of the Middle Class August 28, 2024
These lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance h...
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Talk to Jason Isbell August 28, 2024
Welch and Rawlings met at the Berklee College of Music in the 1990s and moved to Nashville soon afterward. In 2001, they took over and restored Woodland Studios, a former 1920s movie house where the legendary engineer Glenn Snoddy recorded everyone f...
Ben Shelton Is Back in New York August 27, 2024
Last week, in the quiet, upstairs green room of a giant Brooklyn field house that the Swiss sportswear brand On had transformed into a swanky tennis arena for its pre-US Open fête, Clubhouse Nights, 21-year-old Ben Shelton appeared buoyant and relaxe...
House of the Draggin’ August 27, 2024
Watching House of the Dragon is like watching professional soccer. The pacing is slow, and most episodes are devoted to world-building and character development. And, like a soccer match, most of the game consists of setup, which is periodically punc...
Against Lists of Books August 26, 2024
Once you’re done being US President, I think they should kill you. You get four or eight years to kill anyone you want, destroy entire countries at will, throw around billions of dollars at whatever cretinous idea catches your fancy—but once it’s all...
How a Citizen Can Think Like a King August 23, 2024
In my mid-twenties, I found myself at a crossroads. Down one path, if I stayed the course as a graduate student in political science, I could pursue a life in academia. Down another path, I could go back to my hometown in Washington state to challeng...
Jane Austen’s American Spirit August 22, 2024
Jane Austen is England’s brightest literary jewel. The slightly upper-crust characters in her novels spend most of their time in the most English of pursuits: drinking tea, visiting country houses, and gossiping about their neighbors. Austen herself ...
What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last August 22, 2024
Recently after a literary event, I was hanging out with some other writers and a conversation about older books led to a parlor game. One of us would read the titles of bestselling novels from a few decades ago and everyone else would try to guess th...
Zoë Kravitz's (Shocking! Twisted! Brilliant!) Mind August 16, 2024
Zoë Kravitz just wanted to make her mother laugh. She needed to get her attention first, though. They were at home in Topanga, California, and her mom was surrounded by her closest friends. The group was tending to her in a way that Kravitz, just nin...
Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel? August 14, 2024
Early on in Danzy Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, her biracial writer-professor protagonist, Jane, takes a meeting with Hampton Ford, a Black producer who is pivoting from network to prestige TV. Jane’s situation is less enviable. Up against a...
The End of HBO Sunday Nights August 13, 2024
House of the Dragon is the most expensive show on HBO, and its Season 2 finale drew nearly 9 million viewers on Sunday night, but the season hadn’t even ended before the network was promising viewers that “the best is yet to come.” A sizzle reel rele...
JoAnna Novak’s Poems of Domestic Dread August 13, 2024
In her memoir Contradiction Days (2023), JoAnna Novak sets out to write about the late Minimalist painter Agnes Martin. Traveling from her Los Angeles home to Taos, New Mexico, for a residency, Novak orders Martin’s favorite dishes at her favorite re...
Robbie Robertson’s Family Feud August 12, 2024
On a rainy Nov. 15, 2023, a small group of music and film luminaries gathered at the Village Recorder, the famed studio housed in an old Masonic temple in West L.A. where everything from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk to Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle was recorded.Am...
